How bosses are (literally) like dictators

tranarchist:

cocainesocialist:

Consider some facts about how American employers control their workers. Amazon prohibits employees from exchanging casual remarks while on duty, calling this “time theft.” Apple inspects the personal belongings of its retail workers, some of whom lose up to a half-hour of unpaid time every day as they wait in line to be searched. Tyson prevents its poultry workers from using the bathroom. Some have been forced to urinate on themselves while their supervisors mock them.

About half of US employees have been subject to suspicionless drug screening by their employers. Millions are pressured by their employers to support particular political causes or candidates. Soon employers will be empowered to withhold contraception coveragefrom their employees’ health insurance. They already have the right to penalize workers for failure to exercise and diet, by charging them higher health insurance premiums.

How should we understand these sweeping powers that employers have to regulate their employees’ lives, both on and off duty? Most people don’t use the term in this context, but wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in some domain of life, that authority is a government.

We usually assume that “government” refers to state authorities. Yet the state is only one kind of government. Every organization needs some way to govern itself — to designate who has authority to make decisions concerning its affairs, what their powers are, and what consequences they may mete out to those beneath them in the organizational chart who fail to do their part in carrying out the organization’s decisions.

Managers in private firms can impose, for almost any reason, sanctions including job loss, demotion, pay cuts, worse hours, worse conditions, and harassment. The top managers of firms are therefore the heads of little governments, who rule their workers while they are at work — and often even when they are off duty.

More awful examples from the link about Amazon:

Other examples include providing UK employees with cheap, ill-fitting
boots that gave them blisters; relying on employment agencies to hire
temporary workers whom Amazon can pay less, avoid paying them benefits,
and fire them virtually at will; and, in a notorious case, relying on a
security firm with alleged neo-Nazi connections that, hired by an
employment agency working for Amazon, intimidated temporary workers
lodged in a company dormitory near Amazon’s depot at Bad Hersfeld,
Germany, with guards entering their rooms without permission at all
times of the day and night. These practices were exposed in a television
documentary shown on the German channel ARD in February 2013.

Perhaps the biggest scandal in Amazon’s recent history took place at its
Allentown, Pennsylvania, center during the summer of 2011. The scandal
was the subject of a prizewinning series in the Allentown newspaper, the
Morning Call, by its reporter Spencer Soper. The series revealed the
lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and
yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—ambulances stationed
on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat
stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no
air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air
circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear
of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as
temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.

And they surveil their employees 1984-style:

Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have
ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology
with the system of “functional foreman,” introduced by Taylor in the
workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a
fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times,
economics correspondent Sarah O’Connor describes how, at Amazon’s center
at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav
(satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must
travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for
their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.

All
this information is available to management in real time, and if an
employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing
this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer
the consequences. At Amazon’s depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which
more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day,
mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March
2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she
had been found unproductive during several minutes of her shift, and she
was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at
Amazon centers worldwide.

How bosses are (literally) like dictators