We nickle and dime people for good reasons but we have so many good reasons to do it that it compounds into negative outcomes for many people who aren't either doing well or doing so poorly they get a lot of aid. Augmenting this, a lot of our well intentioned ideas also have shortcomings that prevent them from realizing their goals. Aside from nickle and diming people to death, we have a lot of restrictions in our larger cities that prevent building sufficient amounts of housing to create downward pricing pressure. Of those restrictions, one of the most prevalent is height limits which inhibit building in greater densities to make more efficient use of the space. Two of the main political reasons these restrictions don't see much review is because a lot of vocal groups think they ruin the view/skyline while local homeowners (who wouldn't be living in the high density housing) fear that their property values will go down which is bad because for many of them their home is their primary asset.
Edit: We're at the post limit so I'm adding my response to jelliclesfarm's below post here. Put simply, I agree with your assessment of the situation. My point was that the combined effect of all the various political entities compounded with material concerns is the reason why, even if the motivations are good, we're still seeing an exodus of people. If you were to ask my personal feelings specifically on how to resolve the issue of local home owners I'd argue to still remove the height limits but (since the renters moving in are already saving money by way of downward pressure) implement a modest, in the real way, tax that goes to affected local home owners as compensation and which can't be claimed by children who inherit the house under prop 13. By definition the home owners would be heavily outnumbered by renters in new units across the city and the compensation can be capped at roughly whatever the owner's losses are assessed to be.
Opinions aside, I can't edit this post due to its length so I wanted to call out two typos that I think add a lot of confusion. In the last paragraph, the "either" in the second to last sentence just shouldn't be there and "banshee" should be "balance".
As a native Californian who's privileged enough to not need to think about leaving, I blame the skyline and a macro culture that fetishizes virtuous solutions over efficient ones (the particular virtue doesn't matter because none of them try to seek practical compromises). Also, since I know it will come up, yes prop 13 was a bad idea and doesn't help but if you repeal it in the current environment you're just exacerbating the problem of Californians who can't afford California.
Skyline-wise, rent keeps going up and up and yet nobody wants to seriously consider the idea that maybe we should eliminate a lot of height limits and expand the streets to accommodate the traffic. If you even allude the idea you get noise from a mix of environmentalists who hate all forms of urbanization and home owners who totally want to help so long as their property values don't go down because the neighborhood changed (you could write a book on the civic effects of property being treated like an investment and I'm sure some have).
Related to the skyline issue, because with housing changes comes traffic changes, everyone complains about traffic but they'd rather get good-person points for voting to help the environment with new bike lanes that a miniscule amount of the community will use rather than prioritizing bus lane construction and line expansions. And don't you dare suggest that cities regulating e-scooters to the point of just being a fun novelty was a bad idea! Who cares if revisiting local regulations on e-scooters could expand the utility value of those freshly created bike lanes by catering to a new ridership? Those lanes were meant for bicycles! It's in the name! Besides, everyone knows e-scooter riders never did anything but hit old people and ignore traffic laws (like most cyclists). To add insult to injury, my own city caps the legal speed limit for e-scooters (both commercial and privately owned) at 25mph despite cyclists having a speed limit that is sometimes 25mph but often climbs into the 30s.
Virtue-wise, there are lots but the outcome is the same in the sense that either nothing happens or costs go up while just enough for a photo op happens. Everyone wants to help the poor but at the same time advocate sin taxes on class agnostic products like alcohol, cigarettes, and plastic bags (don't bother trying to explain regressive taxes, that's just wallstreet trying to justify killing people for a buck). Bonus points for individuals who want better food access for poor communities but simultaneously demonize current providers like fast food and large grocery chains while also advocating farming regulations that raise the price of meat and dairy products ("BuT ThEy CoUlD JuSt EaT BeAnS AnD RiCe If ThEy WeRe AcTuAlLy PoOr)". Don't worry though, prices will balance out once the hood is full of those locally owned co-ops that are coming.
Those are just the examples that come to mind quickly but are by no means the only ones (I didn't even get into costly and superfluous certification/licensing requirements, ignoring job loss from mandatory benefit expansions, or how we'd rather keep exclusively raising minimum wage endlessly while demonizing EITC expansions even though they work together synergistically). That said, the overall point isn't that any specific topic is at fault but rather that we have numerous similar situations and the solution to all of them is either to pay "just a little more" with followup promises that the added costs will, as we say here, "for sure" banshee out when you consider the stuff programs they sometimes fund. But at least we're good people with our integrity intact, so hooray!
I'm not sure a lot of this is really relevant in this situation. From the articles I've seen, the employees forming a union are the activist employees. So the fear for a non-union tech worker in this scenario would be if the union behaved like many others and demanded a certain ratio of union to non-union workers since the dynamic in this context would boil down to deprioritizing applicants who don't have the same political views as the union employees which seems wildly toxic for society.
I wonder what the costs/benefits of tele-medicine are like right now. It seems like for certain services like gp visits you could just have a location that scans people to create high detail models for a remote doctor to review during a live call while locally situated support staff handle things like collecting blood, fluids, etc. and feeling for lumps. Probably not ideal for a small practice but if you have a pool of 100,000 employees it seems plausible that you could realize some savings.
Edit: We're at the post limit so I'm adding my response to jelliclesfarm's below post here. Put simply, I agree with your assessment of the situation. My point was that the combined effect of all the various political entities compounded with material concerns is the reason why, even if the motivations are good, we're still seeing an exodus of people. If you were to ask my personal feelings specifically on how to resolve the issue of local home owners I'd argue to still remove the height limits but (since the renters moving in are already saving money by way of downward pressure) implement a modest, in the real way, tax that goes to affected local home owners as compensation and which can't be claimed by children who inherit the house under prop 13. By definition the home owners would be heavily outnumbered by renters in new units across the city and the compensation can be capped at roughly whatever the owner's losses are assessed to be.