Who benefits from the travel benefits?
How do we tell the difference between a company supporting a citizen's right and a company subsuming a citizen's right?
We went on a family outing to see Jurassic World Dominion last weekend. In a sign that occasionally nurture triumphs over nature, our daughter, the scion of two tech journalists, said after the movie that Campbell Scott's Lewis Dodgson looked like Tim Cook but acted like Elon Musk. She was right about the tech CEO cosplay, which is why one moment in the film has camped out in my brain for the past week.
Mild spoilers for a loud, dumb spectacle commence below:
Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm, BioSyn's in-house futurist philosopher, is fired for corporate sabotage. As he leaves the modernist control room of the company HQ, he gabbles to the bright young things working there that they've been benumbed by the PR pitch of working for a tech company. Oh sure, BioSyn provides abundant perks and dizzyingly rapid career progress, but at the cost of never examining what your work is actually doing for the world. The bright young things shrug and go back to staring at screens.
End the mild spoilers.
Someone who worked on that movie either worked around high-tech companies or mainlined a lot of Fast Company and Wired features over the past twenty years or so, because they nailed a lot of particular aesthetics and details about these types of companies. That same keen observer also quietly incorporated the reality that for a lot of folks who are United States citizens and workers, benefits are part and parcel of the compensation package. And those benefits amplify and extend the company branding.
What benefits a tech company offers its employees has been of great interest to me professionally. It's an interesting time to watch the U.S. labor market: We've got the ongoing Great Resignation, we've got the struggle to attract and retain talent in some industry sectors, we've got a persistent gap between a white-collar workforce that is demanding increased workplace flexibility and executives who are choosing to ignore worker sentiment.
It's also interesting because tech companies with facilities in different parts of the U.S. are going to have to reckon with the reality of the Friday, June 24, 2022, Dobbs decision out of the Supreme Court. I've seen a not-zero number of tech companies rush to assure their Texas-based employees that they'll fund the travel now required for reproductive health care.
We all know that companies are no longer standing on the political sidelines. Figuring out the financial benefits and drawbacks of taking specific political stands is part of executive leadership in the United States now.
What sticks with me now, as I compile the list of companies that are offering benefits associated with affirming an employee's right to medical privacy, is this thought:
As a country, we have already accepted the idea that a person's access to healthcare is tied to their/their family member's employment. The scope and quality of the healthcare one has access to can be changed at a moment's notice without any recourse. Our employers literally have the power to decide whether we and our loved ones live or die.
With this new benefit -- "We'll give you money to go get an abortion someplace else!" -- what we're doing is normalizing and upselling the idea that in the United States, our employers are the ones who are defining which fundamental human rights we get to have. And they can change or remove those rights at a moment’s notice without any recourse.
If you want to be a person with some semblance of bodily autonomy, better hope you get hired at some company where the management sees a point to funding your travel and medical care. Good luck if you get laid off right as you discover an unwanted pregnancy, I guess.
There's the Latin phrase "Cui bono?" or, who benefits? Any time I learn about a new company perk somewhere, I ask myself that question. Who benefits? Why this perk? What bet is the company making in its best interests here?
It's not a bad thing for companies to use their public platforms to make policy statements. The Roberts court's decision on Citizens United certainly established that "corporations are people, my friend." In the U.S., people still have the right to express their convictions.
What bears watching is the notion that these corporate-class citizens, by virtue of money and influence, are able to determine the rights of their fellow citizens. Nobody's bodily autonomy should be linked to their employment status. It may look like a perk. But it may also be a way of deflecting employee examination away from the deeper questions around why companies are fine sending their employees over state lines but not demanding equal rights for all under the law: Cui bono?
This post is the result of my tweet reply to the brilliant Heleine Olen this morning.
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And now for something completely different …
On a weirdly coincidental dinosaur note: I went to see Freedom Uncut on the 22nd* and in the previews beforehand, there was a genuinely weird PSA about climate change, wherein a raptor addresses the Unite Nations to upbraid them on the U.S.'s multiple policy failures on this front. I was so bewildered, I took photos:
There's an entire essay -- or ten -- about the appeal of the Jurassic Park movies and the relevance of dinosaurs rampaging across the contemporary landscape, but in the moment all I could think of was the one incredibly weird scene in Jurassic Park III where the raptor speaks to Dr. Alan Grant. You know, this one.
And now the weirdness lives in your head too.
* You have to go see this -- it's a wonderful portrait of a global pop star as someone deeply committed to stretching and growing as a person in the service of stretching and growing as an artist. Watching Liam Gallagher fan out over George Michael is just a delight.