The moment you sign someone’s contract, you take on their livelihood. That’s not a metaphor, it’s the actual deal. You are now the reason they can pay rent, feed their kids, keep their mortgage, plan a future. And bound up in that, whether anyone says it out loud or not, is a responsibility for their psychological wellbeing while they’re in your care.
We’ve built entire systems to protect people from being underpaid. We’ve built entire systems to stop them being physically hurt at work. We have a whole system for breaches of employment law. What we haven’t built is anything that protects them from being deliberately, quietly, psychologically and/or financially destroyed by the people who employ them.
I know this gap exists because for years, I was standing right inside it.
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