Don’t stop there.

My grandfather was at one point a regional manager for a coffee distributor. He got cancer. The company was self insured in such a way that they had to foot his medical bills. They did.

Post recovery, my grandfather describes his remaining time with the company as miserable. For example, they reassigned him to a notoriously bad region while not providing any relocation assistance. Expectation likely being that he would underperform as a remote manager for their worst region. He didn’t.

Following about six months of a toxic work experience, they took him out to dinner to let him know in public that his role was being discontinued. He wasn’t being fired, but he’d be required to accept a demotion into a sales position if he wanted to stay. He did not stay.

Decades later, one of the C-suite members retire. My gramps was close with this guy, who could not speak “off the record” until now. The guy said that C-suite had it out for gramps, viciously so. They wanted him to quit, because they knew that cancer often comes back. They did not want to pay another set of medical bills, so they made gramps life miserable to try avoiding the potential expense.

So, how do you protect people like my gramps in this situation?

Your solution is still better than nothing, but it should go further.

You should work on politics :D

The overton window has shifted

Hardly on it's own.

A ton of money goes into telling Americans that they can't afford vacation or sick leave. Even as a ton more goes into telling us that AI will be replacing our jobs momentarily.

This is what people don't get.

Republicans love being stepped on because those doing the stepping are rich and therefore smarter and therefore in a higher social bracket and therefore allowed to do whatever they want. They only care when they specifically are the ones in the crosshairs. No amount of empathy politics or fairness matter, because they "earned" their right to be an asshole (by cheating and exploiting labor, but they arent ready for that conversation)

You crack that worldview by making them the losers in it. So if you work with a conservative, you make sure they don’t get their days off. You make sure that every single bad thing they do they need to count for or they get fired. This is really easy. The problem is is that people on our side have all this empathy for assholes.

Unfortunately, conservatives believe in hierarchy.

indeed, same everywhere, eg wages, some C suite being paid $50Mil is not a problem, they deserve it after all, a raise in the minimum wage ? heresy!

They wouldn't be conservatives if they were progressive

Yeah and we'd get fired for a "No call, no show" like next day.

If I get fired for not showing up

Technically, FMLA is supposed to prevent this from happening. You'd go on disability if you were out for months. But your employer couldn't fire you without opening themselves up to Wrongful Termination.

That reeks of socialism

In a better country, your non-profit wouldn't need to exist because it was a government service.

The ultimate General Strike.