I'm an engineer at a factory in a large pharmaceutical business. I'm ~30yo, with a 3yo and wife at home, and I make 107k/year. My wife has been a SAHM since our child was born. I've worked my way into management and secured ~50% increase in pay over the last 4 years at this company.
I embrace as much practical work stances as I can with my socialist/humanitarian and millennial background. My teams, hourly or salaried, are indirect support teams to our operation. As such, I give them total flexibility on working schedule. Their PTO is theirs to take and I only ask for a notification, whether planned or unplanned. I actively discourage overtime, staying late, taking work home, etc. I overspend my budget to give my employees ergonomic options and comfortable work lives.
I protect the quality of our product above all else, even if it causes operational unfavorability (i.e. if the medicine we produce has any chance of being produced at-risk, we shut down the operation to make it right and safe). I'm always aware of the fact that I pad C-suite pockets by making medicine that scalps profits from people who will die without this product. I do my best to challenge my superiors and peers when they try to push unrealistic workloads on my team.
This generally comes at personal cost, as I will usually “fall on the sword” to get the work done to shield my team from the unrealistic workload, but I also constantly have poor delivery records because I'm so overutilized at the site.
My question is really: how do I do more? I make a fair bit of money, but still stretch to maintain my wife and child's standard of living. I am very pro-worker's rights, but I'm not in a position of much official authority to enact change on behalf of my employees, my friendly operators, technicians, and other associates at work. Just like every other drone in the system, I know that stepping out of line to stick my neck out and risk progressive changes will be met with a swift boot. I know the system is designed to repress change like mine, but I just want to know how I should behave to support these beliefs? I browse this subreddit a few times a week and I understand and sympathize all of these stories of corporate and managerial dehumanization, but I'm afraid I'm too disconnected to help or relate to these violation of basic worker's rights.