Employee Exploitation Quotes

Somebody is born. Somebody goes to school. Somebody learns to conform. Somebody types a CV. Somebody gets a job. Somebody follows orders. Somebody gets a golden watch. And then, eventually, Somebody dies. And, a Nobody is buried.

A job interview is a competition won by those who are qualified the most, and, those who are willing to be payed the least.

Retirement is a stage where an employer discards an employee that he cannot exploit further.

Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.

Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.

We, in the interest of the so-called progress, have been persuaded to leave the production and at times the cooking of our food to companies whose owners and employees make a living by exploiting our busyness or laziness and our innate hunger to continue living.

A leader’s words matter, but actions ultimately do more to reinforce or undermine the implementation of a team of teams. Instead of exploiting technology to monitor employee performance at levels that would have warmed Frederick Taylor’s heart, the leader must allow team members to monitor him. More than directing, leaders must exhibit personal transparency. This is the new ideal.

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

Homo Sapiens are Exploitable. Large Corporations Base the Mass with Least Recognition. It does NOT have to be the Employee Himself that would Deteriorate the Corporations Intranet but Surely since his Least Recognized, He is Most Definitely Vulnerable, Its a Starting Point to Open a Door for a Lovely Challenging Maze filled with Seed of Corruption that in Stages the Artists Shall Paint their Mark.

I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really tests the mettle of the leader. By contrast, it doesn’t take much self-confidence to downsize a company—after all, how can you go wrong by shuttering factories and laying people off if the benefits of such actions are going to show up in tomorrow’s bottom line and will be applauded by the financial community?

Liberals are willing to believe that these "robber barons" will fix prices, rig markets, establish monopolies, buy politicians, exploit employees and fire them the day before they are eligible for pensions, but they absolutely will not believe that these same men would want to rule the world or would use Communism as the striking edge of their conspiracy. When one discusses the machinations of these men, Liberals usually respond by saying, "But don't you think they mean well?

However, even before the orgies of neoliberalism it was obvious that capitalism is not socially efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially useful science to the existence of public education and public transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had capitalism foisted on them.3 All this testifies to a “market failure,” or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-capital and every other4—and which is propelled by the structural necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard neoclassical economics, which makes such assumptions as perfect knowledge, perfect capital and labor flexibility, the absence of firms with “market power,” the absence of government, and in general the myth of homo economicus—the person susceptible of no other considerations than those of pure “economic rationality”—is societal harmony going to result.

Just as most American employers give us ‘at will’ employments, our entire existence has become subject to their will. We have arrived at a point where most of our stress is a result of not knowing whether we will get the next paycheck. Exploitative employers love it this way. So long as we are afraid, they are sure to get 100 percent submission from us. We cannot let our toxic way of working be accepted as the norm and as the typical American work ethics. We deserve and can do much, much better than this.

In the security community, this letter is known by all as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.” Pen testers tend to be very conscientious about making sure they always have a copy of the letter with them when they’re on or anywhere near the premises of the client company, in case they get stopped by a security guard who decides to flex some muscle and impress the higher-ups with his gumshoe instincts, or challenged by a conscientious employee who spots something suspicious and has enough gumption to confront the pen tester.

Consider some basic economic truths. If the government mandates that workers who are earning $7.25 must, overnight, be paid $10.10 an hour (or even $15.00 per hour) those new dollars must originate from some source. For example, if a fast-food restaurant that employs twenty individuals is required to pay some or all of them close to 30 percent more per hour, it must account for those dollars somewhere. The restaurant can try to sell more food, it can increase the cost of food, it can cut the hours of its employees, it can hire fewer workers, or it can lay off those currently employed.

That’s why I’ve come to see you today, in the hope that there might be some other function in which I’d have less responsibility, without having to relate to the overall workflow to the same extent. I’d like to be assigned to that kind of position. I realize the abilities I’ve been allocated won’t be fully exploited in that case, but does the pain I feel not mean anything? I venture to suggest that such pain impacts the quality of my work and moreover may negatively influence the work of my colleagues. OK. I see. So I wouldn’t have the power of speech? No, I understand. I hereby consent. When

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Sirien gives, for the first time, an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlor employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed - well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phraya, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had line in mind, along the lines of "If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room.

