[vms20591]

Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you.

You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".

[trentnix]

No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level.

And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.

[vms20591]

""" No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal """ yes, which is to make profit and keep shareholders & investors happy. Companies like Facebook might have started with a simple goal of connecting family & friends. But, now its an entirely different beast, making money by selling you and with way too many security holes that it hopes it can fix.

""" And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. """ You are joining another one that has the same common goal.

""" And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce. """ Please tell that to the Amazon's warehouse workers who had to piss in a bottle, because they don't want a slippage in their quota.

[lotsofpulp]

There are vast swaths of the US that are in economic decline, and they most certainly do not allow for mobility irrespective of skill level. They don't even have sufficient economic activity to support a Walmart.

[trentnix]

You seem to define mobility different from me. The people in those areas have the legal and opportunistic means of going elsewhere.

[lotsofpulp]

I have a hard time imaging the people are willingly sacrificing theirs and their kids' futures for no reason. It's hard to up and move somewhere without adequate savings, a family or friends network. What kind of landlord is going to rent to someone with no job? Will someone in that situation be able to get a job that even allows them to save up for a home purchase in an economically burgeoning area? Or will they always be treading water?

[8note]

people have always had that mobility though; there's nothing special about the current US job market. want to become the king in a feudal society? just raise an army and take over

[jka]

I'd like to agree with you, because the narrative that employees corral and motivate their employers is an attractive one, and to be encouraged.

Within tech specifically: I do think it's true that software employers shift and change their rhetoric and/or practices to meet the (sometimes entitled) demands of developers.

But some of the issues silicon valley tech firms are relentlessly unwilling to move on are ones around unionization and collective bargaining.

If employees are truly creating the market, and it's the companies that have to work to attract and retain them, then why are employers so fearful of anything except individual bargaining?

For people who are all of: confident, socially mobile (few family/social ties to bind them) and physically in good health you are probably absolutely correct. But I would wager that setting those expectations across entire populations doesn't scale.