“But I don’t do anything that will get me in trouble!” one might reply.
To which the response is: “Didn’t you? Not once? Are you sure? Is there anything you did that might be interpreted as bad? Maybe there was, and you didn’t notice… welcome to staying up awake all night thinking obsessively over everything you did during the day, worrying about whether you did something that will show up in the footage. Did you like being able to go home from your dead-end subsistence job and leave work at work? Yeah, how would you like ‘just doing your job’ to be your ‘turned up to school for a surprise exam, naked’ dream, forever?”
Probably less cost to “overseer” roles? This is already how it was 20-25 years ago. The advance in technology is just making it worse.
Some places used to make you wear these little pager things that timed your breaks and would raise an alarm if you sat too long.
I realized I actually felt a lot more anxiety about the beeper thing than I did, say, worrying what my manager would think if I took too long to pee.
So… cost-efficient subjugation I guess?
Otherwise they’d have to create more jobs and higher paying jobs which would eat at profits. Nice economy… wouldn’t want inflation to blow it up wouldya?
They’re going to make damn sure that the cashier asks you to sign up for the branded credit card. Gross.
I don’t think I can enjoy shopping at the Maxx anymore. Back in the day you could find some really great bargains, especially for kitchen tools. That’s really diminished nowadays, and this move completely ices my enthusiasm for the franchise.
Another example of why we can’t have even somewhat nice things.
There has been some ongoing effort to further increase the granularity and add some insulating intermediaries(wouldn’t want to be stuck paying a day laborer for an entire day if you can avoid it; and if something bad happens it’s definitely preferable for them to actually be employed by a more or less fungible staffing agency; and if you can get things to the ‘this API is actually just poor people somewhere’ stage you’ll get the fawning techchrunch pieces); but the underlying logic and broad-strokes methods for pushing the costs of flexibility onto the contingent labor to the greatest degree possible seem to be something that hasn’t changed much In a long long time.
The specific incantations required for a regulatory dodge definitely change with time and jurisdiction(no need to elaborate a fiction of ‘independent contractors’ in The Jungle; the ‘gig economy’ branding was presumably at least in part to deal with the fact that ‘day laborer’ now conjures up images of historical labor market abuses and undocumented immigrants hoping to pick up construction jobs); but the underlying logic doesn’t really change.
The one thing that looks to work somewhat differently, though to the same end, is more or less permanent part-time hires whose shift schedules are adjusted unpredictably week to week: if it’s just a company town where you are the employer; or everyone in town just picks from the crowd in front of their gates in the morning their wouldn’t be much point to that; but a part-time employee whose hours can and do wander across the entire range of ‘full time’, just don’t fill it, is a part-time employee who is less likely to be able to tack on one or more additional part-time jobs that they will be busy working when you want them to be available; where someone with a stable schedule is much more likely to make firm commitments to other things outside of their scheduled hours.
And that’s not what you’re doing. Pushing “minorities and immigrants are criminals” is the opposite of that shit. In fact, immigrants, (whether or not they are undocumented) have a LOWER rate of crime than the general, native born population, in fact. And of course, crime rates are pretty much even between different racial groups. You really just don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about… You’re the who is just accepting whatever your TV tells you.
You seem to be doing that very well, just accepting whatever bile fox news drops into your ears and taking it as the truth.
