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>Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation w

• rayiner 5y ago
  Maybe they should do that stuff instead. If we are going to have corporate paternalism, it should at least teach you effective life behaviors.
  • slg 5y ago
    This is literally the path towards fascism. There was a reason Ford was such a big fan of Hitler. Society can be a lot more efficient when everyone is forced to comply with what our leader thinks is best for us. In comparison to that I would take today's corporate paternalism that basically amounts to "don't be an asshole" any day of the week.
    • version_five 5y ago
      Interesting to see the different takes. I think the comment you replied to was being tongue in cheek with the essential point that the (I agree horrible) interventions by Ford were at least attempting to be constructive. What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism.
      • slg 5y ago
        >What we see today is something very different, and in my view much closer to "power for power's sake" control that I think you're associating with facism. I'm not really sure what you are implying here. Can you give some examples of this power for power's sake behavior? Everything that I can think of has a plausible even if misguided motive.
    • rayiner 5y ago
      Lots of non-fascist societies put less weight on unbridled individual self determination and more weight on social infrastructure to help people make good decisions. I’d argue we lean too heavily in the direction of thinking everyone should figure life out by themselves with no external pressure. This hurts young people, who lack experience and the benefit of hindsight, and less intellectually gifted people, who may lack judgment and impulse control. People these days indeed actively give destructive advice. Thinking of abandoning your stable long term relationship? “Follow your heart!”
      • slg 5y ago
        The problem I had was not the split between individualism and collectivism. The problem is that these "lessons" are coming from an employer with corrupted incentives. They aren't trying to make a better citizenry. They are making a better cog for the machine. Hence the fascism angle. If you want to teach these lessons, teach them through the education system.
        • rayiner 5y ago
          I agree with you—as I said above, my point is conditional on “if we are going to have corporate paternalism.” I don’t think we should.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      Hitler was a fan of Ford's. Complete opposite. Hitler used Ford techniques. Your assertion is probably "common knowledge" but it is completely wrong. You should probably read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before commenting further on that window of history. There are also several documentaries that cover this as well. An especially good one is: Hitler: A career (1977).
  • notriddle 5y ago
    When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. They say this about a lot of things, but it’s hard to imagine a worse “target metric” than marriage.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      That’s a one-way ticket to the societal norm being marriages of convenience with zero regard for marital fidelity.
      • goodpoint 5y ago
        Much worse: forced marriages.
  • flamble 5y ago
    Already been noted, but what an unbelievably sinister sentiment. "Effective life behaviors" which include being married. Social conformity enforced through corporate power with the approval of the state, and people willing to countenance it as long as the mores being enforced are reactionary instead of disingenuously "progressive".
    • rayiner 5y ago
      Being married is a proven effective life behavior. So is saving money, etc. Progressive ideas, by contrast, pretty much by definition lack demonstrated effectiveness. They have unknown and typically unpredictable effects on society. I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.
      • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
        I don't know if that is actually proven. It isn't like through a lot of history women have had much choice about the whole thing, nor could they leave someone toxic in many cases. Is it an "effective life behavior" if you don't have a lot of other choices? You could use the same words to state that hetero marriage is "proven", when realistically, people didn't have the choice.
• quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > Nothing employers do today comes close to that. Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too. You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself. Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!"). I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    If I don’t bring my SO or spouse to a team dinner, my pay is not docked. If I don’t want to answer a personal question, I can decline without fearing it will show up on my performance review or pay slip.
    • quadrifoliate 5y ago
      The central theme of my comment was "it has become subtler". I...don't see a conflict between this and your statements? To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't. Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  > This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, you home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture. They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207
  • version_five 5y ago
    Somehow your post reminded me of John Lennon's Working class hero which basically captures this entire discussion, and was written in 1970. So I'm questioning my post above a little bit, although I don't think Lennon was contemplating the modern situation.
  • slg 5y ago
    I disagree with almost all of those practices, but they are all arguably related to job performance in one way or another while many of the checks Ford conducted didn't have that clear connection (although he would probably argue otherwise). For example, I don't think it is necessarily accurate to believe that someone with worse credit is more likely to embezzle company funds, but it is a much straighter line to that conclusion than a married employee being a better worker. And as I said further down this thread: Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
• Clubber 5y ago
  He also paid triple the normal wage for similar work. Today, they are similarly invasive for "market rates."
• epicureanideal 5y ago
  > you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department And now we have ideological inspections.