I would add a couple caveats on your points about sick time and insurance. It’s become more common for states to pass laws requiring sick time, but their are still now federal job protections for long term illness, with FMLA if you’re out for a long term illness, but that only protects you from losing your job for 12 weeks without pay while you deal with illness (unless you’re carrying a short-/long-term disability insurance, or your company has a policy providing pay otherwise), and also has carve outs for businesses, and your job can also ignore it if the company has employed less than 50 people in the current or previous calendar years, or you’ve worked less than 1,250 hours in the current calendar year at that job.
Also, results will vary on how good that insurance is. At a salary of $48,000/year, you’re getting a plan with a $5,000 deductible and a $20,000 out-of-pocket max. For folks from civilized nations, this means that you need to pay $5,000 a year in medical expenses before your benefits even kick in, and then an additional $15,000 need to be forked out before the insurance actually takes over and covers further care at 100%, provided it’s deemed medically necessary and approved. Note also, you’ll have a separate, higher deductible for out-of-network doctors, and you could still well be on your own after hitting your annual out of pocket max if they decide your doctor is wrong that you need a treatment, the only doctor/practice providing the service you need near you is out of network, or for any number of other reasons. And this is all on top of paying your premiums towards the plan from every paycheck.
For small businesses, pay is only part of the issue. Small business owners often get put on a pedestal in the States as the cornerstone of the economy, but they’re often petty tyrants who subject you to their whims for the most trivial things. At my previous corporate job, my process to take things of was:
Once it was approved, it was locked in, and quite difficult for my bosses to wiggle out of if they realize they needed more people present than anticipated for the time I would be away.
In contrast, my current job at a small business:
It’s the same song and dance if I need a doctor’s appointment or anything. I’ve also only gotten a $3/hr raise over 2.5 years there, since “We’re a small business, we can’t afford to give raises,” while the owner has acquired several new vehicles, gone on international vacations, bought and sold a boat, and generally thrown his money around on everything and anything but retaining his employees.
Small businesses can be decent jobs when run by the right people, but they’re miserable when the thinks the universe revolves around them, and anyone else is a secondary consideration, at best. You also lose several workers protections if your small business employer is small enough to be exempt from meeting basic requirements, like my current job doesn’t even have 10 employees, counting the owner and his son, so now FMLA protections for us if we fall seriously ill.
Climbing the corporate ladder and grinding 24/7 is a fool’s errand, but I’ve certainly found more stability in a corporate environment than most small businesses I’ve worked for, with superior working conditions and pay, provided you’re happy with doing a less prominent role. LIke, nah, I definitely don’t want to be plant manager at my previous job, but I would go back in a minute if Document Control offered me a job in batch reviewing. Set schedule, decent pay, minimal OT, solid benefits, and nice, boring work of reviewing paperwork for mistakes certainly isn’t glamorous, but it’ll do you fine and I’d take it over a small business position any day of the week.