QCOSTARICA (Medium.com) “In the United States, you can just fire someone,” he says proudly. “So people are motivated to do a good job.”
He says this to me like I’m not American. He has probably forgotten, despite the fact that I speak American English.
I run into this a lot: Men from the United States who want to leave, but who also miss the rules that allow them to take advantage of their employees. They want the relaxed lifestyle of a country with free healthcare and an emphasis on affordable education, but dislike when those socialist views cut into business.
I’m not a lawyer, but I know Costa Rica has several laws in place to protect workers from being suddenly fired. Severance is mandatory, and this is a deterrent. Employers must think about the large payout. It’s not a generosity like in the United States, where people who have been laid off post on LinkedIn about how they are so grateful for a few month’s salary, grateful for the experience at a company. When you’re outside of the United States for a long time, you see these activities for what they are: performative begging.
Men like this love that. They want employees to beg, even if they are experts who receive a good salary. He wants everyone to beg him for work. But that begging would kill the easy lifestyle. Introducing that kind of worry into the psyche would destroy what he claims to love about this country. And he doesn’t even see it.
This man loves the relaxed atmosphere (people are less stressed when they are protected) the nature (that is legally protected), and the way people still value having families (families don’t expect kids to move out when they’re 18, and women get paid maternity leave…sometimes even in cases where a woman loses the pregnancy, depending on the situation, she will still get paid leave). In the States, these are all luxuries. Paid maternity leave is given at very good jobs only…and it’s a bit of a status symbol. Affording children is linked to status like begging for a job publicly is linked to a good work ethic and attitude.
But yet he will explain to me that for business, Costa Rica sucks, and the United States is so much better. He will not see how all of these things are connected, and that he actually does love socialist values, if he would just chill out.
He sees what he wants to see. He likes the aspects of the socialist society that suit him. But aspects that require him to protect his employees so that they may continue to live with less stress are suddenly bad. Then, Costa Rica is bad, backward, and oh, no wonder they’re still a “third world” country. Then he starts rattling off terms like GDP and bootstraps.
He laments gay marriage and gay rights and fears Costa Rica will go “woke” like the nation doesn’t already have internet access.
He’s afraid that soon, his hypocrisy will be unwelcome. He will talk about how people from Nicaragua and Venezuela should not be allowed into the United States, and develop complex hoops for Latino immigrants to jump through, all while doing casual three-day border runs to Panama to renew his tourist visa, and driving a car without a Costa Rican license.
“I do it the legal way, and so should they,” he will say while taking a selfie on the beach with the iPhone he bought on his long weekend border run.
Read the original article by Lisa Martens at Medium.com.
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