By 2022, all restaurants are Taco Bell.
You’re making me feel all warm and fuzzy - towards corporations. Most of your items involve respecting their property. If you visit someone’s house and start pissing on their rug, is them throwing you out a restriction on your freedom?
[ul]
[li]Private browsing of the internet from work during downtime - their computer, their rules. Do they restrict you from doing it on your smartphone on a 4G network?[/li][li]Freedom to engage in political activism - on work time or off work time. On work time, perfectly justified. Off work time you have a valid complaint, unless you want to identify yourself with them.[/li][li]Privacy in my work email. Again their mail, their rules. Use your own. [/li][li]Freedom to wear what I want to work Find a new job. I can wear more or less what I want. [/li][li]Privacy of my social media pages - private social media is an oxymoron. [/li][li]Freedom to be out of cell phone range on certain weekends - Negotiate better. If you are on call, you should be compensated. Nothing to do with freedom. [/li][li]Freedom to carry a weapon to work - So, you hate property rights? Expecting to meet a bear at work? You wouldn’t be let in my house either - my freedom to my property trumps yours. [/li][li]Bodily privacy (by drug testing, psychological screening) - again, find another employer unless you are working somewhere where being drug free is vital. But this one I can see at least. [/li][/ul]
I work for a megacorp, and seem to be a lot freer than you are. I suspect small companies with nutty owners are at worse on average than big companies.
You’ve misinterpreted my post. Those weren’t complaints. Indeed, whether the policies are justified is beside the point, which is that different jobs have differing levels of personal freedom and privacy.
John Mace seemed to be suggesting that such restrictions would be illegal. They aren’t.
Yeah, some of those examples are hardly impinging on anyone’s freedom. You’ve always had to follow the corporate dress code, follow appropriate Internet policy and most people really don’t want their coworkers showing up to work with a weapon.
But the implication was the “Blue Companies” will gradually start blurring the line between “work” and “home” and start encroaching on your personal life. For example:
[ul]
[li]Private browsing of the internet from work during downtime - their computer, their rules. Do they restrict you from doing it on your smartphone on a 4G network?[/li][li]Monitoring habits and activities like smoking, drinking and exercise levels.[/li][li]Actively encouraging or discouraging certain political positions.[/li][/ul]
Sure, at work, you tow (toe?) the line. But we all like the idea that when 5 o’clock comes around, we are free to do as we please.
Globally I don’t think they make a distinction where the outsourcing takes place.
One of the main complaints I have with PwC’s prediction is that it seems largely skewed towards MBA knowledge worker management types. There are actually huge segments of the workforce that do not work for a Fortune 500, hot startup / professional services firm or environmental non-profit.
I also feel like the workforce has been shifting to where the only employees at a company these days are layers of managers. All of the actual “roll up your sleaves” technical work and even project management seems to been outsourced.
There is no dress code or internet policy at many jobs. Even in the 2014 economy (or 1994 economy), you submit to those restrictions for the other benefits of some “blue companies” jobs. That’s the whole point.
And as you point out, those restrictions increasingly extend beyond the bounds of the workplace, from drug testing to social media rules to political advocacy rules.
Accenture. Been there. Done that. 
I don’t consider many of these rules being a restriction on my freedom in the slightest. Things that affect what I do outside of the workplace are.
That’s the thing. Back in the good old days a small subset of workers were on call at various hours, and often got compensated for it. With the net we’re all on call 24/7. Especially when we are dealing with people on the other side of the world. That we can do home browsing at work means we can do work browsing at home. And if some people do it because they like it others may feel pressured to do it.
It’s a double edged sword. I’ve had jobs or projects where I was basically working 24/7. I’d basically eat/sleep whenever I had the chance. And it might be at home, at the office, at a client or on an airplane.
Things are slow at work right now, so I’m actually working from home. Even if things weren’t slow, my developers are in Eastern Europe, my client is in Chicago, my boss is traveling to Japan. Most of my management support is in Canada. And all my direct reports are managing their own completely unrelated projects from their own client sites. There really is no reason at all for me to be in the office.
