> The biggest protection a worker has is his ability to quit and find another employer.

Which works out great for the top few percent of workers who are sufficient sought after to be able to dictate terms. Not so great for the vast majority that are easy to replace.

History has demonstrated pretty clearly that this is utter nonsense. Here's an example of the type of things that motivated unionisation in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

146 people dead because employers at the time saw it as perfectly acceptable to lock people in to prevent unauthorised breaks.

The 8 hour working day too - it took about a century to get it widespread - and numerous dead.

Frankly, that statement is deeply insulting to the more of the many people who have died to secure the labour rights we have today.

> Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries.

I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up. What I have always had, however, is the right to a certain minimum number of days. Even in Norway, which from a US point of view probably would seem quite extreme when it comes to the level of workers protections, if I truly wanted to work more I generally would be able to give up most of my vacation days.

The big difference is that the defaults in employment law in Norway provide terms that people spent decades fighting for, and to deviate from that requires explicit consideration. You can write a Norwegian employment contract in about two paragraphs. In fact, most of my Norwegian employment contracts were about that length.

But if you want to, you can find ways of deviating most protections as long as your employee is willing to pay for it.

As it happens, it turns out that most employees do not value "buying" fewer vacation days or shorter notice periods, or other abrogations of established workers rights, at nearly enough money for most of them to be willing to write it into employment contracts.

The reality is that while you may be right that salaries could be higher without some of these protections, they appear to be systematically valued higher by employees than employers once employees have actually experienced them.

> Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job.

Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave, and as such I see little reason to believe that providing right to maternity leave or paid maternity leave is likely to have a major additional impact.

One of the reasons why so many women end up leaving the workforce, often for good, on having children in many countries is that many can't afford childcare.

E.g. I'm in the UK, and childcare for a single child here can easily reach 1000 pounds/month until your kids reach school age (with some recent improvements in provision of part time government paid care). If you have a two pre-school children with care costs like that, you need a salary well above average before it is economical for both parents to work. Even if you have cheaper options available some places, you need a relatively decent paying job to be able to pay for child care for more than one child and have anything left.

And this provides an easy solution to reducing the impact of maternity leave: Provide more subsidised childcare. As it happens, that will tend to do more to bring more women into employment than maternity leave does to counteract it. In Norway, improvements to maternity pay/leave and childcare provisions have always gone in near lock-step for exactly this reason (on top of that, there has in recent years been a paternity leave provision to further reduce the disparity).

> Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual salary.

Mandatory insurances and pensions are not about workers protections per se most places I'm aware of, but a side effect of welfare systems where the state will ultimately pay for the welfare of those who don't make their own contributions. This creates a strong public incentive for ensuring that as far as possible people contribute to insurances when they are in employment, which often makes employee contributions to things like pensions extremely tax beneficial, and thus a central point of negotiations.

E.g. in the UK, the Conservative government has been one of the drivers for more compulsory workplace pension plans as an explicit mechanism to shift more of the pensions burden off the government and basically using it as a way of undoing parts of the socialized nature of the UK pensions system.

> Not being able to fire a worker means much higher hiring standards, and make it a lot more difficult for inexperienced workers to find a job.

Not being able to fire a worker is not a common feature of workers protections anywhere.