In some cultures the prevalent view is that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck, and that the needs of the business comes first and therefore the business should be free to layoff employees when it deems it necessary.
In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits from various social contracts (governments providing various structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc), that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year.
US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.
I don't think that the US has the culture that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
At will employment always always benefits the employers more than employees. Your job is tied to your health insurance as well. So there is a much much bigger incentive for an employee to stay at a company than for a company to keep an employee.
In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits from various social contracts (governments providing various structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc), that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year.
US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.