This will depend on your views on politics/society/humanity. I know that there one side of the argument that workers should be basically hot-swappable and rack-

This will depend on your views on politics/society/humanity. I know that there one side of the argument that workers should be basically hot-swappable and rack-mountable. I am often a bleeding-heart liberal and am pretty far to the other side of things. Underneath everything here it's more a question of feelings and values more than any sort of logic. Different countries' laws may come down on different sides of the argument here. A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws around humans and commodities should probably be very different. More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it cannot contact the local news media to complain about working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.