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No kids right?

Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.

Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.

How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.

I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.

The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.

As someone who has become increasingly bitter about and alienated from the American lifestyle because of this issue, this comment made my day. Brutal, biting, hilarious. Thanks for writing it.

They don't even need to say that though, just present some evidence to make me believe this is something other than an arbitrary management cultural preference and I'll feel much less imposed upon and bitter about it.

If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?