The idea that you can just throw away an employee is bizzarre to most of the developed world. You have a responsibility to them (usually a legal one); the employee-employer relationship is an unbalanced one in many ways, and relies on that for fairness. If you want people you can get rid of at the drop of a hat you should be hiring contractors and paying the associated premium.
It should not be bizarre. Everybody should adapt and act accordingly, save money and keep your axe sharp. No job is forever, no employer is your friend or family.
What about demanding a salary no less than 50% of the value you add to the company? How many industries would stop being viable if their whole workforce would demand to be compensated for the worst case scenario Everysinglepaycheck? A couple years ago this would have sounded like hyperbole, but then the Great Resignation happened, so there's that...
From that point of view, severance payments are not noble handouts but compensation strategies to reduce the overall payroll cost.
Whatever country you moved to, odds are there's more of a brain drain from there to the US than vice versa. When places heavily regulate laying employees off, they just make employers much more apprehensive and conservative about hiring.
From a capitalist perspective, the paternal employer-employee relationship is one of mutual benefit. Ensuring that the the employee's incentives align more closely with their employer's. At the same time it acts as (an arguably weak) justification for corporate profit, a comfortable and loyal employee is one who does not concern themselves too much with where the rest of the money is going.
The idea of the relationship as transient and adversarial directly opposes this. When companies force their workers into precarity, while at the same time making record profits, there ceases to be a justification for accepting that profit in the eyes of the worker. Eventually leading to some kind of societal response.
I actually see elegance and justice in the cold, ruthless capitalist approach; I tend to think of it as tough love... But I don't believe that the system we have today is capitalism and so this cold, ruthless approach is actually unfair.
The difference is that in a capitalist system (with a constrained money supply; an even monetary playing field), when you get tossed out, you can get back up and you still have a chance to compete. In this system, when you get tossed out, it's game over (feels like slow withering away, a constant struggle to stay afloat).
The winners' wealth compounds infinitely beyond the point when it becomes impossible to compete against them. Billionaires are earning enough passive yield on their diversified portfolios that some of their businesses become useless appendages and they can afford to run them as a hobby, at a loss... Yet nobody can compete against those businesses; they're essentially subsidized by the money printer which serves as a compounding interest machine for the billionaire.
No real business which relies on profits from its economic activities can compete against a business which is funded by an infinitely compounding source of wealth.
Given that money is taxed by governments each time it hops between economic participants, it can barely hold onto a tiny fraction of its original face value after just 10 hops (at that point, almost all of it will be back in the hands of government)... It can't stray too far from the government money printer. But that's not a concern for billionaires who earn their yields almost straight out of reserve banks.
> I actually see elegance and justice in the cold, ruthless capitalist approach; I tend to think of it as tough love... But I don't believe that the system we have today is capitalism and so this cold, ruthless approach is actually unfair.
I'm curious as to how the hypothetical Capitalism would avoid quickly collapsing into a much more extreme version of the current state of affairs. Capital producing more capital seems built into the system, without strict controls on capital accumulation I don't see how the end result could be anything other than monopoly.
