When an employer abuses an employee, we're usually talking about life-altering things like overwork, withholding pay, denying promised benefits, canceling promised time off, up to the truly awful stuff like firing for biased and discriminatory reasons.
I don't think you can really compare these two directions of abuse at all. The power imbalance is staggering.
> but not materially
One employee of mine stole $70,000 (about $200,000 today). It very nearly wiped the company out. (If you can't make payroll, you are forced to close.)
Yes, and that's allowed. If anything workers are much more gracious in this regard - typically termination happens quickly, with no two week notice. Workers typically at least give that, which they're not required to at all in the US. It's purely goodwill and generosity, so you're welcome.
> One employee of mine stole $70,000
Okay? And Bayer Pharmaceuticals gave thousands of people HIV/AIDS. What's your point here?
We gotta look at the big picture, not your experience.
When an employee with a customer facing job randomly doesn't show up for work, as a manager, what are you going to do about it? Or doing a bit of embezzling? Or filing frivolous lawsuits against their employer? Having more than one "full time" remote job? Or cut special deals with their friends? Getting yourself "laid off" as soon as eligible for unemployment payments? Quiet quitting? Malingering? Padding their expense account?
A manager once told me one of his employees had charged a prostitute's services on his expense report.
All this stuff happens, and it isn't rare.
An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc.
And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.
As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust.
Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it.
I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal.
BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders.
A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
This is a common misunderstanding.
If an American loses their job for any reason, they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. In fact, they don't even need to take any immediate action. If they need healthcare in the month of, or month after, their loss of job, they can go get it and then later on pay their premium to have the insurance retroactively go back in time to cover them. The only difference is that the covered person needs to pay the full premium, while the standard employment agreement has the employer paying a significant portion of the premium.
For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. There are subsidies based on income to make the premiums manageable for low-income people if they can't afford the market rate.
This is incorrect, it's "for limited periods of time under certain circumstances" [0] (and citizenship is not required).
> they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. [...] needs to pay the full premium
This is true but vastly underplays the cost. It isn't unusual for "the full premium" to be over a thousand dollars per month [1] (!). They even get to charge you an "administrative fee". Oh, and there's also tax implications.
> For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov.
More likely for people who can't stay on their previous plan because it would bankrupt them. Or if their spouse is not working. What happens if the employee has children/dependents on the plan? Etc, etc.
None of this is easy. Switching insurance changes which doctors are "in network", so at minimum it's significant hassle. At worst, their or a family member's current treatment is only partially or not at all covered.
So, in practice, parent's description is accurate enough.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539
Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.
nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus.
sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job.
but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.
some work is not about volume but about quality. and exactly the fact that the work can not be measured is the problem. some work can not be done effectively when you are tired, and some work is even dangerous. driving for example. paying attention to safety and security requires you to be a wake and able to focus.
as a programmer i have good days and bad days, and noone can say whether my work is the best i can manage or is slacking because i have a second job. and if i am spending more than my market rate salary as a programmer affords then i need to change my lifestyle, not get a second job.
in germany for example the laws for the maximum time of work an employee is allowed to do in a day covers all jobs. two full time jobs would simply not be possible because you are required to have 11 hours of break between two workdays.
The impracticality of measuring the productivity is irrelevant.
BTW there's a lot of data that shows that it's the opposite of your assumptions that's true.
>sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true.
you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of finding work, and even doing a poorer job of keeping a job; people whose self esteem is more fragile being more likely to lose their jobs, reinforcing their negative self images: but that's not unemployment doing it (the study does hedge a lot by saying "associated" as if they are not suggesting cause).
I'll bet if they had done a Big 5 Factor analysis of the samples in the study we would see lots of clustering, a much more interesting result than what the study found, and Big 5 Factor results are not known to change as the result of unemployment.