Most employers can adapt to the loss of a single worker much more easily than a worker can adapt to losing their job. And much of our social safety net currently operates via employers - things like pensions, maternity leave, healthcare, and even unemployment are tightly coupled to the single-long-term-employer model. Maybe they shouldn't be, but fixing that will take time and in the meantime people will slip through the cracks.

We're stuffing people into cracks and making new cracks to stuff them in.

Most people can’t just quit their job, they have monthly recurring bills that must be paid. Those of us that work in tech are quite fortunate to have realistic alternatives. However, even many of us are restricted due to location, and before it’s mentioned, yeah we could move but we have families with children in school and spouses who have non tech careers. Moving is expensive. The employment system in the US, especially in states like mine, ensure that employers have persistent power over employees under the guise of “right to work”.

>The employment system in the US, especially in states like mine, ensure that employers have persistent power over employees under the guise of “right to work”.

I think you mean "at-will employment". All American states have that. "Right to work" laws refer to laws banning union contracts from creating "closed shops".

Yep, I did mean "at-will". Thank you!

It's bad because the overwhelming majority of people don't enjoy the process of finding a new job and cannot afford to spend time finding new work.

I think a lot of the talk is also due to unhappiness with the economic trend that is drawing the median and minimum incomes closer together, which is a reversal of a trend that gave widespread optimism and contentment.

Because of the massive imbalance of power between employer and employee. Which is why employment protection is a lot stronger in every other developed country than the US.

The employee is usually in a much more precarious situation, and usually more concerned with cashflow than ROI.

Workers are usually more efficient when they concentrate on one job full time. But that leaves them exposed to any disruption of that one job.

Also, many employers expect contractors to be always available, or available full time for long stretches, but that makes it impossible to diversify their income.

So it can become very one-sided. A possible answer would be to make it normal for employees to have contracts with several employers at once, but that can create conflicts of interest in a lot of professions, and would make things like IP very messy.

It's a bad thing that the demographics of the US are now such that this has happened... that most employee / employer relationships are no longer mutually beneficial.

Because we don't like looking at people as purely numbers. Especially when those people are dependent upon their job to be able to pay rent and buy food.