Corporate Benefits

Corporate leaders such as CEOs and lower managers are not cruel or selfish by necessity, and stereotyping them negatively or positively is just as  still enough of them have disregarded the very workers they rely on to make workplace mistreatment or neglect of many workers a major societal problem.  Economics and practicality are not the core of reality, so economic and workplace problems could never be the most foundational or severe problems, but they are enormous in their ramifications all the same.  Those with extensive wealth have more cultural protection in some ways even when they exploit others.  The very necessity of working for payment, when money and other resources are required to partake in American society, can drive some workers to desperation that keeps them at certain jobs even when company or broader workplace trends oppress them.

In other cases, deceptive or underutilized aspects of some workplace environments keep them in the dark about how a corporate leader might be lying or overlooking them.  Consider the benefits offered by plenty of companies in addition to the base wages or salary, like dental insurance, health insurance (which dental insurance conceptually reduces down to, although they are treated as separate), paid time off, maternity or paternity leave, vacation days, and so on.  While it is of course more favorable for employees to have these as options even if they are only begrudgingly enforced or if other obstacles come up, even the benefits that an employee has access to are not necessarily without their artificially imposed difficulties.

Since benefits are not always extended to all employees and are sometimes reserved only for full time employees or those with particular positions, there is already one obstacle intentionally set up to using corporate benefits tied to jobs--and some companies might intentionally keep employees below the full time level of hours in order to deny them key benefits.  Another is the irritability of some managers when someone actually requests to, say, use PTO (paid time off) or parental leave.  Even though these might have been dangled as perks before hiring, suddenly an employee might find himself or herself fighting to get approved to utilize certain benefits or receiving the disdain of their employer(s).  Someone who returns from maternity or paternity leave could be treated in a hostile manner upon coming back to work, despite having done nothing one could rationally object to by simply taking parental leave for a newborn.

Benefits are promised to employees, albeit conditionally in some cases, and yet some employers--even if every single employer actually did this, it would not be a logically necessary part of being an employer--might punish or look down on people for using what was offered as an incentive to get hired.  There are only so many reasons why someone would do this, and all of them involve philosophical incompetence, perhaps in the form of the arrogance of thinking that an employee's job should be what their life revolves around instead of the other way around to the greatest extent possible.  This is the workplace equivalent of college professors who lash out when students use the allowed absences promised in a syllabus.  If you are allowed any absences--and tying class grades or passing classes to attendance is an asinine idea as it is--then it does not even matter if a person taking them is sick or just wants to use them.  In the same way, it does not even matter if someone uses PTO because they have plans beyond relaxing at home or not; they were promised such benefits before or right after employment began.

Corporate benefits have the potential to change the lives of employees or benefit them tremendously when handled right.  On their own, even a smaller range of benefits can supplement pay rather well and provide various safety nets in the case of health issues.  It is corporate mismanagement, hypocrisy, greed, or arrogance, all of which stem from irrationality, that thwarts benefits from being used to smoothly, universally benefit employees.  Promising advantages beyond basic pay is a powerful incentive that could be utilized by employers to secure worker loyalty for years if it is only not followed by arbitrary qualifications, bitterness towards employees, or a refusal to grant them (such as PTO).  Employees who are not loyal to company leadership that overlooks or maliciously antagonizes them do not owe their employers the gratefulness that could motivate someone to stay with a company.