As I write, the prominent twisted plutocrat simpleton Elon Musk is dismantling large parts of the government on the grounds that the public sector is filled with inefficient parasitic civil servants who have unimportant make-work jobs. As the long-term consequences of this pitifully shallow effort play out gradually, the go-to defensive slogan from Musk and his horde of deluded online sycophants is, “Government should be run like a business.” Everyone knows business is efficient, and government doesn’t have those market efficiencies, so, by this logic, we should get rid of public agencies and privatize their workforce. 

But as it turns out, the private sector isn’t necessarily such great shakes. At-will employment laws along with ingrained cultures of ass-kissing deference to hierarchy make the workplace a tyranny of capital that will sweet-talk you with pizza parties and casual Fridays right up until your position can be outsourced to the developing world. 

What better place to discover the methods of these nasty workplace tyrants than the pages of the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal?

The Invisible Hand Signs the Checks

Much of what follows is based on the fine reporting of the Journal, which is the property of the awful goblin billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But while having the same arch-conservative slant of its fellow Murdoch asset Fox News, the paper ultimately ends up being the most accidentally Marxist of U.S. newspapers. As Nathan Robinson memorably put it, the Journal “believes [that] wealth, rather than ideas, rules the world.” The Journal’s relatively elite audience of executives, managers, and investors is firmly on the side of markets and private property, and its editors therefore allow journalists to report most frankly on “what the capitalists are up to.” In this way, the publication also caters to giant firms that need to get reasonably accurate information for their money-making operations.

The Journal’s op-ed page is full of sugary celebrations of the great freedom of the marketplace. But the paper’s actual reporting isn’t shy about the real-world power dynamic: 

“On the surface, the job market looks as strong as ever. Beneath the surface, workers are getting a very different message: Their bosses are back in command. Big companies are tightening remote-work policies, shrinking travel budgets and cutting back on benefits. […] Companies are slashing perks such as college tuition assistance and time off for a sick pet. The moves show how the balance of power between employers and employees has shifted as the labor market has gone from white-hot to merely solid.” 

The writers, Konrad Putzier and Lauren Weber, continue by observing that the “shift in leverage to employers” has led to 

“more subtle […] changes to working conditions. For example, knowing that some workers will quit rather than return to the office, some companies are ending remote work as a way of trimming payroll. ‘Quiet quitting’—workers who slacked off rather than quit—has been replaced by ‘quiet cutting’—employers who cut jobs without actually announcing job cuts.” 

None, the Journal informs us, are safe: “While the power shift is evident across most of the labor market, it is more evident in white-collar roles.”

The power balance may be shifting, but the hierarchical structure of companies has been clear for a long time. Business owners pass on profit goals and major strategic plans to managers, who then instruct workers to carry out their orders. This has been an important reason why businesses hate unions like poison. Of course, unions raise the companies’ costs by enabling their workers to get better pay and benefits through collective worker negotiations, but they also interfere with the “management prerogative,” the principle that bosses make the rules. 

Of course, with capitalism and labor markets, we’re supposed to be free to quit our jobs and find nice new ones. But in reality, it’s not so easy. An impressive 85 percent of professional workers polled by LinkedIn said they were thinking of changing their jobs in 2024. But as labor markets continue un-clenching after the tight conditions of worker shortages during the pandemic, job hunters “are discovering that they have less leverage than in the recent past,” as the Journal once again put it. This has meant lower pay, less flexibility, and fewer perks, from free lunches to vacation time. The paper quotes a LinkedIn vice president who gleefully claims, “The pendulum has swung back, and the power is in the hands of the hiring managers.” This is reflected in a shrinking “switch premium,” the average raise gained by someone changing jobs, which was in 2022 was a full three percent, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, but had fallen to just 0.8 percent by 2024.

That the bosses hold the leverage becomes most clear during layoffs and firings, where workers are put in the position of having to hastily hunt for new income and healthcare as the kids’ food disappears from the cupboard. But firms are working to lessen the budget pain for downsized, right-sized, and lightly disassociated workers, including by taking steps to “cut out human contact altogether when eliminating jobs,” as the Journal again reports. “[T]he ways companies dismiss workers are evolving,” such as when software firm Intuit cut 1,800 workers. “Those being terminated from the TurboTax maker got an invite to a meeting titled, ‘Leaving Intuit Discussion.’ Those who didn’t receive such an email could ‘assume they are not impacted and we ask that you support your colleagues as they process this news.’” Elon Musk also fired employees at Tesla and Twitter via email. 

