[solatic]

1. Relative rates are fine in aggregate. But the economy doesn't consist of actors who are perfect representations of the median. Individual companies are going to be net beneficients or net losers. And it is always the net losers who are more vocal, complaining, and ultimately influential over the wider market. Actor confidence in large markets is naturally biased towards fear, not security. This is one of the reasons why regulation is sometimes welcomed by actors, if they can influence all actors equally.

2. "Treat people nicely" is about as effective a corporate policy as a law is forcing people to "be good and moral." A small company can effectively assert hiring control in hiring only people who "gel" with the people leading the company. A large company with a hiring quota of hundreds or thousands of people a quarter cannot. Ultimately, people are going to have personality conflicts with coworkers at large companies. You can either accept that as an inevitability and find a solution for it, or you can write off people finding (somewhat legitimate but still entirely foreseeable and unavoidable) excuses to move as BigCo management not treating their workers "nicely".

[gerbilly]

So the only alternative is to let corporations offload their training externalities onto higher education?

If that's what you're saying, it's a false dichotomy.

Cry me a river for the corporations, who cares what they want? It's always their agenda that wins these days anyway. That's the way the world is going.

[solatic]

No, what I'm saying is that we need to find some kind of way that balances protecting workers from exploitation with the kind of security that allows corporations to invest in workers' training.

Yes, one way, in theory, of doing that is by offloading training externalities to higher education. But that has its own tradeoffs, namely, the tendency of universities to adopt ivory-tower attitudes to education, the tendency of American higher education to inflate costs beyond any reasonable limit to afford facilities, services, and administration of dubious value to the education afforded the end consumer / student, and the tendency of universities to not educate with an eye to the skillsets which contemporary employers value.

Which is why the better way is to localize training efforts with the actors for whom it is most relevant. But corporate actors are not going to do "the right thing" in a vacuum, the law needs to empower them to do "the right thing", because typically "the right thing" will hurt any actor who does it in isolation but is bearable if all actors commit to doing it together. The easiest, safest, and most predictable way of making that happen is through law or regulation.