Demoralising Workers
Part II
See Part I as well.
TODAY is a continuation of Part I, which spoke about deterioration of workplaces, not just in the technology (and science) sector. This is an intentional trend, not some unfortunate side effect, and more people talk about it, some even go on strike.
One associate spoke of the agitation against '15-minute cities', noting that social control media is being used to wind up the weak minded and gullible to hate on a livable urban environment or a livable environment in general. As noted in the previous part, when I was younger people lived closer to work and were not required (or expected) to move around a lot for whatever job they had. More people could walk to work (a short stroll). Many had the same job/employer for decades, so moving was barely needed (nor an option). Or you only needed to move once, then settle somewhere close to work.
Now we have more people working on contracts, with very worker-unfriendly terms by the way, and as we repeatedly note here, even Microsoft does it. That helps them fake the true scale of expectation-busting and layoffs (which they don't even label as such).
The shuffling around between teams, jobs, roles, and locations can be demoralising. "I suspect that at the bottom there is some motive to prevent people from forming ties and communities or retaining either," one person told me. "Hot desking is vile, since one cannot even have work materials. I know of researchers which had to discard (burn) irreplaceable collections of specialized reference material and research data because their institutions went to hot desking. Under the old model, pre-Microsoft, they got at least 8 hours of work done during a work day. Maybe 5 or so effective hours. Now it is closer to 30 to 60 minutes, at best. so the institutions are getting nothing for their money, but wasting time may be one of the larger goals."
This was thus labelled a kind of "divide-and-conquer". We're repeatedly covered this in relation to the EPO.
I've noticed lately that this gets done also outside the area of "desk jobs"; at one workplace that I know increasingly well they change people rapidly from one department to the next and I am still not sure if it's an anti-union or anti-clique-forming thing. Either way, this does not seem efficient for the business as people need to specialise. Plus, based on my own experiences, one reason people might still enjoy going to work is friends that they have there. Some powwow, tea breaks, and drinks after work can give workers something to look forward to. If employers take it away and expect morale to improve, then they're merely sabotaging the business. It is despotic like the scenes of Winston at his desk in '1984'. Based on reports, open offices are back and the media only casually mentions this. After COVID-19 stopped making headlines the estate lobbyists won, having "convinced" companies that "remote workers" are "lazy" and "unproductive". Well, of course many businesses perished anyway, so they have lots of "space" left to lease to their 'human rodents', in essence caging them in glass and metal office space under sensory deprivation (or pure noise).
To quote Aaron Swartz in 2006:
You wake up in the morning, take some crushing public transit system or dodge oncoming traffic to get to work, grab some food, and then sit down at your desk. If you’re like most people, you sit at a cube in the middle of the office, with white noise buzzing around on every side. We’re lucky enough to get our own shared office, but it’s not much better since it’s huge windows overlook a freeway and the resulting white noise is equally deadening.Wired has tried to make the offices look exciting by painting the walls bright pink but the gray office monotony sneaks through all the same. Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying. I can’t imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day, let alone getting any actual work done.
Anti-union might be another aspect too, says a person whom I know. It's not about efficiency, ever, it's about keeping people broken and isolated and easily manipulated. Experience is needed for good service. Open plan offices are highly inefficient and overall stressful for the victims of such a layout, the person asserts. Too bad that David Graeber died before he could followup much on his research, and subsequent book, on "Bullshit Jobs".
We referred to that several times in the Sirius series, especially the part about people at Sirius being assigned to do intentionally meaningless "tasks" or "jobs" (e.g. time-tracking, lists of open tickets which nobody ever looked at).
Those were useless tasks where the purpose was to pressure people. Those were actively harmful to the person and, by extension, the firm. It should be noted that this did exist when I was a teenager in the 90s (or existed in some places, but to a lesser extent). When I worked in Manchester Computing they asked us to start logging calls with summaries that nobody ever read (it was usually about remote access by university staff). This was done not in 2002 when I started the job, it was added around 2004 as a sort of "telemetry". Who was I writing these reports and logs for anyway? Did anyone really check them? Barely. By 2005 or 2006 they were already shuffling people around a lot, making their job miserable (I resigned around that time). Not to mention the bossing was inadequate, incompetent, and immature. The "telemetry" part was bad from a privacy perspective/aspect, e.g. in case of data breaches. We put down names of actual staff too, those were not students. How is putting names of university staff that needed VPN access (for library, journal, intranet access) going to improve the service? It's reckless, pointless, disrespectful etc.
It's not like the case of a marketing department; since the requests came from the staff, how does logging it improve service in any concrete way?
Many people whom I've spoken to since then (it was about 20 years ago) told similar stories. Places of employment pile up more and more useless tasks to ensure staff cannot rest, concentrate, or build up better/new abilities. It's not even limited to jobs done at a desk. It's a very widespread phenomenon. █