The atmosphere created by the eternal possibility of discipline and firings has had an effect, including on the younger workers entering the workforce today or earlier in the COVID pandemic. One article observes that when Gen-Z workers were asked their most desired workplace amenity, “Some in the cohort of about 100 people said they wanted free, on-site therapy at work,” whereas “Maybe 25 or 30 years ago, it would have been a gym,” an HR officer put it. Today’s competitive employers know to include workplace amenities to help alleviate their workers’ nonstop stress, or at least hide it while on the clock.

At the same time, another Journal column asked, “Have we taken our cynicism at work too far?” The writer notes that trust was once higher in America: 

“Around the middle of the last century, many hummed along on the rosy glow of plum benefits, robust job security and the knowledge that the chief executive was making, say, 20 times a worker’s pay, instead of 200. […] Today, that employee-employer pact can feel like a relic of a bygone era. Workers have swapped pensions and equity in their companies for more meager benefits that put the risk and onus on individuals. Instead of reporting to paternalistic employers, many people now operate under tenuous contracts and gig work. Some of us work from home in isolation or spend lonely days in the office trapped on back-to-back video calls.” 

Citing a psychologist, the author disapprovingly continues: “[G]iven all this, we might scoff at the notion that our company is a family, or roll our eyes at the prospect of joining in forced fun at the office happy hour.” Seems to me like Americans aren’t unreasonably cynical—they’re jaded after a lifetime spent as disposable playthings of the ruling class and their great corporate property. 

Other dismissals are more choreographed. The Journal reviews PIPs, or performance improvement plans, which cover increasing numbers of typically white-collar workers and formally designate the employee’s performance as unsatisfactory, specifying a plan to improve. “That said, many workers and even managers say they’re used primarily to provide legal cover from employment lawsuits or to cut costs without announcing layoffs.” A former CEO is quoted saying “It’s just a legal thing to make it so that we warned you that you’re going to be fired.” The paper cites several HR professionals who estimate that about 10-25 percent of employees put on PIPs survive with their jobs. In tech, including Meta and Amazon, workers are often offered “two envelopes,” an HR veteran describes, one with relatively generous severance, the other a PIP. 

The Mortal Sin of $25

The offenses that lead to dismissal can be petty indeed: things like using an office printer for personal documents, skimming training videos, and other minor acts are grounds for “trimming staff.” The Journal, again, describes the business model of a company credit card-monitoring firm: “Clients are asking Payhawk to restrict when and where company cards work. For example, a company can limit a lunch allowance to be available only on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and be usable at Chipotle but not at Kroger. In partnership with Visa and Mastercard, Payhawk is developing a feature that sends real-time spending alerts to corporate finance teams and allows them to instantly block suspicious transactions by employees.” 

Unafraid to paint a portrait of ugly corporate tyranny, the paper reports “crackdowns at Meta, where employees were fired for spending $25 meal allowances on other items, Ernst & Young dismissing workers who watched multiple training videos at the same time, and Target canning employees who jumped the line to buy coveted Stanley water bottles ahead of the general public.” 

And the Wall Street Journal will tell you how to do better. In a piece of writing that could form the basis for a metric-system  measurement unit of sycophancy, the fantastically-named  Callum Borchers informs us of “The Power Move of Working the 5-to-9 Before the 9-to-5,” because “Working a regular day, even into the evening, is for mere mortals. Those out to impress start well before dawn.”

Celebrating athlete-like employees arriving to desk jobs at 5 a.m., Borchers writes: “They are up before the sun—and, more important, before their co-workers—to get a jump on the workday and impress the boss. Nothing screams go-getter like a predawn email!” Posed as an alternative to the loathed COVID-era work-from-home policies, coming in early-early allows parents to gratefully leave for their kids’ afternoon sports. And remember, don’t see your boss antagonistically; save that for your awful climbing coworkers, whom you may have to shove off the ladder to get ahead. 

