Had a video meeting for work yesterday where a manager several layers over our team presented for a couple hours to perhaps fifty engineers. It was mostly technical in nature, but there was also the announcement that the company has restored the practice of health benefits taking effect on the first day of employment, rather than after three months of employment as is now the case. This change will take effect July 1, we are told – new employees whose start dates are between now and July 1 will need to wait until July to have health insurance.
The change is presented as a sort of perk, a good thing the company is doing for its employees. This was also the spin given by my group’s manager when he told us about it several weeks ago. He’d also said the restoration was the result of an outcry from employees. Both the line manager and the guy several layers up saw this as the company being responsive to „feedback“ from employees.
There is next to no questioning or response in these meetings. Any single question is a softball pitched forward to provide the presenter an opportunity to say something anodyne, or is perhaps a purely technical question about an immediate organizational concern. There is absolutely no engagement of what the norm is for health insurance in the developed world, what sort of profits the company is making, whose work those profits come from, whose pockets the profits go into. The idea of „feedback“ gives the feel of a patriarchal entity making decisions for the „good of the company“ and sometimes taking the desires of employees into consideration. The idea that employees have interests which may be opposed to the interests of investors, that wealth is produced by the employees, that employees can work together to further their interests, just doesn’t enter into the mindset here.
