Okay, this got a lot longer than planned, so let me offer a summary of my goal first:
I’m mainly trying to argue that we should blame the root property (greed) and the enabling factors (system fostering fuck-you-got-mine), rather than a secondary property potentially arising from it, and to propose a solution thay would make that “potentially” irrelevant.
I’ve quit a job for moral reasons without anything else lined up, and I have a house, kids, and cars.
That’s great and I love that for you.
But I can tell you for a fact that not everyone can do that. My wife had to quit hers for health reasons, and though she thankfully gets unemployment benefits (60% of her previous income here in Germany), it isn’t enough to cover her share of the rent, utilities and other regular expenses. We don’t have a house, we have a singular car we’re paying lease for (she needed it to get to her job, I use public transport), we don’t have kids.
If she hadn’t had good cause to quit, the benefits would have been suspended. If she didn’t get public healthcare through those benefits, the cost of her treatment would send us into debt.
She’s been applying for everything even remotely related to her qualifications (both because she risks losing her benefits otherwise and because those 60% are bad and she’d like to get a proper pay again). It’s not that she doesn’t have any qualifications, just that there’s not a lot of openings and presumably many applicants around here. Or maybe whatever AI companies use to screen applications decides she’s not a good fit? No clue. Most companies don’t even respond. The rest send a polite rejection letter that they went with someone else.
If I now quit my job for moral reasons (which I thankfully have little cause for), I’d be trading our future for a chance at a slightly worse and a risk of a much worse future. If I can’t find a new job in the time between handing in my notice and my last paycheck, I probably won’t get unemployment pay for a while, and we’d be living off of, at best, 30% of the income we planned our life with. We already don’t have much in savings to begin with due to an unrelated instance of life fucking us over.
I also know people from the US that stuck or are sticking with a job they hate because they can’t find any other job that’ll sponsor their healthcare, and they can’t afford to go without due to chronic issues.
These Meta employees make at least triple what I do, but somehow I have more financial freedom than they do? Explain that part to me.
Financial freedom doesn’t strictly scale with income. If you earn more, you’re probably also more comfortable taking on debt (car, house) or higher expenses (like an expensive school for your kids). Finding a cheaper place to live isn’t always easy (the housing market is atrocious in some places, and I know that we’ve been looking in vain), particularly if it’s in range of decently paying employers; you may well need the car to get to work; taking your kids out of a school you can no longer afford is probably a bad idea both for their social development and their future prospects. And healthcare is still a fucked up thing that can pose a great risk.
Again, for many of the employees, there may well be concessions they can make that they choose not to, putting their own luxury before the ethics (or lack thereof) of Meta’s business practices. I’m not denying that nor defending them. I’m contending that not all will have that choice, and that we shouldn’t throw them under the bus with the rest when there is a more accurate option:
The root cause that makes the evil ones evil is their selfishness and greed; that is what we should condemn. It applies to plenty more people than just employees coming up with whatever justification to shut up their conscience. The remedy for this would be to strip them of the excess that keeps them there, which isn’t exactly trivial.
The contributing factor that allows Meta and other such companies to exist and do such evil is an economic and social power balance that has been steadily and politically shifted ever more towards corporate dominance. There needs to be a counterweight that enables workers to do the right thing, no matter their circumstances. Social security doesn’t (just) help the unemployed, disabled, or other people that can’t work, it also shores up the bargaining position of those who do work and want to work for fair conditions and with a clean conscience.
Once such a security exists, the question of separating the greedy ones from those staying out of dependency or insecurity becomes much easier. The lower the hurdles for leaving, the less of an excuse for those who stay.
And if Meta was then torn down, the question of stripping the greedy from their unjust gains would be resolved too.
Hence: Fuck greed, fuck the system that enables it and fuck whoever defends that system.
Okay, this got a lot longer than planned, so let me offer a summary of my goal first:
I’m mainly trying to argue that we should blame the root property (greed) and the enabling factors (system fostering fuck-you-got-mine), rather than a secondary property potentially arising from it, and to propose a solution thay would make that “potentially” irrelevant.
That’s great and I love that for you.
But I can tell you for a fact that not everyone can do that. My wife had to quit hers for health reasons, and though she thankfully gets unemployment benefits (60% of her previous income here in Germany), it isn’t enough to cover her share of the rent, utilities and other regular expenses. We don’t have a house, we have a singular car we’re paying lease for (she needed it to get to her job, I use public transport), we don’t have kids.
If she hadn’t had good cause to quit, the benefits would have been suspended. If she didn’t get public healthcare through those benefits, the cost of her treatment would send us into debt.
She’s been applying for everything even remotely related to her qualifications (both because she risks losing her benefits otherwise and because those 60% are bad and she’d like to get a proper pay again). It’s not that she doesn’t have any qualifications, just that there’s not a lot of openings and presumably many applicants around here. Or maybe whatever AI companies use to screen applications decides she’s not a good fit? No clue. Most companies don’t even respond. The rest send a polite rejection letter that they went with someone else.
If I now quit my job for moral reasons (which I thankfully have little cause for), I’d be trading our future for a chance at a slightly worse and a risk of a much worse future. If I can’t find a new job in the time between handing in my notice and my last paycheck, I probably won’t get unemployment pay for a while, and we’d be living off of, at best, 30% of the income we planned our life with. We already don’t have much in savings to begin with due to an unrelated instance of life fucking us over.
I also know people from the US that stuck or are sticking with a job they hate because they can’t find any other job that’ll sponsor their healthcare, and they can’t afford to go without due to chronic issues.
Financial freedom doesn’t strictly scale with income. If you earn more, you’re probably also more comfortable taking on debt (car, house) or higher expenses (like an expensive school for your kids). Finding a cheaper place to live isn’t always easy (the housing market is atrocious in some places, and I know that we’ve been looking in vain), particularly if it’s in range of decently paying employers; you may well need the car to get to work; taking your kids out of a school you can no longer afford is probably a bad idea both for their social development and their future prospects. And healthcare is still a fucked up thing that can pose a great risk.
Again, for many of the employees, there may well be concessions they can make that they choose not to, putting their own luxury before the ethics (or lack thereof) of Meta’s business practices. I’m not denying that nor defending them. I’m contending that not all will have that choice, and that we shouldn’t throw them under the bus with the rest when there is a more accurate option:
The root cause that makes the evil ones evil is their selfishness and greed; that is what we should condemn. It applies to plenty more people than just employees coming up with whatever justification to shut up their conscience. The remedy for this would be to strip them of the excess that keeps them there, which isn’t exactly trivial.
The contributing factor that allows Meta and other such companies to exist and do such evil is an economic and social power balance that has been steadily and politically shifted ever more towards corporate dominance. There needs to be a counterweight that enables workers to do the right thing, no matter their circumstances. Social security doesn’t (just) help the unemployed, disabled, or other people that can’t work, it also shores up the bargaining position of those who do work and want to work for fair conditions and with a clean conscience.
Once such a security exists, the question of separating the greedy ones from those staying out of dependency or insecurity becomes much easier. The lower the hurdles for leaving, the less of an excuse for those who stay.
And if Meta was then torn down, the question of stripping the greedy from their unjust gains would be resolved too.
Hence: Fuck greed, fuck the system that enables it and fuck whoever defends that system.