There's been some discussion about socioeconomics and the impossibility and 'unreal' expectation that you would leave a company if they were terrible to you; if there are no other positions in your sector or industry available other than the non-viable position you currently have, how long would you expect your position to exist, and how long do you intend to work it? If investment in games development is diminishing year after year and creating negative growth in the sector, how can you argue one should not investigate other career options or paths, especially people with extremely valuable multi-sector skills like software development experience?
I'm less than surprised to see more sympathy for software engineers and asset creators than miners and factory workers who actually lack options, skills and privileges. Prioritizing one's concern for the least advantaged and most beleaguered of the global economy is now 'bullshit' because it's apparently a slippery slope that leads to human suffering. I'm sorry, but that sounds like self-serving middle-class bourgeois tripe.
To say that slavish devotion to an uncaring company is part of Japanese custom is factual, but perhaps I don't understand criticizing the company for a lack of benevolence (while reinforcing the custom of slavish devotion) rather than criticizing the custom that facilitates dehumanization. When people talk about going out and finding a new job, what they are promoting is a more mercenary and self-valuing ethic as opposed to the custom of deference and submission with the hopes that management becomes inexplicably nicer. I read this old Wired article today, I thought it was relevant.
Japan is beginning very fast - in part because they have begun to downsize without downsizing. You know what I'm saying? They are moving people. The Japanese have practically no unemployment insurance, but they keep people on the employer's payroll even if they don't work. So they are being moved out to suppliers. They are being moved out to dealers. Or they are just kept on the payroll without work. But actually, the Japanese big companies have begun to change very fast. They're moving production to mainland Asia, to America, to Europe.
The German big companies are beginning to move out of Germany because costs are prohibitive. And you have enormous unemployment in Germany, dangerously high.
In Japan, you have a social compact for lifetime employment for one-third of the labor force. In Germany, you have the social compact of the social market economy. Therefore, to lay off people, even to shift them, is very difficult. In those countries, it's very much a social rather than an economic problem.
In this country, the restructuring has caused amazingly few social problems because our labor force is so mobile, so adaptable. Our disorder is a great advantage. The Germans and the Japanese are programmed for order - and it gets in their way.
I feel like you're reading arguments incorrectly. No one is arguing that people should not search for better work than this. The point is that the treatment detailed here is inhumane and should not exist. How the workers respond to it is not the point. The point is ending the inhumane treatment.
And you are misreading what I called "bullshit." Caring and making smart consumer choices (or practicing activism or protests or awareness campaigns) is not so rare a resource that we need to "prioritize" our concern or actions. It's become really fucking easy to look up companies and be a thoughtful, ethical consumer in general. My point is that human suffering exists in many places, and when we learn of examples of it, we are confronted with what we're going to do about that. I would argue that saying that worse examples exist than the one we found is a bad way to deal with it. It's good to educate about other examples and show trends, but do not belittle lesser evil and pretend that because it is lesser it should be ignored for the big fish. That's not how progress happens.
The idea that we should promote individualism and self-worth rather than self-effacing team playerness is probably fine, but I rather like the idea of focusing on improving the attitude of the leaders, too. Companies need to realize that profit margins and long-term growth depend on humane and fair treatment of employees, as well as other major concerns like, say, curbing climate change so humanity doesn't die. What needs to change is the attitudes and approaches of owners who see one-year profits as the point, sacrificing the future in the process. That shortsightedness will doom single employees in the short term and the entire fucking human population in the long term, if it hasn't already.
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