Mystery Shopper: I Got Paid to Spy on People While They Worked
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This sounds poetic and wise, but most people aren't doing a bad job to rebel against their employer. They're doing it because it's not worth their effort. They're not getting paid enough that they actually care about doing their job well, and since they often feel that their employer is greedy, they feel they should be stingy with their effort in return.
I think that a real rebellion would be unionizing or challenging corporate policies or refusing to work scheduled shifts. "Forgetting" to clean the bathroom isn't a rebellion, it's just laziness.
Before I got into tech, I certainly remember some jobs where I just wasn't paid enough to care. But there's no need to romanticize that into some kind of labor uprising.
Corporations expect their employees to be devoted and loyal — at the same time they treat them as expendable and replaceable human resources. That means empirically being loyal to your company will give you nothing in return. There are many such asymmetries, e.g. in the way time is treated or how much slack is given when there are "special circumstances": Be late as the employee and it will get you in trouble, be late as the corporation and everybody is expected to swallow it. Have a special circumstance that would need the employers consideration and you can go fuck yourselfas an employee — but if the corporation is in special circumstances everybody is expected to go the extra mile with it.
Even if the salary was better, this is the opposite of a healthy, respectful relationship. If you treat your employees with respect, don't expect them to act like they respect you.
Corporations are entities, so anthropomorphization without specification can muddle the point you're trying to make.
The former exploits human biases and the latter doesn't.
Specifically "corporations doing <X>," is always shorthand for "people doing <X>, " where X is aligned with corporate interests.
1. We can imagine scenarios where the converse is true, but what I'm talking about is that hearing this in a corporate setting significantly shifts the priors. Individual experience doesn't invalidate the claim.
The corporation acting as an entity is part of the problem — if company culture, your manager, or whoever demands loyalty to that entity, that always will be a hollow promise no matter who asked for it, because an entity cannot return that loyalty. Corporate entities of a certain size are like superorganisms — their main goal is survival and for that they will shed the cells that make them work if it benefits them.
You can be loyal to people within those corporations, but even they can be forced to break that loyalty towards you to safe their skin.
Saying all of this I think true loyalty can be found at work. Just not beyond a certain organizational scale or at a very limited interpersonal level.
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