Oh puh-lease!
Employees don’t risk anything except their career, livelihoods, and homes.
Investors take enormous risks, like a small amount of their vast wealth, and maybe even risk losing a controlling interest in the board. If they really fuck up, they might even risk not being allowed to be a CEO again for a few years.
But go on, try to convince me again that employees deserve a bigger share…
You know, it always amazes me how people equate layoffs with losing livelihoods here. Is that how it is in America? Seems so alien, when where I live, being fired (without cause) would be somewhere between a non-event and a pleasant break using the severance pay.
Depends. I’m an experienced programmer. It has never taken me more than a month of casual searching to land the next gig, no relocation.
But if you’re a factory worker in bum fuck nowhere, where the factory is the town, well, layoffs are going to be catastrophic for most, particularly since relocating would almost certainly be to a more expensive area.
Often, yes. Outside of more senior level white collar careers, severance is often not guaranteed upon separation here. In many states, “Right to Work” labor laws enable an employer to terminate an employee for nearly any reason. To make matters worse, our health insurance is provided as a benefit by our employers, so losing your job not only means you lose your source of income, but also your means of keeping yourself healthy and getting care should you need it.
And in many cases, even if you do receive severance, the company determines what your separation package includes, and the calculations used to determine the value is kept behind closed doors and obscured from the employee. The packages are presented as non-negotiable, even though they aren’t, and employees being let go are often pressured to sign the agreement in a very short window or risk having the offer of severance rescinded. Often what is offered is a pittance, but generally Americans don’t push back against it. It’s a “better than nothing, I guess” situation.
So yeah - being laid off is a tremendously stressful and life altering experience here for the vast majority of the working and middle class.
Smallest of corrections because the bastards are multiple flavors of bastards: ’
‘At will employment’ is the "fire you for any or no reason so long as we don’t transparently enough do it for/to the small list of protected reasons or qualifying personal attributes for protected class status.
The sick joke is that you can terminate your employment ‘At will’ too, unlike those other work contract places isn’t that liberating!
That one is in all of the US.
‘Right to work’ would be the anti-union version which applies to some states that have gone extra harder than the other ones to prevent the evil evil unions. Plenty of folks better suited than me to explain more around Lemmy.
The sick joke with that one is that you have “the right to work” even when that evil evil union is doing collective bargaining outside with funky signs!
Person who replied to who I replied to; the list of shit Americans ought to be focusing on legislating for is intentionally multi-faceted and obtuse; do you really think such simple insight beyond what you would consider obvious? Our great thinkers aren’t dumb, they’re oppressed.
To double down on the “um actually…”
Right to work laws guarantee the benefits of a union while also removing the requirement to pay for that union. The goal is to have enough people try to get a free ride with the union that it collapses under it’s own weight.
The packages are presented as non-negotiable, even though they aren’t
How are they negotiable? What can the employee threat with if they don’t get a better package?
Whether or not you win additional concessions depends on what information or knowledge you have about an organization that could prove damaging in some respect, and whether or not you can afford legal representation. But it is negotiable.
