Until we force Congress to incentivize the creation of millions more well-paying jobs here at home:
* Notice to businesses planning/threatening to outsource my job *
A brief list of demands. I trust you'll make allowances for my emotionality -- you see, I have substantial "skin in the game."
If you're going to take my job so you can put more money in YOUR pocket, disrupting my life, my community, and my local government; threatening my ability to keep my home, to send my kids (and myself) to college, to buy affordable and comprehensive health insurance (until the ACA fully kicks in), to keep my family's automobiles insured and running, to retire -- if you're going to do that, give me and everyone who works here, bottom to top, minimum wage to salaried professional, a parachute that FLIES.
Yours is gold. I need no such rarified materials, but mine has to be big enough to carry my family, high-performance enough to let me relocate, retrain, retrench, maybe get a leg up on starting my own business. You're the one who has elected to turn me into one of the highest-risk of all "risk takers" -- and it's common wisdom that our economy rewards the "risk takers," right? RIGHT??? Then let's do it.
Time to pony up before you shove me into my next slice of life. My parachute: a severance package that will buy my family comprehensive, low-out-of-pocket health insurance (COBRA or otherwise) for 18 months, and 9-12 months' pay plus additional cash proportionate to my years of service.
And to bloody hell, the deepest pits of hell, with this "taking down the American flag when we bring in the Chinese workers you'll train to do the jobs you're losing," O my sadistic overlords, you who don't hesitate to seethe the live kid in its mother's milk.
No. Give us the privilege you so often afford your managerial/professional peerage: Treat us as professionals. Lay us off, then rehire us as consultants and pay us an honest consultant's fee for training your future employees. Glad to be of service.
If you have money enough to move operations to China, Costa Rica, or Pakistan, you have plenty enough insulation between your own, personal skin and ruin -- far more than I, far more than most of my coworkers. You want to talk about "risk taking"? "Having skin in the game"? Skin in the game is being jobless in your 50s or 60s in a society where age discrimination is pervasive and well-documented, and when our economy is still bucking the Bush Depression. Skin in the game is losing your ability to retire as you planned. Skin in the game is losing major medical 5-8 years before you're eligible for Medicare and before the ACA fully kicks in. Skin in the game is no longer being able to afford your kids' tutoring. Skin in the game is not being able to help your kids with college expenses. Skin in the game is being pregnant and losing your job and your health insurance. Skin in the game is losing your job and major medical while you're recovering from a heart attack or breast cancer.
It is long past time to get real about who the REAL risk takers are in our economy, and to compensate us for accepting those risks. It is long past time for your cheap-labor free ride to end. It is long past time to recalculate how the pie is sliced.
Just for starts, we increase taxes on the top 2%, remove tax incentives for offshoring investment earnings, increase the minimum wage, create a more realistic and comprehensive definition of "poverty levels," remove the Social Security income cap, and incentivize businesses to raise employee wages commensurate with annual business earnings or otherwise encourage profit-sharing.
(NOTE: This is a rant based on principle, not my job situation (which is still good, thank FSM [and might be better if I weren't composing this at work]). All the dogwhistles and malarkey about "job creators," "risk takers," "skin in the game," etc., finally got to me.)