Corporations are refrigerators | Hacker News Reader

Corporations are refrigerators

lorrinmaughan.com

74 pointspiescream26 comments

I am reminded of Charles Stross' blog post "Snowden leaks: the real take-home"[0]:

"A huge and unmentionable side-effect of the neoliberal backlash of the 1970s was the deregulation of labour markets and the deliberate destruction of the job for life culture, partly as a lever for dislodging unionism

[...]

Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement ("we'll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization") is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it's about as real as the divine right of kings. Employers are alien hive-mind colony intelligences who will fuck you over for the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet."

(Emphasis mine)

He links to an updated version he did for Foreign Policy, but I prefer the tighter wording of those segments in the original.

Those are the words I keep in mind when thinking about my relationships with employers.

[0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/snowden-...

I cannot relate at all to the people who actually lament the bursting of that old model.

"Feudal" is an apt description for it, and I guess some people find the certainty of always being a serf comforting. But it was never a great deal for employees. Security has a cost, and an employer who says they can take care of your forever is either lying or forced to dramatically underpay you in the present to account for future risks and costs.

And it's a great way to get people to go along with evil. Because who's going to stand up to their "employer for life?" Which is the point of Stross's essay.

Giant collectives like governments and corporations cannot feel loyalty to you. Only individual people can do that. And you can't know which person will be holding the power ten years from now, never mind forty.

> But it was never a great deal for employees. Security has a cost, and an employer who says they can take care of your forever is either lying or forced to dramatically underpay you in the present to account for future risks and costs.

Not a great deal for you. Or for me. But for most people? Probably a better deal than they'd have gotten otherwise.

"Giant collectives like governments and corporations cannot feel loyalty to you. Only individual people can do that."

That is true to an large degree, but I think it over-simplifies things sligtly. Giant collectives like governments and corporations, and small collectives like startups, can still have a "culture" (for want of a better word). They have an institutional way of doing things, and they tend to hire people who fit that culture, who think in the same way, and hold the same values, as the people who are already there.

In government, until sometime around the '80s, there was a strong culture of loyalty that went back a long, long time. Possibly to near the start of the 20th century, maybe further. In corporations, it was there too. It might have started dissolving in the '70s, and may not have gone further back than the '40s (although, e.g. IBM's may also go back to the '20s or '30s) but it was there for decades.

Further, these organisational cultures were small-c conservative, eschewing change without good reason, and promoting people who thought likewise. Who would, in turn, do the same.

And so you really could have a reasonable idea of the type of person who would be running the show 40 years from now. In fact, given a culture of loyalty and conservatism, you might even be able to tell who will be holding the power 40 years from now. It's 25-year-old Dave in the next office, who seems just that little bit more organised, that little bit more dependable, that little bit more of a "fit" than you and the people around you.

Whether people were better off or not back then isn't something I want to get into, but even though the culture of loyalty is long gone now, it was a real tangible thing for decades, which is why it still echoes today.

For instance, the lessons we learn from our parents stick with us. If they told us that jobs are for life, there will be some part of us that wants to believe that our current job is more secure than it might actually be.

And so, for many people (well, many people over 30) it's an idea we have to consciously remind ourselves to ignore.

Yes, refrigerators full of bodies.

This person preaches just what we'd expect from an HR/selfhelp person: accept it individually. More sensible people don't just organize in "cult-like" corporate communes to further enrich wealthy elites; they organize to build a better society, which requires dismantling these "soulless" gangs which treat humanity as "just collateral damage."

(Unfortunately, most who fancy themselves hackers really have no imagination for such things, regardless of rhetoric about "disruption" or "creative destruction".)

Yet, to "build a better society" is a just euphemism for "build a better government." Empirically, governments organize themselves just as corporations: cult-like, soulless gangs which exist to enrich the wealthy elites and treat humanity as just "collateral damage." In fact, government invented the term of art.

The relative advantage of corporations, however, is one can choose to quit. Or choose to not buy their product. No one "has to have" an ipad or other such nonsense. No such option exists with regards to government. Voting has negligible effect and emmigration can only offer a least-worst improvement.

No not really. I didn't read anything in his statement that indicated he wanted to nationalize all the things. Maybe he just wants a better arrangment. The corporation isn't something that arises from the natural order of the universe. It's an arangement designed by the government. I would like it if they phased out that arrangement in favor of cooperatives. Just like a corporation you would be free to quit, but you'd be less likely to want to and less likely to be treated like overhead.

> The corporation isn't something that arises from the natural order of the universe. It's an arangement designed by the government.

I sort of disagree. The effects of governments are secondary, akin to trimming a hedge. Corporations look exactly like what happens when you have people getting more and more powerful and people who they rule also rule another people. I don't think it's a coincidence that corporations look a lot like feudal societies.

Corporations are defined by a state's laws. A corporate charter is granted by the government. The reason corporations look like feudal societies is that the first ones were formed by feudal lords to harness the power of the merchant class that operated outside the feudal system, essentially granting monopolies. I recommend the first couple of chapters of Life, Inc by Douglass Rushkoff for a good overview of corporate history

A refrigerator full of bodies is a morgue.

