This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why did people work for demanding leaders such as Steve Elon Musk? If they do not like them, why couldn’t they change their job?”
Jobs are not items in a grocery store that one can pick and choose at leisure.
Each job is a springboard to a better job or a deep dive into an abyss.
It cannot be stressed enough how critical it is to career success that one always has an exit strategy and a place to go if one’s job turns sour.
Jobs often go sour for reasons unrelated to performance and often due to abusive behaviours by management.
A personal case is one in which I was often extolled for my leadership skills while my supervisor would say to me, “You run a tight ship.” He would say these words to me while appreciating how much easier his life was due to my contributions. When I asked him for a reference letter, he wrote me a generic description of my length of employment as an act of spite to limit my options. He deliberately wanted to make it harder for me to make a vertical or even a lateral move away from an abusive environment in which he fraudulently presented himself as an ally who empathized with the abusive treatment I received from his supervisor.
Making matters more challenging is that jobs often go sour to such a degree that they are worse than not having a reference to support one’s candidacy for the next job. In my case, the Senior VP decided it would be fun to play a game of pretend I don’t know you each time we encountered each other. This went on for five years while I struggled with a salary 40 percent below market for my role on paper as I performed at levels higher than the manager and director above my role. They were happy to have me around, while I often saved their bacon and changed their tunes quickly when I chose not to go above my role and intervene to fix their mistakes.
A job relationship gone sour can become a barrier to continuing one’s career. More people than one would like to believe will easily choose spite to justify sabotaging a person’s career development efforts.
Someone as petty as Elon Musk could easily justify going to cartoonish lengths to destroy a person’s career on a whim. In his case, his reasoning is a consequence of the corruptive effects of too much power for anyone to possess.
Changing one’s job was much easier when we had a thriving middle class and various job options outside the structured and incestuous corporate world. Job options have become severely limited throughout the last several decades, in which one’s only choice for a stable career has mostly become a choice of serving as a cog in a multinational organization while hoping restructuring efforts don’t result in it vanishing overnight — like what happened with Twitter when Musk fired most of his staff on a whim.
Musk’s latest attempts at accessing the personal data of three hundred and fifty million Americans are precisely for controlling their lives by leveraging their histories against them. Our choices in working for leaders we don’t like are becoming increasingly restricted to either that or homelessness and destitution. That’s not much of a choice.
If this nonsense continues, no one will be free to do anything without his oversight and the oversight of a fascist oligarchy.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is it ethical for employers to pay workers at the market rate even if it constitutes wage slavery and lets them barely survive?”
If you’re getting paid the market rate for a position you’re filling, that’s the highest level of ethics you should expect from an employer.
I worked for a government-related agency (part of the government Stewardship program of pseudo-outsourcing) for almost five years and was paid 40% below the market rate. I was stuck with that for reasons that will take this answer in an entirely different and unrelated direction. Suffice it to say that my options were radically reduced due to another arm of government choosing malfeasance to manipulate politically based optics in their favour at my expense.
At any rate, I found myself in this environment in a less-than-challenging role, which worked for me for a time as I had suffered a severe degree of trauma and needed mental space to learn how to cope with a new reality.
When I began working in this operation, management was so pleased with my performance and capability that they wrote an entirely new job description and offered me a full-time position within my first three weeks as a temp. Since my engagement before this one involved physically hauling 16 metric tons daily (at 52 years old) at an hourly rate less than one-quarter of what I had been used to as a professional, I jumped at an opportunity to function in a leadership capacity.
As much as I was surprised to enjoy the role and the people I worked alongside, I was shocked to discover that my rate was below the least-paid staff who reported to me. I was told I had to prove myself when I expressed my dissatisfaction. I responded that I already had, or they would not have created a new position for me. That changed nothing for the better for me, and I continued working there because I was more concerned with struggling through an ugly state of mind at the time and in no shape to be successful in professional interviews. I had already been bombing the ones I managed to get during that period.
During the first company Christmas event hosted by that employer, I had an opportunity to meet the Finance VP. I first witnessed him in his speech, declaring everyone was family. I was later introduced to him by an exceptionally proud supervisor and manager. The VP’s initially positive reaction indicated he had heard abundant good news about my performance.
He smiled and asked me a question. I managed six words before he turned around like I didn’t exist and walked away in another direction. I thought his behaviour was rude, which ended my thoughts on the matter as I continued to enjoy the event. As it turned out, that was my first indication of a sustained round of abuse I was to endure from him.
