Not everyone is a programmer in the Valley or East Coast that can just Slack their manager "will be an hour late today because X!" and everything is fine. For the vast majority of people, even white collar employees, not being at work at 9 a few times may mean termination.

It seems that such people can't possibly deal with legal problems, medical problems, car problems...

It's not as if you can schedule such things. Well, you could add more problems on a schedule I guess! You can't avoid the bad surprises.

That's very true. Many workers have to go to work with medical problems, take desperate measures if they have car issues, and lose their job if they get arrested.

If you've already missed 1 day for "my car broke down" and another for "I was vomiting", that one time you need to get the kid to school might be your 3rd strike.

I can't help but think American work culture / expectations are pretty toxic.

It can be this bad, but it's not very common.

Usually it happens in a job with fixed hours. Are you opening up the store in the morning? You'd better be there on time.

Exactly. Or even production line workers. You can cost the company big money if they have to stop the line for you.

There are lots of jobs where it is not unreasonable to require punctuality on a pretty regular basis.

> It seems that such people can't possibly deal with legal problems, medical problems, car problems...

230 times a year? they probably can't.

It depends a lot on the community where it's happening. In some places, that 'one person' is actually the majority case.

It’s not just one person. As amazing as it sounds, lot of people are expected to be at work on time.