6 ms·

Not systematically. The power dynamic isn't there.

by HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago

WalterBright 2y ago
[flagged]
- kelnos 2y ago
  I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc. And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ororroro 2y ago
      For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases. As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust. Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it. I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun. My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal. BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders. A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Sometimes a manager will tolerate a certain level of theft by an employee, for various reasons. But they'll never promote the thief to a position of trust, and the thief will never realize why he doesn't get promoted.
  - room4 2y ago
    > In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their health insurance This is a common misunderstanding. If an American loses their job for any reason, they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. In fact, they don't even need to take any immediate action. If they need healthcare in the month of, or month after, their loss of job, they can go get it and then later on pay their premium to have the insurance retroactively go back in time to cover them. The only difference is that the covered person needs to pay the full premium, while the standard employment agreement has the employer paying a significant portion of the premium. For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. There are subsidies based on income to make the premiums manageable for low-income people if they can't afford the market rate.
    - guitarbill 2y ago
      > If an American loses their job for any reason This is incorrect, it's "for limited periods of time under certain circumstances" [0] (and citizenship is not required). > they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. [...] needs to pay the full premium This is true but vastly underplays the cost. It isn't unusual for "the full premium" to be over a thousand dollars per month [1] (!). They even get to charge you an "administrative fee". Oh, and there's also tax implications. > For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. More likely for people who can't stay on their previous plan because it would bankrupt them. Or if their spouse is not working. What happens if the employee has children/dependents on the plan? Etc, etc. None of this is easy. Switching insurance changes which doctors are "in network", so at minimum it's significant hassle. At worst, their or a family member's current treatment is only partially or not at all covered. So, in practice, parent's description is accurate enough. [0] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra [1] https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539 https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539
- anticensor 2y ago
  > Having more than one "full time" remote job? Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Yeah, I've seen this debated at length numerous times here. If that is your opinion, you shouldn't object to productivity monitoring software installed on your work laptop. After all, you're being paid for your time.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      You’re being paid for your labor. Your time is a proxy for that labor. If an employee can do two jobs at once, then let them without intrusive monitoring. If the intrusive monitoring is the only means of determining their output, then fine, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that there’s less orwellian metrics, and that the primary motive for their introduction is to force more work out of already productive employees by making them self-police, panopticon style.
      - em-bee 2y ago
        If an employee can do two jobs at once nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus. sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job. but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Your loss is an expense, and an employee’s loss is the threat of homelessness. That’s the reason I find your perspective difficult to agree with. You’re holding the cards in these interactions.
  - nec4b 2y ago
    He said he nearly lost his business, that means his and his employees livelihood. How is this difficult to see.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      I mean small business (under like 20 employees) owners are more precarious, but my point still stands honestly. Do you really think business owners are under the same threat of homelessness as their employees?

Not systematically. The power dynamic isn't there.

WalterBright 2y ago

[flagged]

kelnos 2y ago
I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc. And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ororroro 2y ago
    For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases. As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust. Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it. I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun. My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal. BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders. A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Sometimes a manager will tolerate a certain level of theft by an employee, for various reasons. But they'll never promote the thief to a position of trust, and the thief will never realize why he doesn't get promoted.
- room4 2y ago
  > In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their health insurance This is a common misunderstanding. If an American loses their job for any reason, they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. In fact, they don't even need to take any immediate action. If they need healthcare in the month of, or month after, their loss of job, they can go get it and then later on pay their premium to have the insurance retroactively go back in time to cover them. The only difference is that the covered person needs to pay the full premium, while the standard employment agreement has the employer paying a significant portion of the premium. For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. There are subsidies based on income to make the premiums manageable for low-income people if they can't afford the market rate.
  - guitarbill 2y ago
    > If an American loses their job for any reason This is incorrect, it's "for limited periods of time under certain circumstances" [0] (and citizenship is not required). > they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. [...] needs to pay the full premium This is true but vastly underplays the cost. It isn't unusual for "the full premium" to be over a thousand dollars per month [1] (!). They even get to charge you an "administrative fee". Oh, and there's also tax implications. > For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. More likely for people who can't stay on their previous plan because it would bankrupt them. Or if their spouse is not working. What happens if the employee has children/dependents on the plan? Etc, etc. None of this is easy. Switching insurance changes which doctors are "in network", so at minimum it's significant hassle. At worst, their or a family member's current treatment is only partially or not at all covered. So, in practice, parent's description is accurate enough. [0] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra [1] https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539 https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539
anticensor 2y ago
> Having more than one "full time" remote job? Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Yeah, I've seen this debated at length numerous times here. If that is your opinion, you shouldn't object to productivity monitoring software installed on your work laptop. After all, you're being paid for your time.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    You’re being paid for your labor. Your time is a proxy for that labor. If an employee can do two jobs at once, then let them without intrusive monitoring. If the intrusive monitoring is the only means of determining their output, then fine, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that there’s less orwellian metrics, and that the primary motive for their introduction is to force more work out of already productive employees by making them self-police, panopticon style.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      If an employee can do two jobs at once nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus. sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job. but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Your loss is an expense, and an employee’s loss is the threat of homelessness. That’s the reason I find your perspective difficult to agree with. You’re holding the cards in these interactions.
- nec4b 2y ago
  He said he nearly lost his business, that means his and his employees livelihood. How is this difficult to see.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    I mean small business (under like 20 employees) owners are more precarious, but my point still stands honestly. Do you really think business owners are under the same threat of homelessness as their employees?