I just had a credit card stolen by Orange World. Damned contractors!
That’s the thing. Back in the good old days a small subset of workers were on call at various hours, and often got compensated for it. With the net we’re all on call 24/7. Especially when we are dealing with people on the other side of the world. That we can do home browsing at work means we can do work browsing at home. And if some people do it because they like it others may feel pressured to do it.
Back in the day a boss or co-worker driving by someone’s house to see what they are doing would be creepy. Today a boss or co-worker looking at someone’s Facebook page is normal.
I’ve lived through the change from a sharp distinction between work and home to today’s practically no distinction.
Oops - I didn’t remember I submitted before.
I agree. When my wife was having eye problems, I could work at home just as well, and I can do even better today. I can get my desktop on my work PC, and besides no one dropping in and the coffee being better I can hardly tell the difference.
I can imagine people who want instant responses can make someone’s life hell.
The funny part isn’t the workers “giving up personal freedoms”. No, the funny part is the “in exchange for job security”. Yeah, that’s gonna happen. In reality you have workers giving up personal freedoms, not in exchange for job security, but in exchange for getting a job at all, and that job begins and ends at the employer’s whim.
The days when it was only blue collar workers who were interchangeable cogs that could be bought, sold, outsourced, automated, or just thrown on the scrap-heap are long past.
This is why the cyberpunk idea of walled corporate enclaves where square conformist 1950s-style Ken and Barbie clones work for corporations that function as governments, while outside tattooed mutants and hackers and mercenaries fight over the scraps makes no sense.
From the corporation’s point of view, what’s the purpose of the conformist utopia? How does following the conformist rules keep you inside the enclave when budget cuts roll around? If you can be fired any second because your position isn’t generating value for the company, or you aren’t an asset in the power-struggles of the corporate overlords, then how is loyalty to the company generated? You’d have to actually guarantee your worker-citizens a place in the community regardless of their momentary politico-economic utility.
And if you do that, you don’t have a corporatocracy, instead you have the feudal system. The feudal system only works if the vassals actually benefit from their relationship to the liege-lord. In return for the guaranteed loyalty of the vassals, the liege has to guarantee to protect them from other assholes like himself. And now you’ve got a system where the aristocracy works together to support aristocracy as a concept, even while fighting and scheming among themselves for position.
Or to put it another way, if the Paul Reisers of the world don’t believe that Weyland-Yutani will keep it’s promises to them, they’re going to sell out and undercut Weyland-Yutani for their own gain whenever possible. And now how does Weyland-Yutani continue to exist? An utterly mercenary corporation in a world with no government that demonstrably regards its workers as disposable can’t continue to function. Of course, in Aliens we know that the corporation regards the marines and colonists and space truckers as disposable. But people inside the charmed circle like Paul Reiser have to see observable evidence that they aren’t treated as disposable, otherwise the system falls apart.
Here in real-world America, when you get fired from your corporate gig, you aren’t tossed out into a mutant-infested wasteland. You’re still part of a functioning non-anarchic society, even if you lose your job. A complex society can’t exist unless people act as if the complex society exists. The minute people stop believing there’s any point in acting as if America exists, then the whole thing comes crashing down. And walled corporate enclaves won’t work, unless everyone inside believes they’re on the same team. If everyone on the inside is just a disposable cog, then the walled corporate enclave devolves into the exact same mutant-infested wasteland as outside the walls.
No one but CEOs who have appointed their own board or have a lot of stock is immune from getting kicked out. In most of the layoffs I’ve seen third and fourth level managers suffered more than the peons - though they have more to fall back on.
I agree though that job security has nothing to do with personal freedoms, except in the sense that if you demand unreasonable “freedoms” you can be the first to go. I’ve seen it happen.
I’ve worked in tech for 34 years and have never been laid off, and never will be. I’m old enough now that if something happens I’ll volunteer - but they probably won’t let me go. The first thing to do is to not be a cog. The second thing to do is be aware to being on a sinking ship (personally or corporately) and leave before it sinks.
