But asking consumers to vote for moral, intelligent legislative agents is somehow better? Optimizing for past opinions, moral fiber, understanding of the issues, etc. is easier?

Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.

Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.

In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)

And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.

There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy.

There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.

Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.

To be pedantically clear about what needs are vs strategies for meeting needs, this is why we need autonomy; unions are a strategy for achieving that.

Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.

As participants in a democratic nation (whether that be the US republic, the UK parliamentary monarchy or whatever) it is our responsibility to be involved in all facets of the world we interact with.

We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).

We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.

When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.

There are two separate and very different issues at hand. On the one hand is the issue you are tackling, the economic and large scale one. But there is another - the personal and small scale one.

Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.

There has to be some HN version of Godwin's law involving Unions.

Not all customers/workers feel the same way about every business practice, so it's not fair to appropriate their decision-making power by monopolizing it through one regulatory agency or union that they may not support.

People are entitled to their individual choices. If it's too much information to process, they can individually choose someone they delegate their decision making to. One way they do this is to trust a particular certification and only buy products with the certification seal. But each individual should get to choose which party plays the role of delegate for them.

Resorting to one-size-fits-all regulatory/union monopolies shows a lack of imagination that deprives individuals of their agency and breeds corruption/rent-seeking-behaviour.

As for this case, it's pretty clearly theft, and should be dealt with accordingly by the legal system. Customers/workers shouldn't have to band together to punish theft.