For the next five years, he played a game of “You look familiar, but I don’t know your name” with me. He enlisted his HR executive in his game as they behaved like they didn’t know me each time they visited the facility, averaging about twice yearly. His HR sidekick seemed to enjoy the game as she furrowed her brow each time she was introduced to the staff when she showed up on average once per year.
Throughout that period, I found myself constantly mitigating the incompetence of the leadership in the facility and saving thousands of dollars in lost productivity per week. I remember being given a production design assignment the manager couldn’t resolve, causing him great stress. The number of errors generated by his inability to deploy an effective production system seemed to stress him to the breaking point, and he thought I would make an appropriate scapegoat.
He offloaded responsibility for his job onto me under threat of losing my job if I couldn’t resolve his problem for him. It was pretty laughable in retrospect because I already had plenty of experience designing more complex production flows within a technical environment, so the system I devised resulted in a complete turnaround and a successful production flow that everyone appreciated, as stress levels among production staff also significantly dropped.
The short of this is that although I routinely exceeded expectations far beyond the role I was paid to fulfill, beyond management-level functions, and well into director-level functions, I could not find myself being paid the market rate for the job I had on paper. I was being paid 40% less than the market rate. I remember quoting that figure to a different HR personnel, and her response was an expression of surprise: “How did you know that?” I was more shocked by her question than I think she was about my knowledge of the market. It’s pretty easy to find out what the market pays for roles. However, the standing directive from company leadership was that discussing salaries was strongly frowned upon.
This environment had all the hallmarks of a highly incompetent and corrupt environment, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of examples I can provide. Do keep in mind, after all of this, that this environment represents government by proxy and the degree of corruption displayed was criminal. My constitutional rights were violated, and I had no recourse beyond the court system in which I could not afford to participate. I did, however, file a suit against them, so that’s on record if I can finally afford to take them to court.
After eventually receiving an agreement that I would have my income adjusted to near market rates, I experienced a gradual moving of the goalposts where my expectations degraded from an agreement they made to a realization they had negotiated in bad faith. My attitude degraded over time, and I stopped offering extra-curricular solutions to issues I had worked on during my off-work hours. I stopped stepping forward to volunteer for tasks above the role I was hired for, and the response was an attitude that I was being derelict in my job.
They eventually decided to terminate my position by claiming they were going in a different direction. This is an “at will” environment, and they were within their legal rights to terminate me at their discretion. I was entitled to six months of severance and received only four.
Workers have no protections in the modern workplace without the strength of union membership and the resources it provides.
Ethics is a matter of individual character; the shame is that ethics are not a universally held standard of conduct. The primary reason for people quitting their jobs is due to abusive environments. That means that most work environments are unethical, which aligns with my experience as an independent professional who has been stiffed by many people who hired my services to extoll their satisfaction with what they received and then denied me my compensation.
A LOT of employers and people who hire other people to work for them are entitled assholes who will screw over anyone they can get away with. It might be the case that I just had shitty luck, but it was far and above more than half of the people I encountered who lacked ethics.
This is only one reason that when people like Donald Trump or Elon Musk brag about stiffing their contractors, I see red. None of those people would want to brag about such horrid behaviour around me because, after a lifetime of enduring it, I doubt I could restrain myself. I would rather avoid a prison sentence for losing my shit over some psychopath’s gloating over how they screwed someone over.
If you’re looking for ethical behaviour from your employers, good luck because if you do find an ethical employer, hang onto them like they’re a prized treasure. They’re just as rare.
Getting paid at a market rate is at least better than getting paid less than the market rate and being expected to perform at higher levels of responsibility than those who get paid more to supervise your work. They don’t set the market rate, while most employers deliberately seek young and inexperienced people because they don’t want to pay the market rate.
A LOT of jobs I see posted indicate an upper limit of experience precisely because older workers know when they’re being ripped off or manipulated by an unethical employer.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Considering you’ll die without a job, why is being employed not a right? Can society really just ensure someone dies by refusing to hire them anywhere?”
As the world of work becomes increasingly automated, the workplace dehumanization issue rapidly grows into a sociopathic dismissal of our essential qualities as living, breathing, thinking, and evolving beings. This pressing concern will affect more and more people in the future with increasing rapidity as workplace automation continues to adopt and incorporate an increasing rate of technological advancements into their operations.