For example, the benefits of a taxpayer bailout to a failing carmaker are immediate and evident for the carmaker, its investors, and its employees. But the financial dislocation and lost fiscal opportunities resulting from the diversion of economic resources to tax subsidies are distant and disregarded. If the carmaker files for bankruptcy, the company is able and required to streamline its operations, including reducing its workforce and employee benefits and offloading certain debt. Although this allows the newly organized company a fresh opportunity to regain profitability and survive in the longer term, including expanding and hiring down the road, the immediate upshot of the reorganization, with its downsizing, and so on, is visible and tangible. Hazlitt explained the phenomenon this way: In this lies almost the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

Type II trauma also often occurs within a closed context - such as a family, a religious group, a workplace, a chain of command, or a battle group - usually perpetrated by someone related or known to the victim. As such, it often involves fundamental betrayal of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and within the community (Freyd, 1994). It may also involve the betrayal of a particular role and the responsibility associated with the relationship (i.e., parent-child, family member-child, therapist-client, teacher-student, clergy-child/adult congregant, supervisor-employee, military officer-enlisted man or woman). Relational dynamics of this sort have the effect of further complicating the victim's survival adaptations, especially when a superficially caring, loving or seductive relationship is cultivated with the victim (e.g., by an adult mentor such as a priest, coach, or teacher; by an adult who offers a child special favors for compliance; by a superior who acts as a protector or who can offer special favors and career advancement). In a process labelled "selection and grooming", potential abusers seek out as potential victims those who appear insecure, are needy and without resources, and are isolated from others or are obviously neglected by caregivers or those who are in crisis or distress for which they are seeking assistance. This status is then used against the victim to seduce, coerce, and exploit. Such a scenario can lead to trauma bonding between victim and perpetrator (i.e., the development of an attachment bond based on the traumatic relationship and the physical and social contact), creating additional distress and confusion for the victim who takes on the responsibility and guilt for what transpired, often with the encouragement or insinuation of the perpetrator(s) to do so.

Targets, as you will learn throughout this book, are blessed/cursed with a strong work ethic. They just want to be “left alone” to do their work. In the most bullying-prone industries, we’ve found that many employees share a prosocial orientation. They are the “do-gooders.” They want to heal the sick, teach and develop the young, care for the elderly, work with the addicted and abused in society. They are ripe for exploitation. While they focus on doing good and noble things and wait to be rewarded for their quality work, they expose their backs for the bully to sink her or his claws into.

AIG was looking worse and worse. It had a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 115,000 employees, and a slew of solid insurance businesses. But a hedge fund-like subsidiary called AIG Financial Products had put its franchise at risk, selling insurance against the risk of a housing slump. It had exploited the strength of AIG’s traditional businesses and AAA credit ratings

example, if a fast-food restaurant that employs twenty individuals is required to pay some or all of them close to 30 percent more per hour, it must account for those dollars somewhere. The restaurant can try to sell more food, it can increase the cost of food, it can cut the hours of its employees, it can hire fewer workers, or it can lay off those currently employed.

Ultimately, if society wants to eliminate the adult industry, it needs to get rid of the supply of talent. If one wants to eliminate the supply of talent, then one needs to prevent homes from being broken. If one wants to prevent homes from being broken, the mainstream employers in society need to stop exploiting their employees – squeezing the life blood out of them so they have nothing for their families when they return home. Employment

As long as ratings are directly linked to pay and career opportunities, every employee has this incentive to exploit the system.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

On top of those challenges, the food industry has long been male dominated, with as much as 75 percent of business ownership in the hands of men, and and an average of 73 cents for a woman’s wages to a man’s dollar across roles. Similarly, the food industry has exploited immigrant labour and that of communities of color, for nearly as long as it has been around, building business models that depend o n the whims of customers (tipping) to meet living wages for front-of-the-house employees and advocating against an increased minimum wage that could change the economic landscape for the back of the house. Wealth and capital still continue to define the ways in which entrepreneurs bring there products to market, a realtty that has particularly grave implications for black and immigrant communities who might aspire to business ownership in a market absent of investment.

