Why aren't you keeping colleagues informed enough to cope without you for even a week.
Why are you the only person contactable for certain issues. etc.
Drives me mad when schools shut for summer and the only person who can purchase things has sodded off.
One of the best pieces of advice I was given very early in my career was 'If you can't be replaced then you can't be fired, but you can't be promoted either.'
Being indispensable is a career limiting move.
Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.
Except "coping" isn't what everyone thinks about, there's some bizarre expectation of 100% efficiency for short notice things. If the DBA needs a week off then plan around it. I can see a case in a small firm for some people to be contactable in case of dire emergencies - but with significant costs like holiday day reimbursement and cash if activated. Not an expectation of any contact, view that as a significant failing.
Some will die due to those risks. Most likely the right way to mitigate those risks is not European style work/life balance but rather Valley style "pay the SPOF a lot, give him ownership, and make him feel highly valued".
And if your company absolutely 100% relies on having a full-blown PM/DS/DBA around at all times, well, then you DO need (at least) two of each, otherwise your company tanks if your one DBA gets sick or leaves for a company where they don't have to suffer the permanent stress of being a SPOF.
And if you CAN survive for a few weeks while you hire and train a new DBA in that situation, then you can survive for a few weeks while your DBA is on holiday.
Just flout the law?
I would have no concerns hiring someone and telling them "hey, I'm paying you well because I need you available all the time, just in case." They will almost certainly lack the ability to use the legal system to screw me over.
If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery/business-friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?
I have absolutely no idea why you wish to portray slavery as economically efficient. Is it truly your belief that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved? (I suppose this is not a particularly uncommon left wing view, but it's very rarely stated so explicitly.)
It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that and I certainly hope for your sake that you don't believe anyone believes that and are just trying to be incendiary. It is a very common view among most people (since it's the truth) that the welfare of /certain people/ is maximized with /certain other people/ enslaved. And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
The contention is that your position, that businesses should refuse to operate in countries which regulate rights into existence since these rights have costs which hurt the bottom line of the business, if adopted leads directly and immediately to slavery. Slavery is unquestionably disgusting and reprehensible, so therefore your position, which leads to an unacceptable result, cannot be accepted.
So I'm suggesting that the /subjective/ welfare of people in a position to own slaves (wealthy business owners) is maximized under slavery. And from that I conclude the maximization of the welfare of wealthy business owners -- the natural result of unfettered capitalism -- is something to be categorically rejected. So we need fetters.
Simply not true. Several elected officials believe or previously believed that, and some proposed legislation for that purpose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/236365-rangel-renews-call-...
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr5741/text
http://www.infowars.com/obama-camp-scrubs-website-to-remove-...
And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
Yet strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. Multinationals with huge economic power and subject to minimal regulation tend to treat employees better than smaller and weaker local companies (at least in India, the US, and other places I'm familiar with).
I don't dispute much of what you wrote about why we shouldn't do business with those who practice slavery. I'd draw a very clear bright line: do workers agree to their terms of work? In India or the US, the vast majority of IT workers do. I guess you want to go further and tell my employer/me what work conditions are acceptable?
I think the reason multinationals treat employees better is because that since they are multinational, they are a single company subject to the laws of every nation: it is more efficient for them to treat EVERYONE by the same rights as the most stringent (Europe) whereas companies local to India or the US can abuse the lack of rights these countries give workers since they only deal with local workers.
And I would agree with you about consent being the big bright line. Except I think consent is very complicated. If you allowed people to sign themselves into slavery, people would consent to slavery. No matter how awful something is, if it's allowed, people will "consent" to it -- the most desperate in society are forced by circumstances to consent to it. I think the word consent only has meaning when there are other meaningful options available. Which I think is the fundamental difference: the definition of consent. We all agree if someone puts a gun to your head and demands consent it's not consent: but what if a faceless nameless system forces you to die or consent to whatever some collection of business owners demand and you agree: is this consent or not? I say not really.
That's very true, and sometimes the best business decision is one that favours staff retention over short term profit. Losing the experience and expertise of someone who's been in the company a while just because you can't manage your team well enough to get people trained to cover one another's vacation time is going to get expensive when people burn out and quit, not to mention the effect it'll have on staff morale and your business's reputation as a bad place to work (which has a knock-on effect on sales).
You're entirely right that a small business can't afford to have complete redundancy for every staff position - the appropriate strategy is to put well documented processes in place, with good handover management and proper knowledge sharing. Discouraging people from taking vacation time to the point where you'd only hire in countries where you can give your staff zero paid vacation days is not.