Meet the Humanoid Robot Working at a Spanx Factory (18 minutes)
To be clear, the dehumanization of the workforce isn’t a consequence of automation but of aggregation into ever larger corporate entities now spanning the globe in their operational reach. Automation is merely a step toward increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. Automation is simply the formalized acknowledgement of transforming labour into a dehumanized function that benefits capital-infused decision-makers chasing profit. What was once an entity supporting community development within the “Mom-and-Pop entrepreneurial environment” has become industrialized economics.
Entrepreneurs of today are the artists of yesteryear who sought out patrons to support their initiatives and receive benefits in return for their support in a parasitic relationship that both drains value from the creative individual and shapes their creative output in their narrowly defined image to fit an increasingly homogenized production system.
The dehumanization of the workforce began when people became deemed commodities, and “Human Resources” departments were created as legal defence linebackers to protect corporations from the consequences of exposed liabilities.
The world of employment has become less about identifying skills and more about choosing appealing aesthetics and fetishes. One is no longer in a position of being hired to function in a role with an expected standard of performance in fulfilling the requirements of that role inasmuch as they’re selected like an attractive product on a shelf that will complement the rest of the pieces on a mantle.
The disconnect between the function one is intended to fulfill, the decision-maker determining the need, the department composing the requirements list, and the agency tasked to identify appropriate candidates has become so much of a production line that they cannot help but to regard all their people as narrowly defined replaceable cogs with limited capacity and range in an expense paradigm rather than as an investment and a partner in the enterprise. The only success an individual can contribute to a dehumanized function is to meet predetermined expectations in a static environment with an expected and finite lifespan.
Corporations may be deemed people, but they’re more machine than human. Unlike humans, they can only change course and be adaptive to evolution when the small number of myopically focused humans operating them can implement global changes that often involve complete retooling and rebranding or being incorporated into another corporate system.
Once that occurs, however, whatever unique nature or personality that may have existed in the original entity is subsumed into the more enormous beast.
The issue of jobs and employment is a critical metric only for those whose role in society is to diagnose the overall health of the “super beast” referred to as “the economy.” Individuals are irrelevant to their equations. Humans are no longer humans but cattle to be herded in a dehumanizing system that renders everyone only as valuable as accords the desirability of their functionality in a narrowly defined capacity within an inhuman entity.
One’s value as a human in society is determined only by the nature of the type of cog they can function as within the parameters of an acknowledged entity that deems them suitable for its overall operation.
Society doesn’t “ensure” anything because society is a collection of humans operating within a cultural framework. The corporate culture we have endorsed for society has, in return for our loyalties, suffused society with an apathetic disinterest in the human condition and the plights of individual humans.
UBI is the only path available to regain our humanity and create an economy that serves humans rather than modern dynasties comprised of a small handful of monarch-like beings. Without it, system-wide collapse is inevitable.
Many places advertising for employees aren’t actually looking to hire people inasmuch as conducting market surveys.
Many employers are so used to seeing hundreds of applications today that they narrow their vision for what they’re looking for on such strict parameters that they forget they are hiring people and not selecting machines.
Employers often over-rely on agencies who aren’t in the least interested in team building or cultural fits but in spotting skill sets to narrow their candidate lists by algorithms rather than people exercising their judgements.
Most applications are ruled out before any human sees them and are ruled out by humans if their applications aren’t formatted in the manner they expect.
Companies will often advertise for people “who think outside the box” but are so intimidated by outside-the-box thinkers when they interview them that they immediately reject that candidate.
Making matters worse for people in technical professions is having their skills evaluated by people without technical expertise, who judge the candidate based on the limits of their ignorance. They’re incapable of comprehending what skills are transferable and how they contribute toward success in a different area.
Even worse are companies that place upper limits on the experience they’re willing to accept, which rules out highly experienced candidates. Meanwhile, they also often advertise a requirement of years of experience in a technology that’s only been on the market for a few months.
Then they complain, after ruling out qualified candidates, that they can’t find anyone to hire because no one wants to work anymore.
Many unemployed people struggle to find work while being rejected outright because they don’t fit neatly into narrow boxes of expectations defined by ignorance and bias rather than insight.
GenZ may be experiencing struggles unique to their stage in the employment mill, but the overall employment system has massively degraded over the last several decades.
I’ve been struggling for ten years now to land a simple junior-level job in graphic production work to regain balance after having a thirty-year career as an independent professional destroyed by people who are supposed to protect and serve, not scapegoat for political gain.
thotbag 