Who in their right mind would work this type of job? I suppose if you were going to get kicked out of your apartment, you might do this. Evicting people can be very dangerous, not to mention depressing.
Of course, it's a big leap from being willing to screw over strangers for a few bucks to being willing to throw them out of their homes on to the street, but I've got a feeling some would sadistically enjoy the transition. As long as it paid enough.
Honestly it seems to me like something out of a crappy, dystopian sci-fi B movie from the 90s. With everything else we've seen this year, though, I'm not even that surprised. People being horrible is normalized, and most of my outrage has been depleted. It's just expected now.
If you evict people legally - at least in my state - you have to schedule a 2 hour window with the police and they are present supervising during the entire process.
Also, the eviction process required at least 5 people to be present to actual clean the unit out depending on the size of the house/apartment.
The company is doing nothing differently except putting hiring day laborers online. Home Depot wasn’t liable when the guy I hired picked up a crew from the parking lot. We waited for someone from the police department to show up - as legally required - and started the cleanup process.
It is up to the landlord to follow the law.
The implied expectation of class / race / ethnic / ... loyalty is fundamentally flawed, though. I'm friends with people of many groups who are unlike me, and conversely, there are many people in my demographic whom I dislike. Not all [insert race][insert socioeconomic class][insert religion][insert ethnicity][insert career] people are the same, and we don't want segregation.
This is a particularly nasty cross-class alliance, but at the core, we WANT cross-class alliances.
> Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.
As we've so often seen, at scale it's easy to move that line for enough people to enable any atrocity.
At the core, there are few or no internal "Do Not Cross" moral lines. Moral lines are first culturally-situated, and second, individually-situated.
Incentive structures set by the ruling class drive a huge part of culture. Media does too. There are a lot of tools to manipulate culture, and they're actively (and increasingly scientifically) used. At the end of a Roman Triumph -- a big celebration -- captured war prisoners would be strangled in front of an audience. In that culture, that was okay.
From there, you need to find just a few people, either divided, disgruntled, or of low moral character. If I want to keep poor Southern whites in-line in 1870, I can find blacks who hate them. If I want to keep poor Southern blacks in-line, I find poor Southern whites. There, we had a nice 50/50 split, but there will always be a few.
The expectation that "it's the turncoats fault" isn't a productive one. You need to fix systems, not individuals (with incentive structures around individuals are part of systems, of course).
Systems are things like checks-and-balances, incentive structures, power structures, organizational design, and conflict resolution structures.
The US didn't work better than Soviet Russia because it had better people, much as Americans would like to believe themselves superior. It worked better because it had better institutions, starting with a very well-drafted Constitution.
Given a 2020 context, those structures are starting to function less well. You won't fix them by asking politicians to behave better; you need to address the structural issues.
And people at the top rarely understand implications of their actions. Organizational systems are HARD.