Comment by zusammen

Comment by zusammen 15 days ago

Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way.

My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.

The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

namaria 15 days ago

> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself

> to filter out the non-fighters

This is bullying and hazing.

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nradov 14 days ago

Many of the workers in the 1950s were combat veterans who had lived through some shit and weren't as easy to push around. Contrast that to today when a lot of people tend to panic over minor hazards like a respiratory virus with a >99% survival rate. That cowardice puzzled me until I realized that a lot of younger people have led such sheltered lives that they have never experienced any real hardship or serious physical danger so they lack the mental resilience to cope with it. They just want to be coddled and aren't willing to fight for anything.

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Spooky23 15 days ago

That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

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bumby 15 days ago

Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.

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- bitwize 15 days ago
  
  That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.
  
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  jcranmer 15 days ago
  
  > The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.
  The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.
  
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- majormajor 15 days ago
  
  Labor also has more power when a ton of young newcomers to the working force were just killed before they could ever make it there.
  
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southernplaces7 15 days ago

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.

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- djmips 15 days ago
  
  Boomers is anyone 60 or older right now - not just 70+
  That being said, Boomer has evolved to mean anyone older, established and conservative.
  Like the counterculture saying from the past, don't trust anyone over 30.
  
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TheOtherHobbes 15 days ago

One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.
The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.
Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.
Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.
It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.

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- rightbyte 14 days ago
  
  "Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible."
  I think I need to print that out and put on the wall. However, did you live through it youself? I think it it hard to evaluate stuff like this with 2nd hand experience only.
  
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djmips 14 days ago

What if the workers decide the work is imposing on them? Maybe that's a good thing but it could go too far.

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t-3 15 days ago

> The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

That era also had militant labor organization and real socialist and communist parties in the US. Anticommunism killed all that and brought us to the current state of affairs where employers that respect their employees even a little bit are unicorns.

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gotoeleven 15 days ago

Why do you need unions for this as opposed to just a tight labor market?

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- t-3 15 days ago
  
  High demand for labor can lead to better conditions, but demand for labor isn't static and without real organization and solidarity it's nearly impossible for workers to punish companies that move jobs to low-cost locales. Economic policy is also controlled by the employer class, which means policies that encourage unemployment and inflation are common.
  
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