Could you please stop posting flamewar comments, including nationalistic flamewar comments, to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
It's not wimpiness, it's an essential acceptance of cruelty that is accepted as a neccessary part of the american psyche where not just individuals but businesses have that freedom.
"If I was the company owner or the boss, I might do that to in order to protect my money"
> American workers are the wimpiest creatures on the planet
American workers do put up with a lot. But the cruelty of having one’s health care access perfectly intertwined with employment probably explains much of their reluctance to engage in the sort of individual and collective action needed to address malignant employer behaviour.
This is starting to collapse with the shift towards high deductible plans and HSA accounts. Increasingly, employers are just providing a subsidy for something that partially covers you when you get cancer. You'll pay for everything else yourself.
They don't? All the tech companies I hear about having unions are American. (They are also big I suppose, but when I worked at Arm in the UK there were frequently outsiders sort of 'protesting' for employees to join. I was never aware of anyone caring who worked there.)
It seems weird to me to have professional unions, doctors are an outlier there, where it's common, and (partly I suppose because) there isn't a professional institution (which overlap slightly) - it's split between unions and the GMC (licencing body, and as a doctor you'd whistle-blow to them for example).
I'd like to see more software engineers be professionally registered, and it be more worthwhile to. (Yes, quite chicken-and-egg I'm sure.) I'm a member of the IET, but to be honest their light on software-relevance. The chartership requirements for example seemed like they would require quite a bit of bullshitting (not lying exactly, just sort of business-speak style forcing something to fit the very specific irrelevant questions) to satisfy; I abandoned it, so far at least.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.