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Hi-tech Work Places no Better than Factories?
Anonymous Coward writes "A
tasty bit of truth.
Again, a Sociology Professor has found out what we all know. He wistfully comments on the state of geekdom in the modern corporation:
"They face the lonely insecurity of the individual entrepreneur in a marketplace and culture that stresses, with macho imagery from war and sports, that they are ultimately alone"
and adds that...
"For many this may be the shape of work in the 21st century."
You want to start a union? I mean how much is your boss making at your expense even if he did start the company long before you joined up?"
Why pay someone 90% of the proceeds of your labor for the priviledge of working for them? I am self-employed now (as much as I can be, with disabilities) and even if back to 100% health would never go to work for someone else again. A friend is a mechanic, works for a big chain, doing mufflers and brakes. When the company has billed the customers $4000, his cut is about $300. His customers are so loyal to his work that when he left one place and went to another, they followed. So I ask him "Why not just work for yourself, start out on your own?" After all, he manages the day to day operations, knows all the ins and outs of ordering, etc. Answer? NO GUTS. For generations we have all been fed this lie - the American work ethic, that says to go to work for someone ELSE and work HARD, 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get by. Corporations count on us buying into that so they will have a ready source of peons.
This space available.
You don't get your fingers crushed in a high-tech workplace by dodgy machinery, you earn a much better salary, you're not breathing dangerous toxins and you are able to afford a life. I'd rather work in cubicle land than in a 19th century (or even 20th!) factory.
If it does, then I can understand.
This is the main reason why I want to involved with Research and Development and become a professor. I would rather create new things than (as one of my old bosses put it) "Tell a computer what to do" for the rest of my life.
In a factory, just like behind a computer programming, you somehow become subordinate to the machine. That is what leads to employee unsatisfaction in my opinion.
~ kjrose
The article makes it sound like having to learn new things to keep up is a bad thing. It's what makes the job better than most.
Sig is taking a break!
I couldn't agree with you more. Anyone where with a high-school history lesson under her belt will remember a few things about factories back in the day:
- Employees would frequently lose digits of their hands, whole limbs, or even be killed on the job. As a result, they were simply replaced with someone else with no compensation to the original employee or their family. It's not so far off today.
- If employees didn't like their conditions, and went on strike, factory owners would often choose to just ignore them, and then bring in Pinkerton guards. These would then bust up the unions, force employees away at gun-point while the factory brought on cheaper people. Even today, factory workers complaining of insufficient compensation are ignored.
- Now while some tech jobs require exposure to nasty chemicals (chip manufacturing for example), most certainly do not. People working in factories, even today, are exposed to substances that cause severe birth defects, mental illness, and a plethora of other nasty side-effects.
So, do you think you geeks really have it so bad on the job? I highly disagree. I have never worked in a factory (and I consider myself fortunate), but from a tiny little research, it's easy to see how much worse it is for people who aren't working in Tech.
Why bother.
--what you said is true, but it's not an either/or situation. A long time ago I was in the UAW, and for sure the rank and file completely dismissed the threat of japanese inroads, it was laughable to them (not to me I saw it coming) and managment back then was completely out to lunch coke addled morons. BUT, another thing happened, japan not only sold cheaper cars initially, they "dumped" them, ie, sold them BELOW COST to themselves in order to garner longer term brand loyalty and market share. Exactly what they are currently doing with the hybrid cars as well. They also put a HUGE number of restrictions on US imports into japan, and we-our "leaders" just ate it.
To me it should be a quid pro quo, you tariff us, we tariff you right back. You won't allow US people to own property there (japan, mexico, china) they shouldn't be allowed to purchase and own anything here.
Our leaders are sell-outs, and they play the left versus right, repub versus dem,white collar versus blue collar angles against us, keep everyone faked out as they are creating a global two class technofuedal society. The US middle class is the biggest hindrance to those efforts, that's why you see them gleefully destroying first the blue collar manufacturing and agricultural jobs (white collars never cared for those people while this was happening), now they will be destroying the white collar jobs (and of a suddent the white collars are going HEY! what's going on?). They won't "run out" of technology, nor will these uber international pirate bosses "go broke" or lack for anything, they just prefer the master/serf style society, and are willing to trade off the loss of customers to a great degree. The bonus money to them is they get to keep constantly keep transferring ownership of all the land and buildings upstream into fewer hands. A headline last night, mortgage defaults at 30 year high. This isn't an accident, it's part of "the plan". Get people to establish credit well beyond any rational level, WELL beyond that, get them shilled into the phony manipuylated stock market, then destroy their jobs and income, poof, the uber bosses get to legally own everything. In the meantime they set people -the white collar and blue collar victims-squabbling with each other using propoganda and media manipulation with the "political" system with *one* political party with two names. It's a great scam for them and is working right on schedule. One of the easier ways to see the scam is to look at "official" unemployment figures, which are approximately 1/2 of what the real numbers are. How they do that? simple, they stop counting people who have exhausted unemployment insurance, they don't count people extremely under-employed in very low paying part time jobs, and they also really messed with consumer cost of living indices by taking out food and energy costs, which they used to include.
The economy is much worse than they admit to, despite wallmarts impressive figures. I'd like to see a breakdown of how much walmart's sales are cash versus credit card the other day.
Two other economic indicators, look at large banks derivatives exposure, then look at fortune 500 pension funding, and government pension funding and projected cost of social security and medicare/medicaid.
It's pretty dismal right now.
It's more complex than that obviously, but that is a good gist-cliff notes version over-view.
Yep, the man don't want you unionizing, they want you to keep voting for either crips or bloods gang at the polls, they don't want you to notice the daily factory closings and the daily importing of second world labor, white or blue collar. They want you to keep with the safe little finger pointing "it's all the dems fault, no it's all the repubs fault". They love it when people stop looking at that bare minimum level. They love it when 99% of the population is more interested in professional sports, movies, music, games, mindless TV shows and etc. They want you concentrating on ANYTHING but looking real hard at what's going on now and using common sense and logic to make a rational projection of events with some sort of realistic timeline. they want you to focus on "homeland security" and "terrorists" as they remove border patrol people and abandon the southern borders to humongous invasion. they want you to think "cheap prices on gadgets" now as these so called "american" companies all move off shore in search of the last dregs of short term profits. They want you to constantly take any "spare" cash you got and pump it into the magic beans stock market, or even buy government paper, which is just another form of indebtedness that falls right back on you in the form of future higher taxes to pay this paper off. You won't see any of those TV shills recommending people pay off their mortgage early, or perhaps get a smaller and more modest place so they can do that, nope, they still want you to buy-buy-buy, get those 30 year notes on fancy foyers and gimgrack houses and shiny things in the rooms. Just keep doing it on credit, that's all they ask, and don't look any farther than that. On and on. They baited the trap years ago, most people took the bait. The bad part is, people will still argue there is no trap.
Oh well.