Gaslighting, slavery, context, and poverty

[pktechgirlbackup]

When the Mother Jones article on worker condition inside an Amazon warehouse came out, I was not sympathetic. Yes, the company wants you to work fast. I don't consider it damning that a writer on an assignment was unable to meet quota for a highly physical job. Okay, it sounds mean that they will fire you for saying "This is the best I can do" but again, they have the right to retain the fastest workers. It is weird that they will fire you for missing a day your first week, no matter what the excuse, but then hire you back. That's expensive to them and could be fixed with some discretion. And not giving employees lockers is a total dick move. They can't even keep their keys or phones on them in the warehouse, so they have to hide them and pray. Making all the employees break at once is pretty cruel too, given the bottlenecks of metal detector and bathroom.

Debt talks a lot about how slavery, debt, and ripping people from their contexts are intimately linked. Slaves don't get to have social networks like owners, or even poor free people. Slavery often originates as a way of paying off debts/response to debts unable to be paid. Debt itself is about removal of context- people will do things to get out of debt they never would have for the the same amount of money outright. People will accept treatment of debtors for being debt that they would never accept as conditions for getting out of whatever caused the debt in the first place. Somehow the gap between original conditions (sick child) and when the payment comes due changes the moral calculus. And since money's entire purpose is to reduce the context necessary for economic exchange, it does the same thing.

I've had shitty jobs, but I never had a McJob, and I am beginning to recognize the importance of that distinction. I have never felt interchangeable. My shittiest job was summer school tutor. The teachers didn't even want me, my position was funded by a federal grant meant mostly to help the tutors themselves, finding people qualified to take the position would have been trivial... and yet, once I was in the classroom and working with kids, I was an individual with an individual position. I was not irreplaceable, but replacing me had a cost. If I had screwed up, the school would have had reason to pause before letting me go. The thing about McJobs is that no matter how good you are at them, you're replaceable. Even the fastest warehouse picker can be replaced by a finite number of other pickers. It's not until you get late 90s level unemployment levels that unskilled labor any leverage over your employers.

Which explains the unmeetable picker quotas. But why can't they get some g-ddamned lockers? I know the employees are replaceable and the margins low, but I can't imagine there wouldn't be some productivity benefit to employees not spending their entire workday wondering if their car will be there when they get back, and that that benefit exceeds the cost of the lockers. I'm having trouble typing this because I feel like a dirty commie*, but I believe my friends' explanations that it's a deliberate attempt to keep the workers down. That if you consistently tell them they're not even worth lockers, they won't be able to ask for more. I've talked about government and sick systems in poverty, and those are at least nominally designed to help people. Corporations will proudly state they're not allowed to have morals.

Yesterday I talked about the gaslighting involved in subtle racism: why wouldn't the same thing apply here? Once you've accepted that employers want you to fear losing your phone every day, it's not crazy to wonder if they're deliberately setting your quota beyond what a mortal is capable of so they can yell at you. Especially when they will fire you for not promising to try harder, regardless of what your numbers do. Maybe the McWorkers aren't in a position to judge exactly where economic rationality ends and arbitrary cruelty begins and letting that devalue their point is choosing to let the toxin win.

*And then I swing around to "only an unfeeling neocon would be feeling that"

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I kind of feel like any set of political/economic beliefs that categorically rejected the idea of anyone ever trying to keep their workers down would be pretty fatally flawed. I mean, no matter what you think is the general pattern, sometimes people are just jerks and enjoy jerking people around. Or find it economically advantageous. Or both. Just because Google claims to do no evil doesn't mean Amazon has any commitment to it.

I feel like there are parallels between the psychology in the design of terrible jobs, and the psychology that artificially maintains the authority structure in schools. The little ways we remind kids they are not in control, although in reality they outnumber us. You would think that treating students horribly would make them more likely to challenge the authority structure, but that isn't actually how it works.

[ccommack]

And, of course, there's a terrible Nash Equilibrium about being a dick to your McWorkers; it's way too easy to justify being a dick to them by citing all the rest of the McEmployers in your field being dicks to their McWorkers, and claim that they'll outcompete your firm on cost if you ever step out of line and treat your workers well. Whether the evidence backs that claim up is unclear: Costco is the famous example of the firm that's already pulled it off, and there were fascinating numbers coming out of the Fight For 15 campaign, about what would be required to pay literal McWorkers $15/hour.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

My assumption up until now was that that was correct: treating them better would cost more money, and this was the money:aggravation ratio we had arrived at (in part because minimum wage put a floor on the money side of the equation). What I am wondering now is if that's not true, if firms are deliberately upping the aggravation (e.g. denying them lockers, the amortized cost of which would be nothing) not because it's a direct cost savings, but because it makes workers tolerate other cost savings they otherwise wouldn't (like backbreaking labor). It need not actually be deliberate in the sense of conscious: if employers that hire dicks as first level managers do better, you will end up with mostly companies with dicks as first level managers, one way or another.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

I'd never denied that individuals or even companies could be assholes (even in the Amazon case), I just thought that companies would, in the very long term, be punished by the invisible hand, through higher costs or lower quality workers.

Amazon has a reputation for treating its programmers pretty poorly too. Not that poorly, but possibly the same relative amount of bad compared to programmers' other options.

Can you comment more on the classroom management stuff? It does sound frighteningly similar.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

it's not crazy to wonder if they're deliberately setting your quota beyond what a mortal is capable of so they can yell at you

FWIW, the elder of our city's giant software companies is absolutely known to do this to software developers. There's more scrutiny, so it's a more elaborate system, but it's the same basic idea.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on this? Over e-mail if it risks your anonymity more than you're comfortable with.