The reason the unions exist in the first place is because a completely free and unregulated market, in the past, produced gross human rights violations. For example:

http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/23/us-workers-were-once-massac...

Unfortunately most people seem to think we need the government to protect us from an unregulated market of employers. But the reality is, we don't. Even during the Industrial Revolution, work-related fatalities were on the decline and the creation of OSHA had little affect on the trend [1].

It's most surprising to me that people in technology on HN make this argument. You see benefits at startups and larger companies like free meals, free transportation, remote work, free cell phones, gym memberships, on-site massages, free Kindles, health care, dental care, 401k matching, and so on.

What percentage of the potential pool of benefits are mandated by the government? I would say an extremely small percentage. So what causes all of these employers to offer such amazing benefits and salaries without anybody from the government telling them to do so? Competition for labor.

[1] http://mercatus.org/publication/evaluating-oshas-effectivene...

One thing I like about living in Denmark, though, is that just about all employees have reasonable working conditions and decent perks, so there's less of a social gulf between different occupations. I get 6 weeks of vacation per year, along with benefits like paternity leave, good health coverage, a safe working environment, etc.— and so does everyone else. Actually I think even in my white-collar job the benefits are a little better here, though it depends on what you care about. I don't have free lunch or a masseuse available, but the work/life balance is good: at a Valley company it would be hard to negotiate perks like 6 weeks of vacation (especially if you want a real vacation, where you disconnect for at least 2-3 weeks at a time), and people don't seem to normally take paternity leave.

Do you really believe the Clean Air Act was unnecessary? I was around in the 70's in California when the air was crap. Do you really think that cleanup would have happened without regulation? Not in a million years.

And, don't say the labor market and clean air are different. They're both driven by profits.

How can you separate the two things? The reason we need to regulate things in general (not just economically, but in terms of all laws, etc) is because there are a significant amount of bad apples who will act horribly (though admittedly rarely to the point of murder/massacre) for personal gain if unchecked.

If we lived in a truly utopian society where people always acted in the best interest of the entire community then unregulated capitalism would work fine, but so would pure socialism. We obviously don't live in such a utopian society so both extremes fail miserably.

Vacation, breaks and a mild improvement on minimum wage? Limits to what they're expected to lift? What are these horror stories?

UPS is an awful job with awful wages. Of course you could make them work harder for lower wages if you made sure they lacked representation, but I wouldn't refer to that as a fair, free market.

Nobody gets a promotion based on competence. It's pure seniority. The people that are there the longest get first dibs on better positions. And if somebody can't hold their own and doesn't contribute, you can forget about letting them go. It's almost impossible to fire someone who isn't worth the union wages they're making.

Now that's fine and dandy, I hope lots of folks get nice retirements after working at UPS their whole life. But Amazon is more efficient and will replace these high-wage manual laborers with robots and algorithms, and the union guys will try and use the power of government to stop them.

Source: Dad works for UPS, I worked as a preloader.

I guess you have not seen or worked really awful jobs for really awful wages before?

I don't know to what extent that industry is regulated, but there is a very long history of teamsters getting their way.