The US government sponsors a publication called Managing Diversity, which is supposed to help federal employees work better in an increasingly mixed-race workplace. One of its 1997 issues published a front-page story called “What are the Values of White People?” The author, Harris Sussman, explained that merely to speak of whites is “to invoke [a] history and experience of injustice and cruelty. When we say ‘white people,’ we mean the people of greed who value things over people, who value money over people.” Noel Ignatiev, formerly of Harvard, endorsed such sentiments in a publication called Race Traitor, which promoted the slogan, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The lead article of the first issue of Race Traitor was called “Abolish the White Race—by any Means Necessary.” By this Prof. Ignatiev did not mean that whites should be physically eliminated, only that they should “dissolve the club” of white privilege whose alleged purpose is to exploit non-whites. Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, explains what whiteness means: “ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity.” In 2000, there were bomb threats and anti-black e-mail at the University of Iowa that turned out to be a fake hate crime staged by a black woman. Ann Rhodes, a white woman who was vice president for university relations was surprised: “I figured it was going to be a white guy between 25 and 55 because they’re the root of most evil.

The flight attendants were obviously selected according to the phony American-style of “diversity” and “cultural representation” …This phony style of diversity is seen in almost every American work place, including universities. What is noticeably shocking about it is the fact that such employees that presumably represent “diversity” almost always work in hideously underpaid jobs, simply assisting those running the show behind the scenes. The former always act as marketing faces to support the latter in the job of exploiting the world while at the same time giving the unobservant ... viewer the false impression of “diversity”. What we see in every corporate transaction is always a “diverse” face doing the dirty work on behalf of the almost exclusively homogeneous masters constantly preaching a shallow form of diversity and multiculturalism in training and workshops. Whenever you protest an unjust and inhumane rule or a racist policy, the “diverse” employee will always helplessly—and sometimes coldly—tell you, “Sorry, I am just doing my job.

So, the judgment that you have to make is (a) is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and (b) are we going to be number one? If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling. If the answers to both are yes, then selling would mean selling yourself and your employees short.

In one of his first exploits, he called into Nokia from his own mobile phone and pretended to be a senior executive at the company. By studying the organizational chart and learning some detailed facts about the company, he was able to persuade someone in the IT department of his falsified identity. Mitnick claimed that he lost his copy of Nokia’s top mobile phone’s source code and needed it sent right away or he would be in big trouble. With this ruse, he was able to trick his mark into action. The loyal and unsuspecting employee complied, and within 15 minutes, Mitnick had the most important and confidential intellectual property of a multinational conglomerate.

Neoliberal, market-driven public institutions promote antisocial thinking or behavior and inure individuals to inequity and cruelty. Violence is ubiquitous in modern society, from the marketing of the military to imposing financial austerity to the economic decimating of communities, to the exploitation of employees and devaluing human worth at work.

Judith Rollins (1985) contends that what makes domestic work more "profoundly exploitative than other comparable occupations" is the precise element that makes it unique: the personal relationship between employer and employee. Rollins reports that employers do not rank work performance as their highest priority in evaluating domestic workers. Rather, the "personality of the worker and the kinds of relationships employers were able to establish with them were as or more important considerations". Deference mattered, and those women who were submissive or who successfully played the role of obedient servant were more highly valued by their employers, regardless of the quality of the work performed. When domestic worker Hannah Nelson reports, "Most people who have worked in service have to learn to talk at great length about nothing," she identifies the roles domestics must play in order to satisfy their employers' perceptions of a good Black domestic.

Francisco shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn’t everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn’t it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn’t it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit—I took a loss. Doesn’t everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastian Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved, in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day’s work, which they could not do. Isn’t it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn’t it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn’t everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned.

A writer suggesting that companies are exploitative monopolies may use the word corporation. We sometimes use the word enterprise to highlight how companies, both old and young, can grow the pie by being enterprising – come up with new products, services and ways to engage their employees.

