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Holding companies accountable via the law does not work, because there is a fundamental imbalance: People compete for good jobs, so they are willing to accept a certain amount of injustice, which gets larger the fewer jobs there are. Employers know this, and use it against you: You can't do anything against it on your own, because they will simply hire someone else.

Unions in turn fight this by representing a lot of employees, so the employer cannot simply ignore them. The have fought bitterly for humane conditions, a 40 hour work week, and abolished child labor. You might call this overly dramatic, but that's where you get if you let corporations run free (remember those news stories about child labor in Texas lately?).

A "company's mission" doesn't mean shit if it doesn't even treat its employees like human beings. If you want to be a good slave, have it your way - but stop characterising unions as somehow evil.



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