Meanwhile, the Journal elsewhere reports that “Personal Use of the Corporate Jet Has Soared,” with non-business mileage climbing over 50 percent since the pandemic. For example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg got $6.6 million worth of personal flight time on company planes in 2022. A rounding error to the budgets of many billion-dollar  firms, the “perk” predated the pandemic but increased greatly during and after.

Ordinary workers settle for humbler luxuries. Headlines tell us that “More Workers Are Cheating on Drug Tests” as commercial drug-testing lab Quest reports rising use rates, especially for cannabis, and more cheating on random workplace tests. Use is up across workforce sectors, as is cheating, including submitting friends’ urine, using clean-reading online synthetics, or using additives to foil the test diagnostic. For the full workforce, 4.6 percent of all tests came back positive in 2023. Depending on company policies, “A failed drug test could result in a prospective employee losing out on a job or disciplinary action for a current employee,” even though, of course, much of the drug use is happening away from the workplace and often isn’t even illegal.

Once again, you awful workers have let The Man down. And it only gets worse when he tries to bring you back under his thumb.

Work-from-Work

During the fearsome times of the worst COVID years, companies embraced work from home as a way to keep business partially running while gatherings of large groups were medically dangerous. During those years, many workers got used to the convenience and increased family time that some forms of work from home provided. 

Well, that’s over, and it’s no secret whose decision it was. “More companies are backing away from the looser workplace policies they adopted during the early years of the pandemic as executives increasingly recommit to promoting an office culture,” the Journal informs us, adding that work from home became prevalent “because low unemployment gave employees leverage when pressing for more remote work. Now, the white-collar workforce isn’t growing as much, shifting the balance of power back to managers.” 

By now, the share of businesses expecting workers on-site most days is likely back to the pre-pandemic level of 76.7 percent, as it reached a value just shy of that in the Labor Department’s 2022 survey. The Journal cites a recruiting firm survey which found that 92 percent of managers prefer their employees work in person, and it appears they got their way. But don’t worry, some remote jobs are being kept—they’re just being outsourced to the developing world. A Stanford economist says, “U.S. wages are very high so moving fully remote workers to Mexico, Philippines or India can generate huge cost savings.”

Now, you out-of-pocket workers might resent having your leash yank you back into the oppressive corporate office environment, but you should really get over that. A retired IBM CEO recently wrote an op-ed claiming, “Remote Work Is a Leadership Killer” because the art of management suffers, you see. “The class of employees for whom working in a solitary setting is highly detrimental is people who aspire to lead or manage others. [...] One learns how to manage and lead principally by watching others demonstrate how—or how not—to do so.” The point is that middle management won’t be good at molding dumb workers into suitable shapes if they only control them in Slack. “Leadership involves getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. [...] It isn’t a cold digital process; it is a human and at times personal connection with all the members of your team.” He concludes that aspiring CEOs “should get their butts into the office and learn how to manage and lead others.” Very egalitarian! Bring the horse to water, then make them drink by threatening to fire them so they can’t afford apples.

Business media op-ed authors are annoyed when workers resist coming into the office to be managed, but they’re even more annoyed by efforts to give workers any mental space or time that would prevent them from being managed. A proposed California law would institute some measures to bar employers from contacting workers “off the clock,” after closing time, or on weekends. Many workplaces are notorious for sending emails demanding urgent work action on evenings and weekends, with pushy follow-ups sent if a reply doesn’t come quickly.

Well, thank god people are lining up to fight the injustice of creating any space away from work’s reach, as the Journal’s editorial board recoils in horror from a law that, in their words, “[lets] you ignore your boss after working hours.” The author notes that the law is based on similar rules overseas, “including such paragons of productivity as Argentina, France, Greece, Italy and Spain.” Of course, in addition to France, which has implemented such “right to disconnect” policies for workers, one country where businesses tend to implement this practice is Germany, which is among the world’s most productive economies. This gives you an idea of the Editorial Board’s standards of fair argument. The editorial claims that working while off the clock is “the flip side of more flexible work arrangements and smartphones” and specifically mocks the idea of “nonworking hours.” 