When the club’s face looks to the right of the direction in which the head is traveling, the ball spins around an equator tilted from left to right and thus curves to the right during flight. I’ll do you a favor and not tell you about every stroke. Or any stroke at all. Though I got off some very nice drives. True, they didn’t land on the correct fairway, but that was due to wind. And I will stand mute on the subject of technique except to say I learned that many chip shots are best played with a sharp kick from the toe of a golf shoe. And if you cut a hole in your pants pocket you can drop a ball down your trouser leg and “discover” that your shot landed remarkably close to the green. And putting, for a person of my socioeconomic background, is best done by envisioning the cup as being behind a little windmill or inside the mouth of a cement whale. I also found out that all the important lessons of life are contained in the three rules for achieving a perfect golf swing: 1. Keep your head down. 2. Follow through. 3. Be born with money. There’s a fine camaraderie on a golf course—lumbering around with your fellow Republicans, encompassed by a massive waste of space and cash, bearing witness to prolific use of lawn chemicals, and countenancing an exploitative wage scale for the maintenance employees. Golf is the

The key concepts of this discourse are no longer social inequality and exploitation, but rather equal rights and identity. Equal opportunity, for example, now aims at the formally equal access of women to positions that were previously reserved for men. The vertical differences between occupational positions—between the female manager of a large corporation and a low-paid female employee of a cleaning company, scarcely play any role in this discourse. The problem with this shift is clearly not the impetus to improve women’s position on the labour market. The problem is that equality policy is limited to this question, as radically equal opportunity reduces justice to the horizontal logic of inclusion and equal treatment. The vertical logic of redistribution is increasingly blanked out.

For the past thirty years at Harvard Business School we’ve defined entrepreneurship as pursuing novel opportunity while lacking resources. Entrepreneurs must create and deliver something new—a solution to a customer’s problem that’s better than, or costs less than, current options. That’s the opportunity. And, at the outset, entrepreneurs do not have access to all of the resources—skilled employees, manufacturing facilities, capital, etc.—required to exploit that opportunity.

As corporations have amassed more market power, they’ve made every effort to keep wages low and productivity high. Increasingly, workers are providing far more value to their companies than their pay reflects, and employers are constantly finding new avenues to squeeze their labor force. Algorithms have proven to be more exacting bosses than people. Those algorithms powering just-in-time scheduling have allowed bosses to fine-tune staffing levels to demand, leading to unpredictable hours that cause paychecks to grow and shrink from week to week. Companies have deployed programs that record workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks and capture screenshots at random intervals and have even made use of devices that sense heat and motion. Warehouse workers, cashiers, delivery drivers, fast food managers, copy editors, and millions of other kinds of workers—even therapists and hospice chaplains—are now monitored by software with names like Time Doctor and WorkSmart. Most large private firms track worker productivity, sometimes docking pay for “idle time,” including when employees use the bathroom or consult with clients. Such technological advances have increased workers’ efficiency and their precarity: You produce more profit but enjoy less of it, which is the textbook definition of exploitation.

Other narratives in the same constellation with the Laffer curve sprang up around the same time. The terms leveraged buyouts and corporate raiders also went viral in the 1980s, often in admiring stories about companies that responded well to true incentives and that produced high profits as a result. One marker for such stories is the phrase maximize shareholder value, which, according to ProQuest News & Newspapers and Google Ngrams, was not used until the 1970s and whose usage grew steadily until the twenty-first century. The phrase maximize shareholder value puts a nice spin on questionable corporate raider practices, such as saddling the company with extreme levels of debt and ignoring implicit contracts with employees and stakeholders. Maximize suggests intelligence, science, calculus. Shareholder reminds the listener that there are people whose money started the whole enterprise, and who may sometimes be forgotten. Value sounds better, more idealistic, than wealth or profit. Use of the three words together as a phrase is an invention of the 1980s, used to tell stories of corporate raiders and their success. The term maximize shareholder value is a contagious justification for aggressiveness and the pursuit of wealth, and the narratives that exploited the term are most certainly economically significant.

