You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal.
Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.
On the surface, yes, there are many employers. How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...
I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
> How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...
They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?
> I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked.
"Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones.
People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?
> They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?
Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question.
As for the rest of your post, the main issue is having a say. The ill effects you are describing can indeed happen in a single-employer system. But at least in a democratic state, every few years the population has a say in how the system is being run. Right now, nobody except the CEO and the board has a say in how a company is run. They fire thousands of people, many with mortgages and children and people who depend on them, with no regards for what that means. And then to top it off they pay themselves millions of dollars to make these savage decisions. AND, I have no voice and no vote in all of this. Yeah... no thanks.
> Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question
The company I work for, among tens of thousands of other companies. I'm starting to think you're not commenting in good faith.
> the main issue is having a say.
> nobody except the CEO and the board
So here you come in with what I described above. "The bad person". Let's assume they are bad, and they fire everyone. Their company will stop existing, so that'll make them less money and give them less power. So they won't fire everyone. They'll fire exactly the amount of people they believe will benefit them personally the most. Over time, some of these "bad CEOs" will make compounding bad decisions, and nobody will want to work for them or the company will run out of money. This is the built-in self regulation and "the say". If you work for a company where the you believe the CEO is a bad person, you leave. If they fire your colleagues, you can leave too. That is your say, and the market is the "aggregate say". It works in different ways and needs regulations (I don't believe in the purity off implementation of any system).
So you see, in fact the bad CEO and board actually have way more to lose from their decisions than a "job assignment official" in an all-job-controlling government office, moreover because most public jobs aren't elected.
Out of those two, I know which one's whims I'd rather be exposed to. A life of shoveling rocks at the mines because "john the placement officer dislikes me", or choosing which job I do but possibly losing it from one day to the next and have to get another one multiple times through my life.
This really got to the heart of what I was trying to say. I find the concept that we all live by the grace of our employers to be alien, coming as I do from a culture and society that prides itself on mobility, advancement, and self-sufficiency. I find the concept of living by the grace of government (or relying on government for more than services rendered in exchange for the taxes I pay from my own labor) to be odious morally and terrifying in practice. Many Americans, even ones on the left of the social spectrum, feel this way. Particularly ones with roots in the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states. But it probably isn't a natural revulsion or posture for people formed under mildly socialist Western European standards, and it seems to have been lost on the youngest generation in the US.
I went to a wealthy enough private school to have had an up-close look at what children do when they never have to work in their lives if they don't want to. It's not pretty. My father made all his kids start working full time at 14.
As far as the one-to-many vs one-to-one argument, you're absolutely right; the connection between having choices in work and having freedom is only not apparent to people who've developed a conveniently conspiratorial view of the world, in which corporations are acting in concert as opposed to presenting endless opportunities and edges to anyone with ambition in the faces they present. As you said, with a monolithic actor like government, it's just a single bureaucrat's opinion of you that matters, with no chance to prove yourself. This is obvious to everyone I've ever met who has lived under a dictatorship. And ultimately a dictatorship must be the ultimate arbiter of any form of UBI, because one way or another, people will be made to work to support people who don't want to work. And that can only be accomplished by force in measure to how offensive it is to the working group.
Whereas I have quit great jobs to work some incredibly shitty jobs and become good, then great at them, and I think I've become a slightly better human being at each iteration. I quit coding to be a taxi driver - I worked 16 hour days and wrote several novels in my taxi. There is your time to make art. I don't think either part of that would have been possible in a world with UBI or the control structures it would imply.
Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.