“In the USA, a hire-and-fire approach is common, and employees are often seen more as biological machines… and treated as such.”

As an American, I think the analogy where an employee is a round in a machinegun belt is more accurate. A machinegun is valuable machine anytime, but it’s useless without a steady supply of ammunition. But while ammo is valuable, individual rounds are more or less expendable if your ammo supply comes in cases of thousands of rounds each.

I work at a store that’s part of a nationwide auto parts store chain. And I’m seeing all of the negative effects every single day. Understaffing has gone to the level where it takes a roster of people with motivation and years of experience just to keep things afloat. One person finally quits or goes on a vacation, and everything goes straight to hell. I went on a two week vacation about a month ago. A few days later, the store manager “ghost quit” – he just stopped showing up without any sort of communication. A bit later, another person got sent in to take over. A couple years prior, he had to step down from an SM role due to a heart attack on the job. He’s back at it now and already putting well over 55 hours a week due to ongoing cheap labor shortages and not yet having his permissions upgraded to start hiring. We’ll see how it goes.

When it comes to new hires these days, we’re lucky to get people who can grasp which way a nut threads onto a bolt and not consistently show up to work drunk or stoned. Quite a few stores have drivers who routinely come to work still drunk from the night before and the management get no real options besides looking the other way and lots of prayers.

One of the most ugly changes to happen in the recent decade or so is the number of companies that did make the disposable, expendable workforce model actually work. Look no further than Amazon. But in their case, every single process has been engineered from the ground up so that 99% of the ground level workers can be easily replaced within minutes of breaking down. Ditto the same for gig work companies such as Uber whose main “innovations” were figuring out how to hire people while offloading all of the risks and expenses onto the workers. And yet they still have yet to turn any real profit after a full decade when their vision for self-driving and self-flying cars didn’t produce much even after burning through billions of dollars.

Here in California, the law is pretty strict when it comes to injuries caused by work. The likes of Tesla and Amazon made it an art form to fight these claims and to hire private health providers whose job is to care for the company more than it is to care for the patient. Others aren’t so lucky. At my previous job, the company was all to happy to screw people over when the wear and tear from years of physical labor started adding up. A production lead with nearly ten years on the job nearly got canned when his knee problems reared up. On the upside, quite a few workers managed to get “hurt” on the job and were out for months with BS injuries while still getting paid. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I say!

P.S. Have you heard of the Randonda Vaught case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaDonda_Vaught_homicide_case

The chickens are definitely coming home to roost for the healthcare industry here in USA.

Yes there are examples where bad bosses cut headcount with the wrong motivations and that’s a problem but railing against this with minimal facts and high levels of prejudice is terrible.

Having worked and hired in both the US and in Europe I can tell you that the labor flexibility in the US is definitely a plus. Its easy to loose your job in the US but as a result its also easy to get hired. In Europe making a bad hire is such a liability because its so difficult to get rid of employees that you tend avoid hiring unless absolutely necessary and this is not good for employees.

As to lean staffing in the service sector – I knew one consultant who all he did was benchmark the staffing levels a similar restaurants. He often found 3X disparities on a normalized basis! I personally had to sort out business that were 6X over-staffed and were about to go bankrupt as a result. Overstaffing leads to skills loss, quality defects a reduction in pressure for improvement and a whole host of pernicious effects and is usually much more of an issue than under-staffing which becomes apparent really quickly.