Apple was criticized for extractive pricing policies, offshoring jobs, exploiting its retail staff, abrogating responsibility for factory conditions, colluding to depress wages via illicit noncompete agreements in employee recruitment, institutionalized tax evasion, and a lack of environmental stewardship—just to name a few of the violations that seemed to negate the implicit social contract of its own unique logic.

The distribution of tasks amongst the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.

Jamais fui outra coisa que não um funcionário. Fui criado para trabalhar. Não tive infância, mas já tentei imaginar uma. Meu colega humano às vezes menciona que não quer trabalhar, depois diz algo muito estranho, completamente sem sentido. O que pode ser? Ele diz "a pessoa é mais do que o trabalho que faz", ou então, "a gente não é só trabalho". Mas o que se pode ser além disso? Como conseguiríamos comer, onde teríamos companhia? O que seria de alguém sem trabalho e sem colegas? Passaria a vida inteira enfurnado num armário?

Even though we may say we want employee creativity and innovation, we place even greater value on exploiting existing ideas and processes that are tried and true. This makes organizations “highly predictable and increasingly rigid.

Fine-tuned measurements that are tied to rewards and punishments allow organizations to direct employees and exploit the knowledge and processes that already are known to work.17 So far, so good, from an organizational control perspective. “Good” unless the organization needs innovation and adaptability, that is. Because fine-tuned control that exploits existing processes makes it hard for workers to explore and experiment with new alternatives. By definition, the outcomes of experimenting and playing are “uncertain, distant and often negative.

Page 1-2 One of the most serious concerns of the Thai government for the past forty years or so has been the presence within the national society of an economically powerful minority group whose way of life is alien, and in some respects incompatible, to the Thai way of life. How to assimilate this minority, or at least to reduce its influence nationally, is a question which has troubled a succession of Thai monarchs and prime ministers. To speak of the Chinese minority as constituting a problem is only to recognize this concern felt in varying degrees by all Thai political leaders. Yet, the Chinese living in Thailand are peaceful and self-disciplined, a thrifty and very industrious people who have made significant contributions to their adopted land—to what extent, then, can they be regarded as a ‘problem’? While the Chinese problem has many dimensions, at is first of all an economic problem, and it is precisely this aspect which looms largest for the Thai. As they see it, the Chinese, welcomed into the Kingdom years ago by a generous government, have since that time subtly undermined the livelihood of the Thai people themselves. They have driven the latter from various skilled crafts, monopolized new occupations, and through combination of commercial know-how and chicanery have gained a stranglehold over the trade and commerce of the entire Kingdom. The Thai see the Chinese as exploiting unmercifully their advantageous economic position: the Thai are obliged to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs, hitting especially hard government employees on fixed salaries. It is also charged that profits made by the Chinese go out of the country in the form of remittances to China, which means a continuous and gigantic draining away of the Kingdom’s wealth. To protect their favored economic position, one hears, the Chinese have not hesitated to bribe officials, which in turn has undermined the efficiency and morale of the public service. Efforts to protect the economic interests of the Thai people through legislation have been only partially effective, again because of Chinese adeptness at evasion and dissimulation.

Sea World was treading carefully. Park officials stated repeatedly how essential and valuable Tilikum had been to their operations. This is true. Zoos and circuses are a business, and Blackstone paid 2.3 billion dollars for its purchase. The most productive employees in that business, in terms of labor and revenue, are the orcas themselves. Tilikum has performed for almost nineteen years in Orlando, sired thirteen calves, and produced in the range of a billion dollars in revenue. Nevertheless, Sea World did not believe that Tilikum had earned the right to retire. None of that billion dollars would be used to build an ocean sanctuary for older captive orcas. They do not deserve it.

Always quick to demonize the opposition, Obama characterized those who disagreed with his position as “out of step and [putting] politics ahead of working Americans.”16 He insisted that a minimum wage “means making sure workers have the chance to save for a dignified retirement.”17 But forcing employers to pay more for unskilled or less-skilled workers, many of whom are younger, on top of the other statist economic and social policies, discourages employee retention and hiring.

