“I, along with almost all of Disney Imagineering, am furloughed without pay”

Ah that really sucks. Hopefully they got the same email from A&A the rest of us at other Disney subsidiaries received, meaning they'd still have their healthcare benefits covered and Disney will be handling employee/company premiums.

Huge shoutout to the Imagineering team, their work is incredible!

Wow, that's some testament to employee morale. The company you work for effectively fires you because things don't go so rosy for a month and all you want is to go back lol. The company can really be lucky to have you and I guess you can be lucky to have such a great work that you actually want to go back after they pull off a stunt like this (which is essentially a punch in the face).

Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.

I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.

I'm from a country with public health care, so this comes as an interesting shock - would employees immediately lose health benefits if made redundant / fired etc?

Seems to incentivize getting rid of people when they need healthcare the most (eg "I have cancer" -> "Look, we're going to have to let you go, your performance the past few months hasn't been up to scratch"). I assume there'd be a bunch of health related after-effects to jobloss too, particularly around mental well-being.

So yeah people totally lose their health care when they lose their job. Typically it runs through the month and then you’re on your own. You can by law keep buying the same plan at full price (employers typically pay between 50-80 and sometimes up to 100% of the premium).

However, when you get sick that rate doesn’t go up, so there’s no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick. Because of the “losing coverage” part it’s still extra shitty when they double up (cancer plus being fired sounds pretty awful).

Obamacare notably created markets for folks not receiving health insurance through work to purchase it directly (in addition to subsidies for low to middle income folks to do so, and several regulatory changes around other parts of the system), but that basic system wasn’t fundamentally altered and has been more or less how the US has done things since world war 2.

Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.