Treating employees like business partners - for fun and profit
Post-pandemic, there seems to more stories about a growing trend of employers trying to squeeze every ounce of life and value from their employees with no regard to their health, happiness or wellbeing.
In places like China they now seemingly even turn to AI and mass surveillance tools to try and turn their workplaces into veritable digital sweatshops. Ever optimising and modernising, turning the olden-day meat grinder into a more elegant modern form - high frequency "meat switches".
In a recent article Ed Zitron also hints at the changing dynamics of things, where he specifically examines the changing relationship between managers and employees in this mostly-remote world.
He speculates that since the very start, management and the executive generally cared more about exerting power over subordinates than exercising their true, supposed function in the organisation.
The corporate environment is optimised for this form of power play, he suggests, instead of what the textbook definition of management usually tends to evoke - that they should smooth over and enhance the production of whatever the company produces.
