Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day. Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count. I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money. It uses resources to monitor workers, after all. But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.
I think this is at least partially related to a culture of work that discourages any thought beyond whatever the boss deigns is acceptable. The resulting conventional wisdom is that, if you're of a certain class, your day is for work and your evenings are for beer, TV, anything that helps you forget about work for a while.
This isn't to say that people aren't supposed to do their jobs. Only I find, in a lot of cases, people are basically made to feel ashamed of themselves if they take an interest in anything that might be outside of the immediate responsibilities commensurate with their station. It's a subtle form of classism and it stunts the intellectual lives of a lot of very smart people. But, as Carlin says here,owners don't want informed citizens. What they want is obedient workers.
In a somewhat related matter, the incoming Mayor's (not quite public) "customer service" advisory board is headed by two hoteliers. I wonder what kind of worker-citizens they're interested in developing.
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