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>Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.

Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.

Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.

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> This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, you home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work.

Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.

They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207

Somehow your post reminded me of John Lennon's Working class hero which basically captures this entire discussion, and was written in 1970. So I'm questioning my post above a little bit, although I don't think Lennon was contemplating the modern situation.

I disagree with almost all of those practices, but they are all arguably related to job performance in one way or another while many of the checks Ford conducted didn't have that clear connection (although he would probably argue otherwise). For example, I don't think it is necessarily accurate to believe that someone with worse credit is more likely to embezzle company funds, but it is a much straighter line to that conclusion than a married employee being a better worker.

And as I said further down this thread:

Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.

> than a married employee being a better worker

Especially back then, but even now, it is thought that married men are, on average, are more likely to be the settled type. Dependable and boring. It was not a belief idiosyncratic to Ford. I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.

Whether this weird psychological theorizing is true of course, I don't know. (Married men do die in car crashes less, today.) See all that psychometry stuff some employers do. Seems no more reliable.

> I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.

A bit cynical, but this is in my opinion a large part of the reason why politics is so utterly dysfunctional these days: when large parts of the population don't have the time to participate in democracy because they have to work two or more jobs to make rent, there are a couple effects from that:

1) the weight of those rich enough to go voting matters more. Basically, vote day not being a holiday in the US gives the votes of rich people and old retirees vastly more weight than they should have in a world where everyone had equal possibility to go and vote.

2) the opinion of those who have enough time and resources (paywalls...) to access decent journalism matters more, because under-informed people voting "by outrage" got manipulated in their decisionmaking process.

3) People who have to worry about getting fired for getting sick definitely won't unionize or go on strike.

You get what you and others demand. If you accept this, it will increase, if you just leave for greener pastures, these companies have to adjust.

Given, you need to have leverage on the working market of course. But if you have, not using it would not be to your benefit.

You’re just blaming the victim. Reigning in these exploitative practices is the role of government, not the responsibility of an individual worker.

Personally I'm happy for opportunities to work. Just my opinion...but no employer owes me anything, other than compensation for work performed. You mention that reigning in these "exploitative practices" is the role of government, but I respectfully disagree. The role of government [to me] is physical safety against foreign invaders, and enforcing our laws. If these practices you speak of are so exploitative that they violate [labor] laws, then the governments role is to step in and enforce their laws. Otherwise, it seems like asking for government to decide what they accept/reject as "acceptable", and I don't trust my government(US) to do that.

Labor laws are not a mysterious force of nature; they were created by government, precisely to prevent exploitation by employers. The role of government is not only to enforce laws, but also to create new laws which reflect the collective understanding of fairness and create economic incentives which are beneficial to society as a whole.

A society where laws are set in stone and unchanging is a society doomed to stagnation and decline.

> Nothing employers do today comes close to that.

Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.

You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.

Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").

I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.

If I don’t bring my SO or spouse to a team dinner, my pay is not docked. If I don’t want to answer a personal question, I can decline without fearing it will show up on my performance review or pay slip.

The central theme of my comment was "it has become subtler". I...don't see a conflict between this and your statements?

To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't.

Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".

I was told bringing a spouse to a work event meant you wouldn't get raises because family people are less willing to work late. So which is it?

It's on a case by case basis, but try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes :)

Caveat: You have to be in a large company with a lot of managers.

>> try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes

No one will bat an eye at that answer. There are some managers / employees / peers where I know their personal life well and there are some I don't know at all. It has never been relevant.

You have to play the social game.

Saying "It's none of your business and you can't force me to answer" send a very different message than "It's going alright. Did you watch the game last night? Pretty cool, huh?"

It means that you need a new job.

>> but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises ... Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".

I am curious what the basis of your world view is. I worked as a manager in some pretty big companies and this doesn't resonate with how I or anyone I knew acted, nor does it make sense to structure things this way from an incentive point of view.

