zlacker

Imagine framing your employer as "the hand that feeds you", as if it is generously giving you a gift by paying you your salary in exchange for your labor.

Here is a different view: don't expose your most vulnerable and precarious employees to a deadly virus by failing to take the necessary precautions to protect them while they keep your company running.

>>graedu+(OP)
I'm looking at your first sentence in isolation.

> Imagine framing your employer as "the hand that feeds you", as if it is generously giving you a gift by paying you your salary in exchange for your labor.

What is your perspective on this? Are you self employed, providing some sort of raw material/product? How is your food, housing, and fun paid for? Have you ever been laid off or otherwise without work? If so, where did your income come from?

I don't have any side-gigs, so 100% of my income comes from my career. I can't imagine my situation is that rare. If I stopped working or were fired, I would have to immediately find a new job, otherwise my family would become dependent on the government programs (other peoples money/taxes from their hard work) and my own savings.

Every bit of money, and everything I've bought from it, has been from my employers, from pizza delivery to robotics.

Where should we be getting our money from?

>>nomel+L4
I think it's the sentiment that's objectionable. Your employer isn't a feudal lord providing sustenance to you out of noblesse oblige. It's a corporation with whom you have a business relationship - you provide skills and they compensate you for them. If you withdrew your labor from them, the cost of hiring labor increases ever so slightly for them due to the shrinking of the labor pool. It may be an asymmetrical relationship but it's not built on charity in either direction.

>>nomel+L4
I'm not denying the unfortunate reality that in many/most cases in the US today, the employer holds outsize power relative to employees. If you are precarious - you don't have emergency savings or the ability to quickly find another job - then it is not bad advice in a strictly pragmatic sense to be careful when it comes to criticizing your employer publicly.

I was taking issue with the specific idiom used. "Biting the hand that feeds you" often carries with it a moral dimension, and is usually used in cases where you repay kindness or generosity with some kind of bad behavior. If your employer hires you in exchange for a compensation package, they typically do so because they calculated that your labor would provide them value above and beyond what they are paying you. It's not kindness, it's not a gift, it's not to be compared to a master feeding his/her pet dog because of love.

edit:

I'd again suggest another perspective in response to this sentence:

> Every bit of money, and everything I've bought from it, has been from my employers, from pizza delivery to robotics.

Your skills, your time and your (presumably) hard work were the source of value that you provided to your employer in exchange for money and benefits such as health insurance. I don't know your specific situation, but maybe it's possible that you could choose to provide them to a different employer, maybe for even more money.

>>graedu+79
> What is your perspective on this? Are you self employed, providing some sort of raw material/product? How is your food, housing, and fun paid for? Have you ever been laid off or otherwise without work? If so, where did your income come from?

Notably absent: an answer to these.