We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better than the alternatives.
Dons flak jacket
Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face.
Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged and upper class."
If you can't stop working tomorrow without ever having to worry about money again - including health crises - you are not privileged or upper class.
Please stop telling yourself you are.
The original article leads with mentioning the recent layoffs at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. These are people who were making great money, and now have those companies on their resumes. I know they’re currently going through a rough situation, which should not be minimized.
It’s hard to take your argument seriously though, as there’s so much space between FAANG execs with 8 figure savings, FAANG workers making 200k+, and poverty. Being realistic about this helps your argument that those companies could have done better, not the exaggeration.
Whatever your complaints here are, start with having people working at a job where there is literally no-one willing to stand up and pay them their salary. That isn't going to be a society that can comfortably sustain people being unable to work. To have the level of surplus where a healthcare crisis is easily dismissed requires extreme economic efficiency.
If you want someone to be unable to work and just sitting around dealing with a personal crisis, then we really need the people around them to be working on things that get a "wow, yeah, that is important!" type reaction.
Weirdly though, the number of health crisis that will lead to death are fewer the more wealth you have.
It’s incredibly tone deaf.
1. Someone making $200k is definitely doing well compared to almost anyone in the US (94th percentile, 98th at $300k) but those salaries are heavily clustered in very expensive areas where that might not even be the top 10%. Someone making that much working at Apple or Google is living in a normal house - a nice one, sure, but not a mansion - and still feeling things like childcare costs.
2. That tech worker has to go to work every day. If they get sick, their income will end just like someone making coffee or pulling packages in a warehouse - to be clear, not as quickly and there are more conditions they can keep working with, but their income is derived by selling their time. Contrast that with the truly rich, who have passive income and enough assets that things rearrange around their needs. Someone with $10M in the bank isn’t homeless if they get a chronic illness, and if they own the company (or are related to the owner) they get as much time off as they need to deal with it.
Nobody should feel sorry for tech workers but it’s important to look at how people’s lives differ, especially in the United States where things like healthcare and retirement are linked to their ability to work.
A billionaire might “feel” the cost of his private jet fleet but that doesn’t mean he’s not rich.
And, again, I’m not saying that this is a pity-worthy situation – only that it’s a lot closer to the average worker than the average rich person in terms of having to go to work every day, think about finances, etc.
Your average middle class American could never afford to own anything in a HCOL city.
That’s the privilege.
Of course a lot of the people who live in a HCOL of living area feel like they can only just afford to live there. If they thought it was cheap, more of their class would move there - it is a desirable area. You have to be so rich that everyone in your wealth/income class can afford to live in an area before housing costs will be low enough to ignore. So the top 100 billionaires don't feel the housing costs of living in a HCOL area because all the billionaires in the world could probably move there and not fill up the available housing stock. But if all the millionaires in the world want to move somewhere then the price will be high enough that a millionaire feels like they can't afford to be in the area. And that is really just a subtle market hint that a lot of millionaires think it is a nice area. Doesn't make the people involved less rich.
It doesn't matter the wealth or income someone has, there is always something they can't afford. So clearly the existence of "limited resources" is not a good indication of whether someone is wealthy or not.
But ignoring the type of house and it's location - if someone can afford the down payment and mortgage payments on a $2M homes (typical single family home in the Bay Area), the are objectively very well off.
Just like it's useless work to build a search engine when directories work well enough? Or useless to build an email service when ISPs already offered them?
Microsoft shouldn't be in the business of providing dental care for it's employees. Blaming corporations for the dismal state of the healthcare system is unfair.
But that's exactly why we have bankruptcy. You know the word doesn't mean "losing everything you have", it means "discharging debts you're never going to be able to pay", right? You can do it once, and it ruins your credit for a long time (7 years IIRC), but it saves you from dying of starvation trying to pay off debts you don't have money to pay.
competent operators wouldn't get into this problem in the first place
(or, alternatively, these layoffs are also an incompetent decision and the C-levels are simply following the herd)
- if they optimisitcally hire a ton of people, then fire most of them, that’s expensive in the bad years
- if they only hire as many people as they need, then they’ll be eaten by the bigger-risk-taking competition in the good years
In general, it’s better to keep people if you’re profitable even if you want the margin to be higher. Google’s problem is more their management – in a less rudderless environment you could come up with things for people to work on but when you’re mostly sitting around hoping the ad words money fountain keeps running it probably is true that you can’t figure out what to have them do.
Does it?