Corporations to Americans: Hurry Up and Die

Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions
Life expectancy gains have stalled. The grim silver lining? Lower pension costs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/americans-are-dying-younger-saving-corporations-billions

Here is a little known item that takes us close to the heart of the beast, the American labour law of “employment at will”.

Jacque Vilet wrote:
What many people do not know is that the U.S. is the only country where “employment at will” applies.

I have worked with several in-house attorneys that were not even aware of this. The fact is that labor laws in general in the U.S. are very pro-business while labor laws in most other countries in the world are pro-employee.

As a result, from the point of view of U.S. headquartered multinationals, firing employees gets stricter, more complex and more expensive once they step outside the U.S.  

Many foreign employment termination laws impose notice periods, severance pay and pre-firing procedural steps. There can be monetary penalties if these transactions are handled improperly. Settlements are usually calculated as a multiple of annual earnings.

https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/employment-at-will-it-doesnt-apply-to-workers-outside-the-u-s/

Wikipedia wrote:
At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning.

Conservative scholars in the field of law and economics credit "employment at will" as a major factor underlying the strength of the U.S. economy.

If the "strength of the US economy" is that workers can be fired at the passing whim of their employer than USA has the advantage of being a form of slave economy, while European nations are encumbered with labour rights laws.

Sounds like the prefect set-up to extort workers - there must be some laws that prevent blatant sexual exploitation or firing anyone who mentions the U-word? Do you have file some sort of a civil law suit if a boss fires you for not having sex with them? It would be insane.

Gives the real context to Trump's "you're fired" show, the over-powering aura of exploitation was more pungent on that show than I thought - and I already that it was turd-munching bully-porn...

Mercifully a third of U.S. employees have managed to get contracts that require some "objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category: 15% public-sector employee, 8% of unionized private workers, 15% private-sector workers with 'individual' contracts. Again to put in blunt terms, half of the protected are the labour elite who can individually bargain better contracts, the other half is unionized to some degree.

I like how business is supposed to be in the 'real world' but American employers run from the words "objectively reasonable" like a vampire from a cross.


One final Wikipedia quote -

Wikipedia wrote:At-will employment has also been identified as a reason for the success of Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur-friendly environment.

Also some related headlines:

Silicon Valley's Cheap Tech Labor Addiction

Silicon Valley tech workers are using stoic philosophy designed for Greek slaves as a life hack

Silicon Valley 'Tech-Slaves' Forced To Live In Their Cars

The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History

Silicon Valley Debt Slavery: Is This the New American Dream?

Creating Dependencies with Electronics Worker Slavery in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: "Slavery Lite"  

Modern day slavery in America — The H1B visa and Silicon Valley

Big outsourcing companies are gaming the H1-B system and its modern day slavery

New human trafficking report: "Modern-day slavery is real and occurring every day in Silicon Valley"  

Globalization, raw materials, and slave labor from Potosi to Silicon Valley

The end of “Silicon Valley slavery” epoch?

and, of course...

Silicon Valley libertarians claim Government is “slavery”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-massacre-at-least-30-children-die-in-indian-hospital-after-oxygen-cut-off/2017/08/12/5f51cf70-fcc8-4fd3-8a71-94fcba37094f_story.html

washington post wrote: NEW DELHI — One by one, the infants and children slipped away Thursday night, their parents watching helplessly as oxygen supplies at the government hospital ran dangerously low.

At least 30 children died Thursday and into Friday at a hospital in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after its supply of liquid oxygen was disrupted over an unpaid bill, officials said.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. as medical practitioners and relatives — the tanks running dry — handed out manual resuscitator bags to families in a desperate attempt to save the young patients.

Many of the young patients were suffering from encephalitis, a potentially deadly illness that causes acute swelling of the brain. The disease is often spread by mosquitoes, and infections rise during the monsoon season.

The hospital owed $89,750 to a India-based medical supply company called Pushpa Sales Private Limited.