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by netizen-936824 1648 days ago
>"Nike, for example, gave all office employees a week off earlier this year, and Bumble and LinkedIn enacted similar policies."

This bothers me quite a bit. Only office workers get off? Why not everyone? This seems like some class warfare type bullshit. Everyone is under stress, and the physical laborers may be even worse of simply due to the physical nature of their work

2 comments

I agree with your points about unfairness, and that laborers are much more deserving of time off than office workers. But I wouldn't characterize it as class warfare.

In most cases, when physical labor doesn't get performed, people notice. There are consequences that ripple out, affecting other people or systems.

In most cases, when office work doesn't get performed, people don't notice. Things just stay the same.

The system rewards cheaper and faster. But that's an issue of (primarily financial) incentives, not sociocultural biases.

Business don't give a shit about workers and this only reinforces that belief. This is a thin facade of caring about workers in that only the ones that don't really matter are treated well. IMO that's what makes this class warfare. It's all the people with cushy high paying jobs that get cares for, and all the others get shat on
At the risk of repeating myself:

> The system rewards cheaper and faster. But that's an issue of (primarily financial) incentives, not sociocultural biases.

Abusing other workers is a common phenomena at all levels of a company. Low level team leads (line/operations managers) are almost always of the same "class" as the people under them. They almost always ascend from those lower ranks.

In any given instance of abuse, there may be other factors. But there is always a zero sum financial incentive to do so - to exploit others to benefit oneself.

To be clear, I'm not in any way defending CEOs or any other executives. As a category, they are grossly, inexcusably overcompensated for the value they deliver. I'm just saying that the issue is systemic, pervasive.

Fully agreed. I work in such a job (laborer), and the only thing I can figure is that giving office workers extra time off has less of an impact, whereas giving laborers off would affect production/output/service/whatever. We can't have that now, can we? Those companies did not enact this policy without their bottom line as priority, as usual.
Less of an impact on profits, more impact on workers

Business don't give a shit about workers and this only reinforces that belief. This is a thin facade of caring about workers in that only the ones that don't really matter are treated well. IMO that's what makes this class warfare. It's all the people with cushy high paying jobs that get cares for, and all the others get shat on