The Future of White-Collar Exploitation
NOTE: I see many examples here that resemble my own workplace.
In the economic world of 2013, employed workers who stop believing that they are lucky to have their jobs, that they should be “grateful for what they have,” will quickly find themselves in trouble. There are always consequences for challenging a culture’s mythos, but this notion has become nearly impossible to dispute in the days since the economic crash of 2008. With so many looking for work and so few openings available, the ability to labor someplace and collect a paycheck is universally accepted as a blessing.
Nevertheless, a June Gallup poll revealing levels of disengagement among all American workers at a staggering 70 percent suggests it may be time to challenge the perception — shared on both Right and Left — of the white-collar office worker as an effete, back-slapping, internet-surfing, casual-Fridaying “professional” coasting through a cushy existence. With many earning guaranteed annual salaries and even hourly clerks and assistants afforded health benefits and paid time off, the notion of organization and collective bargaining within this sector of the workforce is increasingly treated as a fantasy. Tellingly, the Office and Professional Employees International Union represents only 110,416 white-collar workers in the US — out of a total estimated at upwards of 54 million. All this begs certain questions of those who count themselves among the Left. Is exploitation that is neither physical nor overt still exploitation? More broadly, is the purpose of organized labor limited, confined to checking off a list of old demands without venturing beyond, or is the struggle for a freer and more pleasant life ongoing?
If answers to these queries are to be found among the office workers at C&S headquarters, we must acknowledge one thing Coffey and Siraj get right: Rick Cohen is, strategically speaking, positively brilliant. While the company’s anti-union practices and warehouse schemes are readily apparent, it is a mistake to assume this trailblazing “innovation” doesn’t shape the working lives of employees in button-downs and blouses......
Indeed, there are advantages to remaining nestled in “little, dinky Keene,” with its modest local population and small state college, where the corporation has the freedom to do all of this and still remain the largest and highest-paying employer. Here, it is easier to attract the eager and the inexperienced, who know nothing of industry norms surrounding pay and treatment. More importantly, local residents, especially those with underwater mortgages, children, and other family ties to the area, are less likely to go through with the relocation required of anyone wishing to use their experience to command higher pay elsewhere. These workers are more dependent on the company, and consequently more grateful and subservient.
After all, if reducing labor costs is a priority to a corporation, hiring or developing professional experts can be an expensive proposition. Despite the desire on one hand to hire people without the means to easily depart, fostering long-term employees is also expensive. The department wrings no hands at the fact that workers here who have lasted longer than five or ten years are a rarity. Not that this is altogether bad for workers. The stress-related health problems and widespread use of prescription blood pressure and antidepressant medication are so prevalent that the company represents something of a dark inside joke among Keene’s medical community, and the effects of this labor on lifespan have not yet been properly studied....
The desire of management for standardization was unquenchable, and a document formally entitled “A Day in the Life of a Buyer” became gospel. This Excel spreadsheet was a moment-by-moment guide to the myriad activities in which every buyer should be engaged at a given time of day. Its authors never acknowledged that the total time detailed amounted to nearly twelve hours, not including a break for lunch and with no time allotted for the reading and answering of daily e-mails that routinely numbered in the hundreds. Additional “time studies” would be conducted over the years in a relentless search for anomalies and inefficiencies to eliminate. Slowly but surely, the goal of making each employee interchangeable and disposable has been more effectively realized, and with many employees having less than two years’ tenure at any given time, few are ever able to identify any transformations at all.....
This is the office of the future, the one in which colleagues huddled together in pens view one another as competitors for an unknown but finite amount of resources, the one in which expertise in one’s line of work is viewed as a potentially expensive liability to be abandoned in favor of deskilled automation and rote adherence to standardized routine encased in iron. This is the office in which workers are prevented from considering the possibility of joining together by confusion, fear, and carefully crafted ignorance.
The currently emerging generation of millennials is poised to inherit this promised dystopia. The disadvantages faced by the young are well-documented. Conditions such as high rates of unemployment, drastically devalued college degrees, and chronic indebtedness grant a vast advantage to those who, like C&S Wholesale Grocers, seek to “innovate” the white-collar workplace toward greater efficiencies and lower costs. Frequently and mistakenly characterized in the cover stories of national magazines as lazy and entitled, the danger that millennials will assume self-blame and buy into the workplace mythos of their forebears is very real.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/26/white-collar-exploitation_n_4659979.html
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