Thank you all for reading and for these thoughtful comments! Seems like a few people are converging on the same thought so I’ll respond here rather than on everyone’s individual post.

I couldn’t agree more that the reason most people work is because they have no other options for securing the means of subsistence. In economies like ours, most people must find a job in order to survive. This makes them dependent on the people who offer the jobs - the owners and managers of capital.

This dependence of workers on bosses is, I suspect, responsible for the kind of abhorrent working situation some of you describe. It’s also responsible for the lack of agency at work I’m trying to describe in the piece. That is to say, I think both of the effects we describe come from the same source. Here’s one example that comes to mind.

In the piece I say that bosses appropriate productive indeterminacy for the sake of efficiency. Companies will standardize a work process, denying the worker of her judgment, so that her labor is as efficient - and so productive - as possible. They are able to do this because our worker has no other choice. She is relatively powerless compared to her employer, since she needs their salary in order to survive. But her dependence means that her employer can subject her to other kinds of abhorrent working conditions also for the sake of efficiency. For instance, they may force her to work in an unsafe environment (e.g., if they haven’t provided important safety equipment or given the worker enough rest from strenuous labor), or to take home significantly less money than she generates on behalf of the company. This is how I interpret Ian’s examples. It is not an inherent feature of Malaysian jobs that workers get paid $340 for every $1000 they produce. Rather, it is the product of the dependence of workers on companies myopically focused on efficiency and productivity. In situations like this, you should expect to find unsafe and underpaid work in addition to work that is reduced to its simplest operations and which involves little judgment.

Tyler Re

Written by Tyler Re