> Typical unskilled office job, with handpicked horror stories.
Are you arguing that these stories aren't important because of the relative infrequency with which they occur? An employee died on the job in a brutally high-stress environment, and Cognizant is denying that his death had anything to do with the work he did. You're right in that cases like his are all too typical nowadays. But the fact that you don't "see anything particularly bad about it" says a lot.
> They didn't create neither the job situation, neither the lack of education
They created the jobs, didn't they? Those jobs exist because Facebook exists. How do they not bear responsibility for the conditions of those jobs? And nobody is criticizing FB for the lack of education or life choices of these workers. What do those have to do with this story at all?
> they aren't even in a any condition to control the labor market.
Disagree. They're in a position to constantly threaten thse workers with termination, that's about as close to total control as one can get in the free world. I'd wager that's far more control than your employer exercises with you. Can you imagine what would happen if Facebook tried that tactic with their SWEs? It's unbelievably disgusting that they treat their low skilled workers this way.
> But aside from an impulse of assigning blame on the closest most powerful actor related to situation, I don't see any reason to see Facebook in any kind of negative light for this.
If the company paying the employees isn't responsible for the working conditions of its facilities, then who is? Do companies not have a responsibility to provide a safe and healthy work environment? On top of that, these employees who make very little chose to break their NDAs, subjecting them to legal exposure, in order to talk about this. They're risking far more than just their jobs by going to the press.
If a company isn't comfortable with employees talking, the onus is on them to create an environment in which workers aren't motivated to go to the press. That very clearly isn't happening here.
> In my experience, such an experiment creates a very unhealthy office politics: people realize that they won't get this kind of compensation anywhere else, and their concern for not getting fired becomes more influential than personal ethics or professionalism.
Logically, this makes no sense to me. In a healthy work environment, strong personal ethics and professionalism should inherently insulate a worker from termination. If a worker feels that they need to behave unethically to stay employed, that says a lot about the culture of the company. Good people in good work environments don't think this way. But I'd love to see some data on this if you have any.