There was a time when blue collar workers were were interchangeable cogs and then there was a time when they were not(vis a vie union strong unions). There are still a number of blue collar jobs from which it is very difficult to get fired and that pay very well.
Anyway, what’s my point? The point is that a lot of people rail against corporations and talk about this feudal vassal system etc. But really I don’t find that analysis convincing. The corporations can do many things, but their power ends long before it encroaches on a large number of freedoms. So really it is people deciding not to do anything with their lives other than suck at the corporate teat, and the complaining when it runs dry.
Don’t get me wrong though, I do have a lot of empathy for someone in your situation on a personal level despite what I just wrote.
Blue collars workers coginess or not coginess was not based on if they were in a union. It was based on the level of skill required to perform their labor. Welders, machinists, carpenters, and other professions performed labor that required years of training to develop the skills to do the job. Skilled workers are expensive. But over time, technology was utilized so that instead of requiring a skilled tradesman to perform a task, it could be performed faster, cheaper and more consistently by a 19 year old high school grad pushing a button.
The same thing is happening in the white collar world. Information and decision support systems are gradually replacing much of the menial grunt work that used to be performed by entry level accountants, developers and analysts.
A phrase I keep hearing is that there will be or are two types of workers - those who tell machines what to do and those who are told by machines.
That is not even close to an accurate description of the situation.
These guys are not spending years honing an skill
And this is all in the current environment of weakened unions in the US. I won’t even start talking about Germany.
Multiple factors can contribute to a specific wage rate. If you have some sort of reliable data showing that powerful unions do not contribute significantly to improved working conditions and higher wages, please share. Yes, unions can kill their golden goose etc, but I am only interested in something that would show that one guy who’s really skilled can have something more secure than a union contract.
How about the fact that a significant number of occupations earn well above minimum wage and typically aren’t unionized?
The reason unions were needed was because many of those workers were interchangeable cogs. If a miner or factory worker got sick or injured, needed a day off or just looked at the boss the wrong way, he could toss them out and replace them with someone else. Individually, workers had no leverage.
I’m not sure how you can say bus drivers and escalator repairmen aren’t honing a skill. I don’t know how to drive a bus or fix an escalator. Do you? It’s a skill that needs to be learned.
You didn’t get my point about the feudal system, which is that current corporate culture in no way resembles the feudal system. We do not have a feudal or neo-feudal system. My point was only that a cyperpunk dystopia where corporate drones live in walled corporate enclaves would more resemble a feudal system than our current utterly non-in-no-way-resembling-feudalism system.
For there to be a feudal system, you’d have to live in a corporate-owned house, educate your children in a corporate school, obey corporate cops, and so on. But we don’t have that–your boss doesn’t care where you live, doesn’t care about your kids, doesn’t enforce the law, doesn’t care about your social life. If you get fired from your job you aren’t kicked outside the walls into a mutant-infested wilderness. Instead you get another, possibly shittier job. You’re free to quit your job and move to Florida and get another job. The point is, a dystopian future where losing the corporate job you were born into is a death sentence isn’t anything like today’s world, and the “corporations” of that world wouldn’t be anything like the corporations of today’s world. If a corporation really did act as if it were a government suddenly it would start acting like a government rather than a corporation. It might be a nasty dystopian government, but it would be a government.
And despite all the talk of corporatocracy, we don’t have any such situation in the United States today. People don’t talk about being a Microsoft employee-serf, because working at Microsoft is not an all-encompassing identity. And even if a rare employee feels that way about Microsoft, Microsoft as a corporation assuredly does not feel the same way about that employee. Nobody in the technology industry expects to work 40 years for “The Company” and retire with a gold watch.
And they wouldn’t have any such expectations even if there was such a thing as an IT professional’s union.
Oh, I was agreeing with you - I was not disagreeing but going off on a little tangent about people who say the opposite of what you are saying. I was saying people have a choice to not be involved in the system, yet they choose not to go that route and then complain about corporations. Sorry, it was a badlly worded post.