I don't remember the name of the class or the unit, but it was the final class in the major. The phrase "trick people into working unpaid overtime" was never actually used, but is clearly what was being discussed. I only remember a few of the methods discussed such as we're a family, pizza parties, threatening performance reviews, and trying to gameify the production process somehow to get workers to compete for meaningless points.
I was reading a book about American chattel slavery called Slavery's Capitalism and that book made it clear how plantation overseers would use small prizes as an incentive to get slaves to compete with each other. Two able bodied slaves might compete with each other over a cup of sugar, or a hat (commodities which they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to have), for instance. The overseers would use this to get them to reveal their capacity for excessively hard work and, this part is key, then proceed to raise the harvesting quota on all the other slaves. Failure to meet quotas would result in one whip lash per pound by which they fell short. Here's the larger quote:
In other cases, enslavers used positive incentives to get people to pick faster, setting up races between individuals with prizes like a cup of sugar, a hat, or a small amount of money. But such speed-ups shouldn't be seen simply as attempts to import positive incentives into a system dominated by negative ones. They were also tricks, designed to get enslaved people to reveal capacities they were hiding. In Georgia, John Brown's enslaver Thomas Stevens would "pick out two or more of the strongest and sturdiest, and excite them to a race at hoeing or picking, for an old hat, or something of the sort. He would stand with his watch in his hand, observing their movements, whilst they hoed or picked across a certain space he had marked out. The man who won the prize set the standard for the rest. Whatever he did, within a given time, would be multiplied by a certain rule, for the day's work."
But enslavers also whipped greater picking speed out of enslaved people in the field itself, forcing their targets to devote sustained attention and unrelenting effort to their speed and accuracy (less leaves, dirt, "trash," etc. in the picked fibers). This kind of invigilation reveals yet again the major differences between the labor system used on the cotton frontier and that used in the Lowcountry. It also reveals the essence of the enslavers' plan: to force enslaved people to show their left hands. Here, on the cotton frontier, enslavers "whipped up" enslaved people to force them to reveal capacities they were hiding, or that had not yet been created. "As I picked so well at first," remembered John Brown, "more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day," after starting at a minimum requirement of 100. "Old man Jonas watched us children and kept us divin' for that cotton all day long," remembered lrella Battle Walker, and "us wish him dead many a time."
Similarly, under post-slavery wage servitude, we are incentivized as workers to compete with each other over small concessions, small privileges, for which we are supposed to be proud of having, but our overexertion in attempting to beat each other, and win those privileges, is used to raise the expectations on everyone else. Productivity increases while wages fail to keep up with inflation. More and more surplus value is extracted by the Capitalist, and we are inundated with "hustle and grind" propaganda.
by @DodecaWeasel@hexbear.net in fact now that the timewall is gone I should go find the original comment
Reminds me of how newly-arrived enslaved people were broken-in for picking cotton by being rabidly whipped and chased by the overseer in a frenzy to pick cotton as fast as possible, and once the load was weighed, that became their standard quota
Without the benefit of studies, the specific analogy to wage labor in this case seems much less useful than the simple fact that if you are getting employees to work more than they would otherwise in hopes of a prize, but only the winner gets the prize, the others are not being compensated for their additional labor, but that matter is framed to them as their loss to the other employee rather than the employer using an antisocial framework to extract extra value from most of the employees at the price of compensating just one of them.
That's not the only relevant point, and the original analogy might have been substantiated in the text, but at base the perversity seems to mainly be offering people a carrot for more labor and then giving only one of them a carrot, it's false-consciousness-building 101.
I don't remember the name of the class or the unit, but it was the final class in the major. The phrase "trick people into working unpaid overtime" was never actually used, but is clearly what was being discussed. I only remember a few of the methods discussed such as we're a family, pizza parties, threatening performance reviews, and trying to gameify the production process somehow to get workers to compete for meaningless points.
by @DodecaWeasel@hexbear.net in fact now that the timewall is gone I should go find the original comment
Reminds me of how newly-arrived enslaved people were broken-in for picking cotton by being rabidly whipped and chased by the overseer in a frenzy to pick cotton as fast as possible, and once the load was weighed, that became their standard quota
Without the benefit of studies, the specific analogy to wage labor in this case seems much less useful than the simple fact that if you are getting employees to work more than they would otherwise in hopes of a prize, but only the winner gets the prize, the others are not being compensated for their additional labor, but that matter is framed to them as their loss to the other employee rather than the employer using an antisocial framework to extract extra value from most of the employees at the price of compensating just one of them.
That's not the only relevant point, and the original analogy might have been substantiated in the text, but at base the perversity seems to mainly be offering people a carrot for more labor and then giving only one of them a carrot, it's false-consciousness-building 101.