All work is fraudulent and no one cares
In the early 2000′s, my girlfriend worked at a Subway restaurant. If you’ve ever been employed in fast food, you know what it’s like: the pace is brisk, the pay is low, and the customers treat you like shit.
Now it wasn’t a horrible job, so far as these things are concerned. She was friends enough with her coworkers to join their wedding parties. Her manager was a woman in her early 30′s who expressed sympathy and was not especially abusive, at least in comparison to the bosses she and I had had in similar positions during our teens.
But the district manager was a real prick. Like every other American industry, fast food tasks its lower-level employees with the paradoxical combination of perpetual growth and consistent cost-cutting. The store managers within this district were given a strict mandate: more sales, less cost. Here are your new target figures: if you don’t hit them, you’re all fired.
They had to sell more sandwiches while using fewer ingredients–a literal, physical impossibility.
But, oh, it didn’t stop at slicing the tomatoes ever more thinly or putting only two small shards of onion on each sub. Employees also needed to cut down on the use of inedible supplies. While serving more and more meals, they had to clean their equipment less and less frequently. When the store’s only mop snapped in half, the manager had to buy a new one out of pocket–a direct violation of labor laws and official company protocol, sure, but better that than everyone losing their job. Besides, who’s gonna report it?
Expiration dates were ignored. Purchase orders were fudged. Cleaning logs were outright fabricated. After a few months, at least on paper, they had accomplished the impossible task that had been laid before them. Their reward was a staffing reduction of 20%, and a notification that any employees who utilized their legally accrued vacation time were not being team players and would have to be let go.
This is the reality of lower level employment in the United States of America: if you want to keep your head above water, you need to lie and you need to cheat. Safety protocols and company mission statements are empty bullshit meant solely to gird corporate from legal accountability when, inevitably, their impossible mandates lead to accidents or tragedies.
Or take, for example, the case of my cousin. In the year 2010, he worked at a factory in rural Illinois. His job required him to work with hazardous materials. There was a safety manual filled with safety protocols, but early on he found that they existed only within the manual’s immaterial realm. Going through the steps of protecting himself and his coworkers would have impeded his productivity, and that.. that was another matter.
This factory took over 20% of my cousin’s wages off the top of his check as a means of compensating the “employment agency” that had placed him in his job. I use scare quotes there because this agency was owned by the same company as the factory and was, no kidding, physically located within the factory. Each day’s work quota was firm: you complete it, or you’re fired. Only the company had an equally firm policy of never allowing overtime. So, at the end of most shifts, he and his coworkers had to clock out and return to their jobs, working uncompensated for as many as four hours before being allowed to go home.
We added it up, and after the placement fee and unpaid hours were factored it, he was earning well below five buck an hour. For factory work, in the United States, in the early twenty-tens.
But, again, on paper everything was good. The site was super productive and the safety protocols… well, they were written down in the manual and so presumably the workplace was quite safe. Yes, several of my cousins coworkers complained of blackouts and memory loss, but that was just locker room talk. They knew not to tell their managers about it, because doing so would have resulted in immediate termination. So there weren’t any reported safety violations, ergo the factory was very safe, very productive, and really more of a family than a workplace.
Being a worker in America is a unique combination of dehumanization and dishonesty. Everyone realizes, if only deep down, that they are being treated like shit, that the systems they exist within are unsustainable, that our entire economy is a paper-thin edifice held together by prayers and scotch tape. We also realize, however, that there’s nothing we can do about it, that if your superiors suspects you of so much as wanting to do something about it you will suffer grave consequences.
But, hey, the bottom lines are great. They must be–CNBC shows a lot of green text and lines pointing upward, and even during a horrific pandemic we managed to create several dozen new billionaires. That’s what the system has very explicitly been designed to do: enrich a handful of people to pornographic extremes while disregarding literally everything else. To say we’ve failed is to disregard intention. To say we’re broken is to fail to realize that functionality was never the point.
I bring this all up in response to a few pieces I’ve read in the last couple days: first, there’s coverage of the horrific treatment of Frito Lay’s factory workers (the treatment of whom was so bad that NPR broke from their tradition of blaming unions for the decline of American manufacturing to express some sympathy toward striking workers). Then there’s this excellent Vice piece from a couple years ago outlining something very similar to what I saw in service in the early 2000′s, with railroads adopting policies that essentially force employs to lie about adhering to safety protocols. This had led, predictably, to major disruptions in our supply chain, as it turns out adopting literally impossible business models might have some material consequences.
And then finally, most horrifically, there’s the recent case of a large fuel spill in Brookhaven, PA. The details are bleak. A man who delivered fuel to gas stations was caught literally pouring it into ditches, "motivated by a desire to speed up his route.“ More than 4,000 gallons were intentionally spilled onto the ground.
The driver has been criminally charged. But, predictably, the company that employed him will face no sanctions, since the driver violated company protocol. Ahh, god bless that protocol.
I’m not suggesting a complete lack of culpability here. The man’s indifference to the safety of bystanders was profane. But it absolutely cannot be understood outside the lens of the sad realities of contemporary American employment. This is the direct result of routinized dehumanization. All the protocols in the world don’t matter: if this is how you treat people, this inevitably how they will behave. Me and you and everyone you know have engaged in some version of this type of callousness, even if our actions were relatively inconsequential. We had to. We couldn’t have survived otherwise.
I’m sure more details will emerge. I’m sure we will find that this driver and his colleagues were forced into dangerous cost-cutting by a system that values efficiency over human life. And I am equally sure that such findings, however well-reported they may be, will result in just a tiny blip in media coverage. Under no circumstances will any substantial changes be implemented. That’s just how America works.
