It is perfectly possible in a competitive market to have terrible work conditions. While the average conditions tend to improve over time, not all workers are in a good bargain position viz-a-viz employees. There are information assymetries, transaction costs for changing jobs, short-term biases, market failures and a lot of other issues in the real world.

This view also assumes that skills are perfectly replaceable, that there's no cost for requalifying for another profession, and that this is instantaneous or that people have some magical way to offset the opportunity costs of requalification while they train for another job.

The problem nowadays (and this is not exclusive to HN, although it is especially salient here) is that people like to fall between two ideological extremes: Either that the government is a inherently neutral and benign all powerful institution 100% of the time, or that free markets always exist, and are always pareto-efficient and that governments action is always some sort of rent-seeking parasite.

In the real world things are a lot more complicated. Not every thing can be solved with the heavy hand of government, neither the market itself is always able to reach the most humane solution. Politics is still needed, and we haven't reached the end of History.