Consider the case of SeaTac, a suburb of Seattle that increased its minimum wage for certain service industry employees to fifteen dollars per hour starting January 1, 2014. The Seattle Times reported in February 2014: “At the Clarion Hotel off International Boulevard, a sit-down restaurant has been shuttered, though it might be replaced by a less-labor-intensive café. . . . Other businesses have adjusted in ways that run the gamut from putting more work in the hands of managers, to instituting a small ‘living-wage surcharge’ for a daily parking space near the airport.” Some businesses in SeaTac have cut benefits to their employees. When asked whether they appreciated the increase in the minimum wage, a hotel employee replied, “I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday and vacation.” The hotel reportedly offered meals to its employees. Now the employees must bring their own food. The hotel has also cut overtime and the opportunity to earn overtime pay. A part-time waitress stated, “I’ve got $15 an hour, but all my tips are now much less.”41

Every person in an organization has the right to be the company’s top expert at something,” John Shook, who trained Madrid as one of Toyota’s first Western employees, told me. “If I’m attaching mufflers or I’m a receptionist or a janitor, I know more about exhaust systems or receiving people or cleaning offices than anyone else, and it’s incredibly wasteful if a company can’t take advantage of that knowledge. Toyota hates waste. The system was built to exploit everyone’s expertise.

We have been taught that our societies are built on rational contracts and our economies on free markets. That manufacturers and consumers, employers and employees – everything – are one and the same consciousness in different forms. Different expressions of one and the same reasoning. The world, the impersonal sum of the individual’s free choices. Actually, society is more like a form of war. It’s exploitative, racist and patriarchal. The economic reality is more ‘the survival of the fittest’, the rich grow richer and the rest of us chase after them. On some level, we know this. But still we continue to fantasize. For centuries we have been fed stories about how society arose because people made a rational decision to unite. After establishing that we would all benefit from a collaborative structure, we started to depend on each other. No sooner, no later. This creation myth is told in countless variations, and like most other myths, it’s a mind game. It’s hard to imagine it really happened this way: there we were sat hunched over in our caves. Darkness, cold, other squatting figures in other caves, impossible to determine who was friend, foe, human or mammoth. Suddenly, one person stands and exclaims: – Hey, listen up! Why don’t we join forces and help each other as part of a society? We can trade things with each other, everyone will benefit from that! Hardly. But that’s our fantasy of self-sufficiency. And it’s seductive.

The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with work environments that encourage the architecture of serendipity. Traditionally, organizations that have a strong demand for innovation have created a kind of closed playpen for hunches: the research-and-development lab. Ironically, R&D labs have historically functioned as a kind of idea lockbox; the hunches evolving in those labs tended to be the most heavily guarded secrets in the entire organization. Allowing these early product ideas to circulate more widely would allow rival firms to copy or exploit them. Some organizations—including Apple—have gone to great length to keep R&D experiments sequestered from other employees inside the organization. But that secrecy, as we have seen, comes with great cost. Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations.

the reality of factory farms is an integrated scheme to exploit everyone involved but those at the top—the animals are treated without mercy by underpaid employees, who in turn make an unhealthy product to be marketed to the poor, who consume and shorten their own lifespans by enjoying it.

Think of how your work environment would be altered if the leaders in your organization related to themselves differently. If they hate the parts of themselves that want to slow down and enjoy life, they will be impatient with workers who aren’t as driven as they are. If they want to get rid of their own insecurity and anxiety, they’ll create an atmosphere in which people fear for their jobs if they show vulnerability. If they attack themselves for making mistakes, everyone will pretend to be perfect. If they fear their own inner critics, they’ll fear the judgment of others and let people become exploitive. On the other hand, if they can relate to those parts of themselves in caring ways, that compassion and acceptance will permeate the company, making it much easier for all the employees to relate compassionately to their own parts and to one another. The same process applies to your inner family. This new way of relating to yourself can’t be forced. It doesn’t work to command yourself to be curious about these parts of you or pretend to feel compassion for them. It has to be genuine. So how do you get to that point? This raises the question of who the “you” is who relates to your parts. Who are you at your core?