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Modern Corporate Wage Slavery Is So Instilled In Our Culture We Don’t Recognize It for What It Is
Capitalism is in runaway mode and must be curtailed. Perhaps ‘quiet quitting’ doesn’t go far enough
Here is the title to an article I recently saw on Yahoo. “Ford targets quiet quitters with new policy that could see underachievers lose their severance.”
Companies are in a complete froth about a media-hyped attitude towards work called “quiet quitting.” Quiet quitters say they are going to work the hours they are paid for. They are going to do the tasks they are assigned in the time frame they are given and that is it. They will not go above and beyond. When they get off work, they will not answer calls or texts about work. They want to divorce work from their private lives. They want to have a life. These are normal, healthy attitudes toward work. And these people are being ferreted out and punished for it.
Corporate America has had a secret policy of institutional economic slavery for so long, they go crazy when it is threatened.
My whole career was spent at engineering and construction companies. I noticed early on that the salaried engineers were expected to work extra hours to get projects done. The schedule of projects was intentionally shortened by managers to create a sense of urgency in order to facilitate this practice. I was an hourly employee. If I was asked to work extra hours I was paid time and a half, but if the engineers worked extra hours many times it was for no extra pay. I turned down salaried positions offered to me for this reason. Salaried personnel had an ethereal expectation of a bonus at the end of the year that was usually a fantasy.
Salaried personnel are being blackmailed into providing extra work for nothing with the implied threat of being let go if they don’t.
I would tell the engineers they shouldn’t do that. That it was, in effect, slavery. They wouldn’t listen. They were too afraid of losing their jobs. Now that there is a revolt against such practices, companies are having the media portray it as something almost sinful, anathema to the American work ethic. If we take a closer look, the American work ethic started out with slavery…