Again, it’s a portrait of a work environment characterized by drastic power hierarchies, and if technology allows, workers “are sometimes expected to respond to important emails while at their kids’ soccer games.” But as always, in the Right’s imaginary world of endless competing firms and infinite worker options, “Some bosses no doubt exploit employees in their off-hours, but then these bosses tend to lose the best workers.” 

Don’t like your boss calling you on date night? Just quit and find a new better job the same day! To hear the Journal tell it, fresh work opportunities always exist. Of course, this is a lazy argument that happens to benefit the bosses financially. In fact, the time workers spend job hunting depends heavily on broader macroeconomic conditions that are well beyond workers’ control, and is drifting up since the COVID labor shortages.

Companies Love Misery

Unsurprisingly, these tyrannical private governments that rule our lives are making us miserable. And it’s not my opinion. 

Consider a recent article in the Journal: “Corporate America Knows We’re Miserable. Is a Toilet Bomb the Answer?” The paper often acts as an outlet for corporate America’s hand-wringing over how to squeeze more productivity and economic value out of a desperate and justifiably paranoid workforce. Observing that “Light beer, air freshener, [and] spicy pretzels” are “all part of a marketing push to improve our mood,” the paper documents how “Across the consumer-products sector, the giant companies that study us in hopes of unearthing insights that can help them sell more potato chips, laundry detergent and lipstick have reached a conclusion that economists and pollsters have also found: We are unhappy—squeezed by inflation, troubled by global conflicts and worried. [...] Clorox thinks it can help with a new toilet bomb, a tablet of pre-dosed cleaner that foams and fizzes in the toilet bowl and releases a pleasant scent.” 

Somehow, such extra-stupid versions of empty old consumerism are failing to fill the void. The paper cites an international survey of happiness and finds America’s self-reported happiness dropping, “in large part because of a decline in sentiment among younger adults. They report feeling hopeless as their budgets are squeezed and they feel increasingly lonely, lured by social media and the promise of contentment from material possessions, according to the report.” They also ran a recent headline, “Tech Workers Are Just Like the Rest of Us: Miserable at Work.”

But of course, no matter how many toilet bombs you drop to try to fill that hole in your heart, the boss is still the boss, and while you may express yourself with corporate novelty products, real freedom of speech rights only apply when the state is trying to suppress you for your involvement in a social movement. Your employer can suppress, I mean manage you all they want. Google and Microsoft, for instance, have fired dozens of workers in April 2024 for joining sit-ins in New York and California protesting the company’s cloud computing contract with the government of Israel. The $1.2 billion deal, Project Nimbus, provides Israeli ministries with cloud-based software, likely including military-relevant programming at a time of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank. Google’s workforce was able to shame the company into killing military deals in the past, including Project Maven, a 2018 contract to supply the U.S. Defense Department with AI to analyze drone footage. But not this time. The employee group, No Tech for Apartheid, called the firings retaliatory and claimed that some fired employees hadn’t even joined the protests. 

Politicians and media figures tout capitalism and markets as being the freest system in the world, but you’re not free to express your conscience about providing algorithms to a government that kills gigantic numbers of civilians with demonic glee. Not if you want to keep paying your bills, anyway. 

It’s all too easy to get accustomed to or even stop noticing the intense hierarchy of the workplace, since it’s taken totally for granted by society and justified by every dumb business book. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could also see the workplace as a site of productivity that is actually planned around the requirements of the job and the workforce, where the workers have some form of democratic say. All this “misery” in the headlines really sets the bar low for free socialist organizing in your workplace. Of course, management won’t care for that, and not only because it threatens the profit margins. Professor Ronald Purser related in these pages the story of the Topeka dog food plant where a worker-participation program was canceled by management in part because the workers performed too well—to the point of making management irrelevant. But you can organize your workplace in “worker-to-worker” fashion even if local unions are not active in your area. If Starbucks workers going up against a billionaire owner can do it, so can you.

But until that organizing happens, the bottom line, guys, is that we’re all a big happy family here, for this quarter. But if our executive team doesn’t hit the earnings-per-share target the markets expect, cutbacks may have to be made. At the end of the day, we may be looking at a workforce rightsizing. And you might, at that point, be fired from the family.