Saturday, June 3, 2023

The Petty And Gratuitous Aspects Of The American Workplace

The trivialities and needlessness of many aspects of American jobs are no stranger to plenty of people.  From not at least matching raises with inflation to requiring people to repeatedly attend utterly pointless in-person meetings, all of which are likely to weaken employee morale and engagement, there are legions of things that could be easily avoided or modified, but they are such a traditional part of the broad American workplace--which is, of course, comprised of individual, smaller workplaces that might not stoop to this level at all--that even just minimizing them might be a dream for some.  There are many examples that might be casually included in the hiring process or that might ambush people after they join a company.  In fact, there are so many that it could be easy to forget many of them when trying to provide examples to someone else.

Making people fill out the same information that is already on the resume again on the website, promising one type of position and then switching it to a position with lesser pay in the interview, paying an unlivable or almost unlivable amount of money even for a full time job, refusing raises when there is enough company profit to grant them (especially if there is still leftover profit after raises), not trying to improve someone's pay or working conditions until they threaten to leave, and more are all symptoms of the irrationalistic egoism and sometimes outright deception that is so prevalent in corporate America.  Only a fool thinks that an application, hiring, or working process must by logical necessity involve these types of stupidity, exploitation, or dishonesty (this is where some liberals add irrationality alongside their legitimate criticisms of the American job market), but these are not exactly uncommon practices if miscellaneous employee reports are true.

As long as these and other needless or oppressive norms continue, many workers of America will be taken advantage of or made to submit to asinine demands whether or not they realize it.  Paradoxically, it becomes easier in general to avoid these things after you are in a better financial and social position to withstand them: people with more workplace experience or higher positions can have an easier time securing additional or better jobs, and the higher one is on the hierarchy (and a workplace hierarchy is not the problem, only abuse and irrationality under the guise of "manager/CEO authority"), in many cases, one does not have to put up with the typical bullshit of applying for low level jobs only to be misdirected, underpaid, and so on.  However, the workers who are most directly and frequently victimized by these practices are the ones who need to avoid them the most and who must sometimes endure them simply to survive.

Since it is also easier to get away with stupidity, pettiness, hypocrisy, and deception if you already have corporate power, not that the last three items in this list are not ultimately just expressions of the first, there is a strong need for employers who are rational, consistent, and just (again, these latter two things ultimately reduce down to the first).  When some employees do ascend the corporate ladder, a certain kind of person would need to be careful to become the exact kind of overseer or business leader who has the very same failings as previous employees that they resented.  After all, employees can be just as irrational and hypocritical as their worst employers, and the American workplace as a whole will only improve for all parties when current employers/managers recognize their errors or the ones who replace them intentionally avoid their mistakes from the start.

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