> Laws that regulate how people can be treated by employers have always been a balance between _some_ people having it worse (ex, their jobs not being available) so that the _vast_ majority of people have it better.
Not all of them. For example, a law that requires companies that agree to pay workers for services rendered to actually pay them has no obvious mechanism to destroy jobs and may even create jobs as people become willing to do work when they otherwise wouldn't have trusted the employer to pay them with no enforcement mechanism.
The types of rules you're talking about are typically lobbied for by specific groups to gain advantage for themselves at the expense not of the employer but of their competition for employment, i.e. other workers. For example, the passage of minimum wage laws came about during the Jim Crow era because what white workers wanted from discrimination was to prevent black workers from "taking their jobs" but what the discrimination was actually causing was for the black workers to accept lower pay and then receive the jobs anyway. The law was motivated by the desire to prohibit the latter and thereby cause the black workers to lose their jobs because then the discrimination would manifest in the hiring decision rather than the wages.
This is the same category of thing which is happening with Uber, except that the groups aren't black people and white people, they're part-time Uber drivers and full-time ones. The full-time ones want the part-time ones out of the market, so they keep lobbying for laws to make casual acceptance of fares more burdensome.
> The same things is true of things like safety regulations. It costs more to be safe, and you have to charge more or hire less if you're going to have them. But overall, society is better for them (even though some people no longer have jobs).
The premise of safety regulations is that people are busy and don't have time to read through statistical studies to determine if a more expensive product is worth the cost because it's sufficiently safer, so the government should do the evaluation and then require the ones that are worth the cost.
The problem is the government doesn't require the ones that are worth the cost, they require that ones whose manufacturers or other interest groups have the best lobbyists even when they're not worth the cost, and then net-negative rules accumulate over time. Soon you have a thicket of rules where the vast majority aren't worth the cost, and a tiny minority that are but are mostly things the market would have demanded even without the mandate. This is a big reason why, for example, it's so expensive to build housing in the US and high rents are causing homelessness, preventing family formation and transferring wealth from working people to landlords.
Notice also the scam here: New "safety standards" are passed but they don't apply to existing buildings, so people continue living in the existing buildings (which by this logic are unsafe) because now newer buildings have been made prohibitively expensive. This benefits landlords, not safety, but attempts to remove the rules are met with claims of impacting safety.