<The Democrats focus on "working people" exactly as I've defined them, because those people, who make up by far the largest sector of the population, could be called "dependent contractors". They too have an implied contractual relationship, but it's entirely one-sided: employment is at-will, and can be terminated at the whim of the employer. Unlike entrepreneurs, their fate is not entirely in their own hands, and that's why the government (at least, when motivated by Democratic policy) intervenes in the employment marketplace to mitigate the worst excesses of employment at-will. Left to their own devices, employers would stripmine their human resources the way natural resource companies exploit material resources. Government employment policies, in an ideal world, manage human resource use for sustainability and the general welfare.

This might almost make sense if there was only one employer in the United States. I worked plenty of "wage slave" jobs, and at no time did I feel I was "trapped" there. There were a lot more employers where that one came from, and most employers know it. You work for somebody right now, right? Check out your benefits, and find out how many of them were mandated by law. As far as I know, no national law states that an employer has to offer medical (so far) or most other benefits. They are there to attract valuable employees, even at the lowest rungs of employment, who expect them. No even moderately skilled employee is "interchangable," a resource to be "strip mined," and this hasn't been true since workers stopped doing most of their work with their backs.

Most American employees do not live in fear of their employers, but see them as pretty much equals in a contract. Ask around. See how many of your fellow employees think of themselves as "wage slaves." Nobody likes being laid off--believe me, I know--but in a free society, most of us can handle it. And who cares what happens to an employer when a skilled and valuable employee leaves for higher wages?

Democrats "intervene" in employment relations because it gives them political power. Period. They have a lot of incentive to convince people like you that without their benevolence, the private sector would eat you alive.

Get your brain out of the 1920s. Joan Baez notwithstanding, Joe Hill is dead, the "working people" are doing pretty damn good, and the unions that were founded to defend them are only political powerbrokers now. I could write pages about most unions being little more than buttmonkeys for the Left, whose sole job now is not protecting workers but delivering votes, money tapped from employees, and political power to the Democrats.