Comment by hintymad 4 days ago
> How petty are the tyrants.
I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.
Both employer and employee want the employee succeed in helping the employer provide value to the customer. I fundamentally disagree with the first paragraph, and don't see how it can be justified without an appeal to emotion. They are not perfectly aligned, of course, but no alliance is.
And why would the employer or employee give two shits about prodividing value to the customer? You understand that employees and employers don't act out of a sense of compassion for customers? They both want to "provide value" so the customer parts with his money. They want him to part with his money since the employer wants to reproduce their capital, and the employee wants to sustain himself. How is your premise in any way a more natural framing? To the contrary it seems extremely contrived in essentially restating what I did but keeping the actual material dynamics implicit. And again who is actually providing value, the employer that recieves the revenue by virtue of owning the cafe or factory or tools, or the employee who actually valorises whatever good or service is being put on the market by virtue of his labor? What appeal to emotion are you talking about, I fail to see any.
If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.
Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.
I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.
If I dont go to work I starve. If I organise with my colleagues for a more favourable contract I will be removed by security guards. If we protest this we will be arrested by police. Are you able to only recognise force the moment blood is being spilled?
The example was literal. Force is not just violence. The threat of being fired is a use of force. I'm not clear if you missed the reference or think that this isn't force. I think it is. If you think otherwise, perhaps you could clarify where you think the line is. How about working in extremely hot conditions with no water breaks?
Now do I think it is tyranny? No. I agree that there should be another word used.
Citations:
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56628745 "Amazon apologises for wrongly denying drivers need to urinate in bottles"
For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.
For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.
I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).
Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.