I'm watching Telemarketers and it's reminding me of shady jobs I've had in the past.
I worked for Rent-a-Center doing collections. It's a place that preys on the poorest people in America, getting them to pay extortionate interest on rent to own furniture, appliances and electronics. We had customers who would end up paying thousands of dollars on a couch that wasn't even new when they got it. Even worse was people who would hit hard times and get their stuff repoed and end up with nothing to show for thousands of dollars in payments.
My job was to learn when these customers got paid, or when they got their disability or welfare check and hound them over the phone or in person. If they didn't pay, I'd be sent out to knock on their doors. If that failed I'd be sent to repo it.
It was a soul crushing job. I've had shit jobs, but I'd never had a job that made me feel like I was doing harm to people before. Some of my coworkers would deal with this by demonizing the customers, acting like they were all deadbeats who deserved to get fleeced. Others would blame the customers, saying shit like, 'Anyone stupid enough to buy here was going to get ripped off by someone, and it might as well be us'.
I couldn't do that, so I started getting fucked up at work like Pat Pespis. I started pretending to do my job, dialing the number and then hitting the flash button and faking the calls. I'd get sent on a repo and my coworker and I would go out to eat or to the mall and pretend they wouldn't answer the door. I expected my collection stats would fall low enough that I'd eventually be fired, but they barely moved at all. It turned out that hounding people to pay a bill wasn't actually doing much.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a job that felt morally right.
I worked at a housing association that I thought would be useful in helping the unhoused with a type of co-operative housing, especially as they’re regulated. But no, it was all ‘pass on the poor folk to other associations’ and ‘try to grab property for cheap’ with the pooled rent money while skimping on repairs and improvements.
I worked in renewables for a while, and profit is always king there too. Safety was never the priority.
I worked at a crisis centre for victims of SA, which was also run to the bare minimum and largely existed as a flex for the person in charge to get write-ups in the Guardian. I can’t remember actually being able to successfully connect anyone with the therapists due to the length of the waitlist. We gave the bare minimum of advice. It existed on the lowest wages possible because everyone working there was supposed to feel good that they were essentially doing charity.
I did some advocacy work where I was connected with people that were unhoused, and where the job was to help them navigate the system in order to get assigned a home with a local housing association. Each case took months and nobody in the relevant council departments and housing associations gave a single shit. The clients were distressed (naturally), but were still given false information from every angle, and then it was all consistently used against them or leveraged to try and make them accept a lower standard of housing and/or care. They were treated like criminals for simply not having access to shelter. I worked hard and felt sad constantly. There were some successes, but a few people just quit trying to get housed because living on the street and sofa surfing were somehow less humiliating.
Those are the most ‘moral on paper’ roles I’ve held, and even they were a disgrace.