> you can choose not to work for employers
You don't have to work for any particular employer, and you also don't have to work for any employer at all. You can consult, contract, start a company, etc. But of course this is not necessary even if you're basing your entire career around avoiding that question, because it's not like every single employer asks it.
Starting a company? Sure. There sure are a lot of restaurants, food trucks, and dry cleaners out there. Although it's not easy with all the legal barriers to entry created by well-intentioned regulators like yourself :)
This is a tangent, but the whole nanny-state ideology advocated by many of the people arguing with me here is the reason people are so dependent on employers instead of having freedom to easily create their own enterprises.
But this is not necessary regardless, as I addressed in my previous closing statement.
Edit: curious if HN users are downvoting based on opinion versus content. Feels a bit like a hive mind whenever I post against a generally left-leaning argument.
It does nothing to change the market of service purchasers in any way. As such, if you had problems as an employee with the pool of service purchasers, you're going to have those same problems as a vendor of services.
> Although [starting a business] is not easy with all the legal barriers to entry created by well-intentioned regulators like yourself :)
Because that's the hard part of a successful business?
>> you can choose not to work for employers that ask the question in the first place
>>> you can choose not to work
And here is the disconnect. Not everyone has the ability to simply "choose not to work...". Hence, laws. Your reasoning could be applied to simply working in general. After all, one can just choose not to work until they find a job that meets all of their criteria (salary, vacation time, commute, great people, great mission, etc). Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that.