> I can understand why people think that, but the history of capitalism is much misrepresented in that way.

Oh for sure feudalism was worse than capitalism. My concern is that we can do better than neoliberalism, in terms of looking out for individual welfare, reducing oppressive/exploitative living or working conditions, and solving collective problems that are not well-addressed by market dynamics (e.g. global warming, climate destruction and other civilisation-tier concerns).

> As the factories ramp up and make more money, they also have more resources ("capital") for improving the working conditions.

They don't tend to though, as working conditions are not their motivation; profiteering is. Tesla Motors' factories have a pretty high injury rate, despite being one of the most over-capitalised companies in existence.

> Also why should things degenerate to that, if people simply quit if an employer misbehaves.

This works in theory, but many people do not have the option to just quit. Many are living paycheck to paycheck, others are in various countries on work visas attached to their employer (e.g. H1B in the US), or just don't have many options. Given that market pressure on unskilled, and thus highly competitive jobs, pushes wages towards subsistence levels, this will always be the case for the lowest rungs of the career ladder. You only need to look at reality compared to the theory of "you can just quit" to see that it clearly doesn't solve the problem. If you've worked an entry-level job in retail, an office or wherever, you will likely have experienced some pretty miserable conditions.

> If "workers" are in demand, employers can't afford to treat them badly. Look at the Google offices with their slides, free food and childish gadgets. They provide that because they compete for "workers".

That's true of Google because of the market dynamics of California's software engineer job market. It doesn't scale to everybody; also, many of these perks are designed to blur the lines between work and social life so that their employees spend more time in the office. It's soft exploitation, but it's still exploitation.

> You enter a contract and exchange labor for money. That's it. There is no need for creating an arbitrary class of "workers".

It's not arbitrary; it's the people who earn money working. I'm not sure what your opposition is to the drawing of economic class lines?

> If unions make demands, it is fair game (negotiation). If governments give unions special rights, it is not. For example in my country I think you can not fire people who form a union in your company. That's fucked up. Those people are free to say "if you don't give in to our demands, we quit". Yeah, go ahead, quit.

This just comes back to "if you don't like it you can just quit" though, because under this model strikebreaking, bussing in non-union workers and such are legitimised. You might as well ban unions if you give workers no leverage in any negotiations, and by default the employer holds all the leverage because they're not the ones who need a wage to put food on the table.

> I think that is happening, there is just a huge amount of leftist journalists who try to frame everything as "exploitation of workers". Like the endless stories about Amazon warehouses. It seems likely to me that the things that sound bad from the outside may be necessary to make things work. Like you and me probably wouldn't take a 5 hour long toilet break to spite our employers, but some warehouse workers may do so. So they have limits on toilets breaks to make it possible for people to work there who couldn't work anywhere else. (Just a guess, I have never been inside of an Amazon warehouse - in any case, as always, if you don't like it, quit).

My dad worked in an Amazon warehouse. He's an extremely hard worker and a tough guy all round, he said it was pretty tiring work because they were constantly sprinting round the warehouse to meet deadlines and had 5-10 minute bathroom breaks. There's been quite a lot of reports of workers having to urinate in bottles because they don't have time to go to the bathroom - do you really think that's acceptable working conditions in a first-world country?

> Also there may be government regulations preventing free flow of workers, for example the health care issue in the US seems weird (not sure what is going on).

What is going on is that that's what happens then your healthcare is run for profit by large corporations. Regulation seems to exacerbate the problem, but in that case the problem is that the incentives are not correctly aligned between healthcare and profiteering, hence healthcare should be a government service first and foremost.

> I am not for corporations, I am for freedom.

Freedom is not one thing, it's a series of tradeoffs. Your tradeoffs seem to prioritise freedom of trade, which primarily benefits businesses, over freedom from oppression, which would benefit workers.

> And that law wouldn't even benefit corporations, as it is impossible to adhere to it.

It's impossible to adhere perfectly, but companies are rolling out copy protection laws all over the place to try to protect their interests as best they can.

> In my opinion the only fair way would have been for the government to provide an API that everybody could query to check for copyright. Instead they just created an unsolvable challenge and require businesses (and individuals) to solve it.

So you actually want even more power held for the enforcement of copyrights compared to now. Because you want it to be not just a corporate responsibility, but a government one. How is that any different to the upload filter you expressed disdain for?