I don't think I'd care to work at a morgue.

I honestly don't know why we need corporations at all. All they do is make a small number of rich people richer. I'd be happy to see the corporation phazed out in favor of cooperatives.

Strange to find you downvoted.

I just finished reading a brief history of the cooperative movement in the UK. I was amused by the various parallels to Free Software: the explicitly utopian premise, the entrenched interests fighting with FUD, the originators being laughed at as kooks and nerds, the startling success of the model that rapidly made it "normal" in many industries.

Much like (social) darwinism, too much has been made of competition compared with cooperation in business, in both cases against all evidence (families, herds, the fact that we are ourselves built from cooperating organisms, or on the business side that you have far more suppliers, customers and employees than competitors), because it suited some people with power to justify their actions.

> I just finished reading a brief history of the cooperative movement in the UK.

I'd love to read this. Can you point me in the right direction?

It was an educational graphic novel produced the by CO-OP group in the UK:

http://www.co-operative.coop/our-ethics/our-plan/co-operativ...

You can read the whole thing online in a (slightly) animated Flash version.

Thanks! I thought I'd have to go find a book in one of those book-buildings. Much appreciated!

> Do remember the function of a corporation. It's to make money for its stakeholders. If it's a publically traded entity, its job is to increase shareholder returns at all costs. This goes to the point above. It's not personal, it's business. Humanity is, sadly, often just collateral damage.

Important reading on this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Corporation-Pathological-Pursuit-P...

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Really-Matters-Privilege-Success-e...

Overall this engine has brought great prosperity. A company makes a lot of money when an external group of people find its services valuable so they keep giving this company money. A "job" is a way for you to be productive for other humans. This is primary, everything else secondary. Take joy in this fact of being useful. Being paid is a sufficient condition - for everything else there is family, friends, hobbies, pubs etc. An unprofitable company may have "happy employees" ignoring this fact but ultimately, society at large decided to allocate demand to other companies whose services and products society found more valuable. So, I don't know why an unproductive division consisting of people feel entitled to resources from everybody else? The end result of this is lay-offs. A company that doesn't trim down when demand goes down is jeopardizing everybody else's job. You end up like France & Italy, with bloated unproductive companies, or even worse, Greece, eventually bankrupting the whole country. This is far more pathological. On the other hand, breaking the law is breaking the law. Some companies - more accurately, people in them break the law, and should be held responsible.

I understand that layoffs are traumatic and put people in hardship. The correct way to solve this problem is a social safety net, free and universal healthcare & education, and access to new opportunities via specialized training. The wrong way to solve it is force companies to retain people.

In other words, we can all help unemployed people by paying more taxes to transfer resources to them to get them back on their feet. But people of course don't like that idea.

I vote for fluid labor markets for an efficient economy + strong social safety net.

> Whenever he learned of my latest all night work effort, or when I refused to take vacation because of a work thing, my Dad always used to counsel me to go fill a bucket with water and stick my hand in it. Then he'd ask how much of a hole was left when I took my hand out. Smart man, my Dad - he clearly learned his lesson after that layoff :-)

Can someone explain this?

I get something like "Being at work isn't going to change the world" out of that passage, but I'm not real sure that is the intent.

I take it as something like, the hole left by your departure is quickly filled. The bucket hardly notices you are gone.

Which is kind of true, watching people get laid off or leaving the company- the machine chugs on.

Now, there are serious changes that can happen thanks to the presence or absence of an individual, but that is usually all in politics & decision-making, and rarely in hustle (e.g., late-night grind).

The water represents corporate resources and the hand represents the employee. When the employee is removed, other resources back fill to compensate. No need to delude oneself into thinking one is indispensable. The world moves forward whether one is at work or on vacation -- the only question is: what is the benefit and for whom?

Working all night and skipping vacation to work may indicate that you think your work is indispensable. The bucket of water shows you that the mark you leave may not be as big as you think.

On the other hand, there are companies which would go to Hell if one person failed to show up for a two-week stretch. How many of those companies survive a full decade? How many of those companies consistently write paychecks that don't bounce?

A great article, and one worth sharing with colleagues who make their work their entire life.

I am usually comfortable engaging with and learning from people who hold completely different world views (that is usually the point of learning after all).

This one is a bit hard to take anything from: (ad hominem) "I'm a Certified Holistic Life Coach, Public Speaker, Facilitator, Reiki Master and Animal Communicator. I help people and animals redefine themselves so they can map and move into their true potential,..."

While some of these things may be less admirable than others (especially to my more science-oriented side), I find it helpful to read the ideas first, process them, then determine if the person's credentials and experience are relevant (in either direction). Being a life coach (even a holistic one), likely has put the author in the position to have seen this happen several times, and her advice here makes a lot of sense as a result.

She's not discussing how to channel your energies or talk to animals in this post, so I'd encourage you to look past the credentials and debate the ideas.

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