In my experience, the commenters here, on a forum for SV startups, are overwhelmingly biased in favor of business.

Why wouldn't it be? Businesses doing pro-business things are the main reason well paying jobs exist. And people love well paying jobs rather than poor paying jobs.

I am making no claim about what the comment bias should be here on HN. I am merely reporting it to the parent comment.

That's a very loaded way of putting it.

Government is in charge of regulating the minimum wage. Private companies are in charge of bidding for the "maximum wage", they have no obligation for providing a minimum as they serve their shareholders not the public, the government serves the public.

Oh honey, do you know what lobbying is? Or how Republicans get their funding? Or what dark money is? Private companies and their private interests have a vested interest in keeping minimum wage low, and exploit campaign finance to do so. (And they also bribe judges with vacations and speaking engagements and RVs.) Just because it's not the Wal-mart CEO deciding it himself does not mean that companies as whole don't do pro-business things and aren't the ones pulling the strings of their GOP puppets.

>Private companies are in charge of bidding for the "maximum wage", they have no obligation for providing a minimum as they serve their shareholders not the public, the government serves the public.

This doesn't support your point the way you think it might.

Speaking from a country where workers are very well protected, nothing really prevents anyone from being fired. It's just more expensive.

A court never reinstates anyone to their job, the company just needs to pay damages to the former employee.

In the US you can be reinstated, it's not actually that uncommon of an outcome.

My own experience working in a white-collar union with a just cause provision is that the process is much more cumbersome and time consuming, and includes some off-ramps, but it is certainly possible to fire and or punish low performers. The more concretely "low performance" can be measured, the quicker and easier, but we're still talking months or years.

> My understanding from the comments

That is your problem right there. You cannot trust comments to give you an accurate idea of what actually happened. The linked source is marginally better (but keep in mind that it is close to one side of the story, even though it is more independent than some people here seem to believe).