Originally Posted by
Grapemask
As a followup rant to my earlier rant that America's cultural refusal to actually socially distance is a large part of why our infection rate is skyrocketing:
A couple days ago, we had a company meeting to address the current status (teleconferencing, of course). No one's getting laid off, we're all just going to take a 10-15% pay cut, skip merit raises, and eliminate bonuses. I could rant for days about this subject given that we're a multinational, multibillion dollar organization that spent hundreds of millions buying back stock last year, but whatever.
All of us software people are working from home, but the production team has to work on site. Can't put together embedded systems and server racks from the comfort of home, obviously. So at one point in the meeting, someone from production asked, "What do we do if we're driving in from a county with a shelter in place order?"
Now, there are a lot of human responses to this. Corporations may be people, but they are not human.
The corporate response was, "Don't worry, we got everyone an essential personnel order so you can all come into work." And he had such pride when he said it.
For starters, nothing we do is essential to US infrastructure. We use image processing to find physical defects in rolling stock; that's the line that was probably used to get the order. But in full context, everyone who manages that end can work from home. Production is just about putting together more systems that will ship 3 months from now, to come online 6-12 months from now, and all of the systems currently in queue are for France and Australia. Our US systems are all remote management. Our US maintenance team that goes to fix hardware issues could be arguably essential, but they're not the production team.
Second, these people are all paid salary, and they were already told they're not being laid off, so clearly the question is about their personal well-being. And now it's clear that the profit margin comes first.
And this isn't just my company finding these outs to keep everyone working. Damn near every business out there is doing what they can to weasel out of distancing. In other countries, you see images of cities with millions of inhabitants that look utterly dead. No movement. I live in a little town in the Atlanta suburbs, population just under 30k, and people are everywhere all hours of the day, while under a county shelter in place order.