(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2021 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty, poison, (mild) violence]
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)
As someone whose in-person workplace is breaking many laws and regulations, and who for the past year or so has been quietly collecting dirt on her bosses and co-workers† even as she knows she'll probably never use it:
It's not camaraderie that keeps me in line. It's fear.
In the short term, physical presence means a risk of physical violence. It wouldn't have to be premeditated: if I'm in range at the moment they find out I ratted them out and any one of them snaps, well, sure they'll get prosecuted, but it's too late to save me.
In the medium term, the most likely punishment is being cut to four hours a week, and you can't feed your family on four hours a week. (I mean this literally: I am in charge of funding groceries for the household.) This aspect is no longer an acute concern because I now have fourteen grand in the bank thanks to the government, but in the beginning it was a major issue.
In the medium-long term, I *might* get fired, and I *definitely* would not be able to use them as references. They already vaguely suspect that I'm rule-abiding enough to be dangerous to them, but if they were *certain* it would make starting my career more difficult.
In the long term, they're a floor job for as long (and only as long) as I stay in their good graces. If all I can find for accounting is part-time work (a distinct possibility), I can work for them on the side; if I lose my accounting job later on and can't find *any* in-career work, I can go beg them for my job back and probably be re-hired on the spot because the boss loves hiring known quantities (maybe even for a living wage, but if not, some money is better than none).
(And notice how all of this is relatively optimistic in that it assumes my blow to them wouldn't be fatal. If my report gets the restaurant shut down, it doesn't matter whether they'd still be willing to have me work there, because then there *is* no there.)
Working from home only goes so far: it doesn't remove most of the fear, and it doesn't apply to all jobs. If you want a world where the people who make your food dare to speak up when their bosses and co-workers are poisoning you, what you want is a basic income.
---
†Matt Levine, eleven months ago: "I have never worked at an organization in which everyone was constantly and consciously collecting blackmail material against their colleagues, though I have watched television shows like that and found them pretty enjoyable. I just wonder how anyone gets any work done. Doesn’t this take time?"
Me: *laughs bitterly at his naivete*
(Yeah, once upon a time *I'd* never worked at a workplace where people were constantly scheming against each other. It was the same workplace! But there's been a nearly complete turnover since then, and things change.)
((Even at the time, though, I'd wondered if I would outlast its good working environment. I was disappointed when I in fact did, but I was not caught entirely off guard.)) ↩
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)
As someone whose in-person workplace is breaking many laws and regulations, and who for the past year or so has been quietly collecting dirt on her bosses and co-workers† even as she knows she'll probably never use it:
It's not camaraderie that keeps me in line. It's fear.
In the short term, physical presence means a risk of physical violence. It wouldn't have to be premeditated: if I'm in range at the moment they find out I ratted them out and any one of them snaps, well, sure they'll get prosecuted, but it's too late to save me.
In the medium term, the most likely punishment is being cut to four hours a week, and you can't feed your family on four hours a week. (I mean this literally: I am in charge of funding groceries for the household.) This aspect is no longer an acute concern because I now have fourteen grand in the bank thanks to the government, but in the beginning it was a major issue.
In the medium-long term, I *might* get fired, and I *definitely* would not be able to use them as references. They already vaguely suspect that I'm rule-abiding enough to be dangerous to them, but if they were *certain* it would make starting my career more difficult.
In the long term, they're a floor job for as long (and only as long) as I stay in their good graces. If all I can find for accounting is part-time work (a distinct possibility), I can work for them on the side; if I lose my accounting job later on and can't find *any* in-career work, I can go beg them for my job back and probably be re-hired on the spot because the boss loves hiring known quantities (maybe even for a living wage, but if not, some money is better than none).
(And notice how all of this is relatively optimistic in that it assumes my blow to them wouldn't be fatal. If my report gets the restaurant shut down, it doesn't matter whether they'd still be willing to have me work there, because then there *is* no there.)
Working from home only goes so far: it doesn't remove most of the fear, and it doesn't apply to all jobs. If you want a world where the people who make your food dare to speak up when their bosses and co-workers are poisoning you, what you want is a basic income.
---
†Matt Levine, eleven months ago: "I have never worked at an organization in which everyone was constantly and consciously collecting blackmail material against their colleagues, though I have watched television shows like that and found them pretty enjoyable. I just wonder how anyone gets any work done. Doesn’t this take time?"
Me: *laughs bitterly at his naivete*
(Yeah, once upon a time *I'd* never worked at a workplace where people were constantly scheming against each other. It was the same workplace! But there's been a nearly complete turnover since then, and things change.)
((Even at the time, though, I'd wondered if I would outlast its good working environment. I was disappointed when I in fact did, but I was not caught entirely off guard.)) ↩
no subject
Date: 2021-01-15 06:20 pm (UTC)I desperately wanted a video of the franchise owner and the manager repairing a vegetable slicer in a wildly unsafe manner (he whacked the stuck nut with a screwdriver tip like a chisel! while the other guy held on to the sharp-edged wheel with his hands in an attempt to stabilise it!!), but I knew there was no way I could record it covertly. I *almost* tried to peek my smartphone camera around the corner of the wall and take a picture of the franchise owner with his mask pulled down under his chin as he was repairing stuff, but in the end I decided it was just too risky.
I *do*, however, have a clip of one of my co-workers mocking me for wearing a mask.