I'm not talking about executives. I'm talking about rank-and-file office workers who have nobody reporting to them. Now, while there are probably some individual office workers treated worse than individual warehouse employees, the contrast is stark. Like, I work at the office of a factory. I don't have anybody under me, but the difference between how I'm treated and how they're treated is so stark. Hell, they're even union guys and I'm not.
Is there some obscure theory thing explaining this?
PMC culture explains a lot of it. The interesting piece is customer service - namely call center workers, who get treated like shit.
If any step along the production line stops, the whole system is disrupted. If no one's physically present on the factory or warehouse floor, the stuff doesn't get done. Manual workers are cogs in a machine. There's almost always more to do, so it's worthwhile to force every second of productivity from your employees.
Office work is a lot more flexible. If you don't do the work now, you do it later. An email that goes unanswered for 10 minutes doesn't disrupt the flow of emails. Office workers are probably overscheduled, so a good chunk of your time at the office isn't productive. You're just there in case something comes up, not becaue there's actually 8 hours of typing to do that day.
They are the same class but are tricked to think that they are not. The division is helpful to the capital. It create loyal workers from the top one and aspiration for the bottom.
Your boss will steal from you every day. Treat them the same.
Lol I see you come to the right conclusions in the end lmao
Anyone who steals from their employer is a comrade of mine. Had a friend who found a way for his dad to double bill his employer and did if for long enough to get them both new trucks and buy a bunch of tools. True hero shit.
It's probably the association of manual labor = low skill, easy to replace, and white collar = skilled labor, difficult to replace. This is generally bullshit, the difficulty in replacing someone and their value to the company is more often tied to how long they've been working in the industry and with the company, in my experience.
Also, offices tend to be where the bosses and managers live most of the time. Kind of a "don't shit where you eat" type situation. Notice that line managers and shift leads usually only get a small percentage more than line workers. Because they aren't in the same place as the big managers/bosses.
Honestly I think in a lot of ways we aren't. Being salaried just means management can make us work ungodly hours with no extra pay because "overtime is factored into your salary already." Jobs are intentionally understaffed to save money, why hire three people to work 40 hour weeks when you could make two work 60 for no extra cost. I traded destroying my body with destroying my mind. I can't fucking believe it but sometimes I actually miss the feeling of clocking out, body aching, knowing that the next few hours of my day were mine even if I was too tired to do anything with them. Now I'm stuck in constant anxiety, there's no clocking out and I'm expected to respond to emails quickly regardless of day or time. Nothing I do is worthy of this stress but they loom these impossible goals over our head to ensure we are always underperforming according to their metrics and able to fired at any time, based on poor performance. The stress is so engrained into the system our office has a "meditation room" where employees can go to cry in private.
The worst part is everyone thinks they'll be the one employee out of hundreds that lasts long enough to make some real money. I've got no allies here--I can't have a serious conversation about these working conditions because according to everyone else we're not being exploited, we're just "paying our dues." When I started this job I thought I had made a real step forward in life, now I see I just traded in for a different kind of bullshit.
Classism is classism even if you only think the people are in a diffrent class
The more bullshit of a job you have, the more likely you aren't doing anything contributing to anything. Sure, you might move numbers from one excel sheet or answer some client's phone call who has some type of special need with their product, but you do not need to sit on your ass 9 hours a day while having bullshit meetings in between. If manual laborers strike, you will see real material results from the lack of work being done. Once an office worker strikes you will see results but you won't see any difference from the highest of high levels if a CEO goes on strike. Office workers who do real work get treated like shit too though, tons of call center and low level IT jobs are complete ass despite being vital.
Our office bathroom used to get the fancy toilet paper while the factory floor got the low grade stuff.
I used to steal the good shit and put it in the floor bathroom.
