"or we'd be heading back towards Victorian working conditions"

I can understand why people think that, but the history of capitalism is much misrepresented in that way. There was a huge rush of poor people into the cities because of the breakdown of feudalism, among other things. So many poor people desperate for work - asking for modern working standards might have prevented many of them from getting jobs. You can still see that in China and India, I suppose - bad as the working conditions may be, they seem to be better than starving doing subsistence farming in the countryside. And demanding factories there would have the same standards as, say, in the US, would just mean jobs wouldn't be outsourced there anymore and the people would be back to starving doing subsistence farming.

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

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

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".

"If you mean that wage labour is a social construct, then yes - under capitalism. "Workers" are people who perform labour, and is not a social construct. If you start a freelance business, you are both a worker and a capitalist; that's what being self-employed is."

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

"> Now regulators perhaps give unions the right to determine how I am supposed to work. That's completely fucked up.

Unions represent your workers, so it's not the regulators negotiating how you work, it's the people who actually do that work."

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.

"If that worked, then companies with bad working conditions would be shutting down from lack of workforce. This isn't happening systemically"

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).

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).

"This is done for the protection of copyright, no? I thought you would be in agreement with this, as it benefits corporations."

I am not for corporations, I am for freedom. And that law wouldn't even benefit corporations, as it is impossible to adhere to it. 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.