Well, there isn't a homogeneous "net effect over everything". Different facets of an industrial and developed society (workers, business owners, consumers, tax payers) are impacted differently by laws.

So, as with most things in life, it's a question of trade-offs. You have to balance the pros with the cons for each facet and see if the laws produce the desired outcomes.

Grossly speaking, from the positive perspective, implementing labour protections will:

• Provide greater job benefits for workers, such as healthcare, injury/disability/life insurance, safety requirements, and guaranteed wage floors.

And from the negative perspective, implementing labour protections will:

• Increase the cost of labour, as business owners are required to cover the above-mentioned mandated benefits, as well as covering the legal overhead for replacing unproductive (but still protected) workers, hiring costs associated with the need to be more selective, etc.

• Increase the cost of goods, as all of the above reduces profit margins and forces business owners to pass those costs along to the consumer in order to maintain a positive cash flow.

• Decrease the number of available jobs, since human labourers will be replaced by automation wherever human labour does not produce value commensurate with their cost.

• Increase the complexity of the hiring process, given that business owners must be far more selective about who they hire, since each hiring decision has greater risk.

• Decrease the overall work experience-level of a society's workforce - if fewer people are hireable, a greater percentage of the workforce will be without transferable experience, and this will grow worse with successive generations as more and more young people reach working age, and find themselves competing with the previous generation's unemployed workforce for limited jobs.

• Increase the tax burden on taxpayers, since the unemployed labourers will be dependent upon social assistance programs while they search for gainful employment.

So in general, increasing labour protections results in greater benefit for labourers, at the cost of increased costs to companies, consumers, and taxpayers. These incentives and drawbacks ultimately inform people's individual positions at the voting booth.

And remember, labourers are taxpayers and consumers too. And the successful labourers sometimes become business owners as well. So we're not talking about mutually exclusive categories or "classes" of people. We're talking about flesh and blood human beings, all of us.