I would say there's an angle there where people that like their work and co-workers more are generally more productive than those who punch the clock. So I could see that there could be some (mild) correlation - not causation - between better performance/higher team cohesion and interest in work social events, it would be silly to pay people based on the later because we can just pay them on the former.

It seems pretty noncontroversial to me that managers are more likely to promote people they like, and that this effect magnifies at higher ranks where performance metrics are less objective. Obviously a worker who only focuses on politics is going to be seen as redundant pretty quickly, but I've seen some very good workers who didn't get the promotions they should have because they didn't engage with politics at all.

I agree with that - people need to know who you are. It's very different than the "you didn't bring your wife to the party so we won't promote you" nonsense (frankly) that I am responding to.

Or up until last year, you could have been fired based exclusively off the gender of your SO.

Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.

I have no idea about your personal position, but the GPs point is that it's more subtle and you're not refuting that. There is not a box on your pay about these things (or any other form of orthodoxy, I'm not necessarily suggesting those examples are the main problem), but that in no way means they dont relate to your career trajectory. Sorry for the double negatives

your performance is adequate but it's clear now you're just not a good culture fit here

I should hope that at least some of the intents have changed, since Ford was an award-winning white supremacist.

He also paid triple the normal wage for similar work. Today, they are similarly invasive for "market rates."

Maybe they should do that stuff instead. If we are going to have corporate paternalism, it should at least teach you effective life behaviors.

This is literally the path towards fascism. There was a reason Ford was such a big fan of Hitler. Society can be a lot more efficient when everyone is forced to comply with what our leader thinks is best for us. In comparison to that I would take today's corporate paternalism that basically amounts to "don't be an asshole" any day of the week.

Interesting to see the different takes. I think the comment you replied to was being tongue in cheek with the essential point that the (I agree horrible) interventions by Ford were at least attempting to be constructive. What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism.

>What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism.

I'm not really sure what you are implying here. Can you give some examples of this power for power's sake behavior? Everything that I can think of has a plausible even if misguided motive.

Lots of non-fascist societies put less weight on unbridled individual self determination and more weight on social infrastructure to help people make good decisions.

I’d argue we lean too heavily in the direction of thinking everyone should figure life out by themselves with no external pressure. This hurts young people, who lack experience and the benefit of hindsight, and less intellectually gifted people, who may lack judgment and impulse control.

People these days indeed actively give destructive advice. Thinking of abandoning your stable long term relationship? “Follow your heart!”

The problem I had was not the split between individualism and collectivism. The problem is that these "lessons" are coming from an employer with corrupted incentives. They aren't trying to make a better citizenry. They are making a better cog for the machine. Hence the fascism angle.

If you want to teach these lessons, teach them through the education system.

I agree with you—as I said above, my point is conditional on “if we are going to have corporate paternalism.” I don’t think we should.

Hitler was a fan of Ford's. Complete opposite. Hitler used Ford techniques. Your assertion is probably "common knowledge" but it is completely wrong. You should probably read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before commenting further on that window of history. There are also several documentaries that cover this as well. An especially good one is: Hitler: A career (1977).

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.

They say this about a lot of things, but it’s hard to imagine a worse “target metric” than marriage.

That’s a one-way ticket to the societal norm being marriages of convenience with zero regard for marital fidelity.

Much worse: forced marriages.

Already been noted, but what an unbelievably sinister sentiment. "Effective life behaviors" which include being married. Social conformity enforced through corporate power with the approval of the state, and people willing to countenance it as long as the mores being enforced are reactionary instead of disingenuously "progressive".

Being married is a proven effective life behavior. So is saving money, etc. Progressive ideas, by contrast, pretty much by definition lack demonstrated effectiveness. They have unknown and typically unpredictable effects on society.

I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.

I don't know if that is actually proven. It isn't like through a lot of history women have had much choice about the whole thing, nor could they leave someone toxic in many cases. Is it an "effective life behavior" if you don't have a lot of other choices?

You could use the same words to state that hetero marriage is "proven", when realistically, people didn't have the choice.

> you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department

And now we have ideological inspections.

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