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
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.