Big Corps v Humans

[ancianita]

Books reviewed in this article of The New York Review of Books:

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)
by Elizabeth Anderson
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour
by Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano


"The Boss Will See You Now," by Zephyr Teachout, reviews books that increase our knowledge of corporate surveillance, worker exploitation and other stealth anti-democratic operations. It complements our growing knowledge of corporate capture of our government, as shown by Sheldon follow-the-money Whitehouse.

If Republicans haven't sufficiently groomed Americans for fascist rule, their corporate bosses will. So far, what corporations have done in America have been legal, but not lawful, as Elizabeth Warren and Katie Porter have shown.

As Liz Cheney said today in the perhaps final Jan 6 Committee hearing, unlike Americans, most people of most countries have not been free. We are feeling the campaign onslaught of corporate dark money this year as corporations -- we like to keep it at the Republican bag man level -- go all out to end rule of law, by any means necessary, and move this nation into the global corporate network.

"Legal" is the language of the corporate world. "Lawful" is the language of the human world.

The future ... is in combining the tracking and rewarding tools from gig work with employment contracts that allow for changing pay. The existing toolkit is vast:

Activtrack inspects the programs used and tells bosses if an employee is unfocussed, spending time on social media. OccupEye records when and for how long someone is away from their workstation. TimeDoctor and Teramind keep track of every task conducted online. Similarly, Interguard compiles a minute-by-minute timeline that monitors all data such as web history and bandwidth utilisation and sends a notification to the managers if workers pick up anything suspicious. HubStaff and Sneek routinely take snapshots of employees through their webcams every five minutes or so to generate a timecard and circulate them to boost morale. Pragli synchronises professional calendars and music playlists to create a sense of community; it also features a facial recognition that could display a worker’s real-world emotion on their virtual avatar’s face.

Right now, there may be limited proof that these tools are used to vary pay in traditional workplaces. But the authors argue that these technical tools are not hard to combine with legal innovations in work contracts. Contracts that allow for adjusted wages can easily bring many of the conditions of gig work to traditional employment. Corporations may soon jettison the fixed-wage model that has been a feature of blue collar employment for decades.

It is no coincidence that routine work surveillance followed closely on the heels of the Reagan antitrust revolution and the collapse of private sector unionization. Nothing except unionization or new laws would stop an employer from taking all the data it is gathering from sensors and recordings and using them to more precisely adjust wages, until each worker gets the lowest wage at which they are willing to work, and all workers live in fear of retaliation. This is no more sci-fi than Facebook and Google serving users individualized content and ads designed to keep us on their services as long as possible, allowing them to sell as many ads as possible.

The bespoke clothing that my Park Avenue boss wore was a mark of privilege, a step above mass manufacture—suits made to fit her individual body, shoes tailored to the grooves and arches of her feet. The modern promise of tech personalization, building on a romanticized notion of individuality and authenticity, is that we can all live in similarly tailor-made worlds, with newsfeeds adjusted to our preferences and professional and leisure interests. You may be one of few listeners who loves both Kenny Rogers and the Cure, but Spotify knows you, and can bring you songs that speak to your singular soul.

But extending this tailor-made ethos is exquisitely unromantic: these eyes may have the intimacy and memory of a lover, but they lack all affection. Modern surveillance technology means that tailor-made wages are coming for all workplaces. The mass-produced, nonunionized depressed wages of the late twentieth century were already alarming, but the new, specially commissioned AI wages of the twenty-first century enable a new level of authoritarianism. To stop it, we’ll have to outlaw particular forms of spying, and use antimonopoly and labor laws to restructure power.

Tracking technology may be marketed as tools to protect people, but will end up being used to identify with precision how little each worker is willing to make. It will be used to depress wages and also kill the camaraderie that precedes unionization by making it harder to connect with other workers, poisoning the community that enables democratic debate. It will be used to disrupt solidarity by paying workers differently. And it will lead to anxiety and fear permeating more workplaces, as the fog of not knowing why you got a bonus or demotion shapes the day.

This matters because work is not an afterthought for democratic society; the relationships built at work are an essential building block. With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-boss-will-see-you-now-zephyr-teachout/

[keithbvadu2]

1. toxic work culture

toxic work culture

go down the page

https://falafelandcaviar.com/calling-out-toxic-b0?utm_source=mediago-b0&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=b0-us-d-fnc-postten-061022-c215

[ancianita]

3. Good stuff. Awareness is growing. Thank you!

Corporations live beyond human generations who have to learn who their real enemies have historically been.

It's because what has not been clear is whether Big Corp runs this country or whether the Constitution -- written for humans -- does.

What's been going on since this government was incorporated in 1871 is that corporations have fought in the courts against humans (look at landmark case names, or read Thom Hartmann's "Unequal Protection" for that history) to achieve equal "fictional personhood" standing before the Constitution. Fictional personhoods having the same rights as Real Humans.

Humans in America have been understandably slow to learn that their protection under the Constitution is unequal to that afforded corporations.

With Trump, corporations (from foreign as well as American lands) were about to achieve more than that -- a corporate control of government and all means of production.

That's called fascism. One example is that surveillance for Big Corp is what the NSA has conducted (thank you, Snowden) for years if not decades.. It continues to be the standard, permanent feature of the fascist corporate goal.

Corporations must be relegated to secondary legal standing (corporations are NOT people, my friend) and subject to quarterly reporting of their cleaning up their pollution and production so as to benefit ALL humans, not just shareholders they pit against the public interest.

Big Corps v Humans is about not turning the U.S. into a corporate campus similar to a human jurassic park, where the owners and their AI manipulate the "inhabitants" labor, perception, and voting.

Democrats still fight for there to be HUMAN consent of the HUMAN governed.
Any minority rule is corporate funded corporate rule.

[keithbvadu2]

4. "I'll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One"

[ancianita]

5. Yep. It's called corporate charter death.

Judicial dissolution, sometimes called the corporate death penalty, is a legal procedure in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or cease to exist.

A "corporate death penalty” is the revocation of a corporation's charter for significant harm to society.[2] In some countries, there are corporate manslaughter laws, however, almost all countries enable the revocation of a corporate charter. There have been numerous calls in the literature for a "corporate death penalty".[3][4][5][6] Most recently a study argued that industries that kill more people each year than they employ should have an industry-wide corporate death penalty.[7][8] Some legal analysis has been done on the idea to revoke corporate charters for environmental violations[9][10][11] such as for severe environmental pollution. Actual corporate death penalties in the United States are rarely used.[12]

[yonder]

2. Kick

[appalachiablue]

6. K/R