A company spokesperson said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”

Wells Fargo has been notoriously inconsistent.

I’m going to assume the workers were being over-monitored, and disallowed from normal human activity until this is specifically ruled out by additional reports.

When a company is abusive and toxic to the point workers turn to surveillance evasion, it not only ruins that job, but makes the employee wary of future jobs. It causes social harm.

Yes, it is typical, but requiring employees to hand over personal Facebook account passwords used to be typical until the requirement was outlawed. Employers often act in bad faith, and workers commonly have to tolerate it. So distrust of companies, and of Wells Fargo in particular, is well earned.

This actually may be a good part of a cyberpunk dystopia story:

A desperate loner programmer laces their PDF résumé with the usual batch of AI exploits to get them upsorted. But this time, it includes the parabolic curve batch a fence friend just won in friday night poker when betting got wild.

When the company’s bleeding edge HR AI reads the PCB prompt, our coder is put on the top of the must-hire list. Less one.

As per policy in the company. Short-listers are then run through the unofficial openings list (enforcers, launderers, evidence cleaning, culinary accounting, peer diplomacy, etc.) and our coder ends up on top of the list, less one, for every single position.

So, meanwhile, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy while trying to make offerings to certain hedge funds for pushing potential merger. If the merger fails, the company will go bankrupted and get Toys-R-Us’d, and a particular investor who likes to go all Putin on failed minions will choose some of the executive management to make into cautionary examples.

And then there’s a couple of high-risk lawsuits which are keeping all the loyalist staff crunching to bury evidence and silencing witnesses the activites of which are keeping them away from their official duties, meaning the executives are going without their handlers keeping them from doing stupid shit.

The HR lady doesn’t usually do interviews for special hires. Normally these are supposed to be closely vetted by high-ranking actual human being officers, but all upper management are either overworked or beyond being asked. The nature of the job in question is on a need to know basis, and neither interviewer nor interviewee need to know (allegedly).

Our lowly coder completly wows her with their tired, no-nonsense, street-level candor in contrast to years of corporate-culture double-speak. They get the job. But it is not the job for which they applied in the first place. Though the salary(!) is high and the benefits(!!) are conspicuously swanky.

It’s probably better to not ask too many questions yet.

Law enforcement based on the Peelian principles is not a tennable thing. Sure, every US beat officer will learn it in training but they also learn the public is the enemy, which has been the way of things for over a century.

if we could imagine a new age of policing, it would involve much less enforcement and much more prevention, mostly disincentivising people from engaging in desperation crime. Heck, we might even end retributive sentencing for a more restorative system.

If we dropped our current law enforcement – the whole thing – and turned to investigating and intercepting elite deviance (white collar crime) we would save more lives, prevent more damage and more cost by orders of magnitude. Not that law enforcement actually does much to reduce crime.

I can’t speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn’t. Healthy adults just can’t couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to widdle whittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,

I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn’t sleep always; sometimes I’d lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn’t lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.

When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren’t actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you’re not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.

Imagine seige engines.

The reason we have time theft as a marketing term is because shareholders and upper management feel entitled to your poop time. Meanwhile wage theft is a real issue that costs our workforce billions.

Our plutocrats like to think based on their feels and pay for content that affirms their worldview. Money can literally make you stupid.

Um, law enforcement comes to mind.

Not to say PTSD and unhealthy coping problems aren’t a valod concern, but if we’re going to try to reduce jobs based on how taxing they are on the human psyche, there are a number of fields that are respected that also qualify.

Off the top of my head, schoolteacher and service industry worker. Cooks amd wait staff.

We don’t own things anymore.

It begins!

Apparently in the time of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette had a play farm where servants would take, clean and replace chicken eggs under the hens so Marie Antoinette could gather them later. Many nobles in France had such play farms. The pond story reminds me of this tidbit.

We know the Qu’ils mangent de la brioche scandal was fabricated (though a lie used to turn opinions against the royal family). In truth it was the failure pf Church and King in the Estates-General to read the room and then the King’s failed effort to escape France that sealed the Queen’s fate in the Place de la Révolution.

Queen Marie Antoinette was by far not the worst of spoiled nobles, just in way over her head.

80% of Americans deal with precarity. Food precarity, rent precarity, job precarity, family precarity, health precarity.

So a lot of us are feeling the discontent.

But we lefties arent used to planning violent protest (say sabotage and mischief. We’d rather not actually kill anyone.)

One possibility is the right-wing doing some sparking. A group of militant extremist reactionaries might load up and massacre a venue to get the civil war started.

Or the government could pass some laws resulting in mass incarcerations of non-violent offenders (say abortion seekers or LGBT+). Once that starts turning into capital punishment of young women protests might turn into arson of police and state facilities. We saw a bit of this with Iran with the Mahsa Amini protests or in 2020 US with the George Floyd protests.

In 2023 we should be at a point where there is actual technique to management, and it’s not just a position where a department leader gets to harrass their crew and make the workplace toxic.

A manager’s duty is to know their crew and what keeps their morale and productivity high, whether that’s letting them text with their kids all day or letting them keep tabs on the Ravens game. People like to be on a team that knocks out task bullet points and reaches goals. They don’t like to be on a team where they have to escape the notice of their managers while trying to complete tasks.

The US has treated upper management and shareholders like aristocracy for so long that workplaces have gone toxic, that office and administration has to babysit bosses who behave like sex-starved pissed-off teenagers and don’t even have a coherent vision for their company. (Case in point, Elon Musk)

You are not a good manager if your crew or HR or admin has to handle you like a drunken politician.

I actually think we should work towards a 20-hour work week or less. Our kids and civic duties suffer for our lack of time and energy, making for intergenerational mental illness and an general civic incompetence (facilitated by the gutting of public education programs)

During the 2020 epidemic and lockdown bunches of people were furloughed and we all got to acquaint ourselves with extended cabin fever. Many of us picked up new hobbies and some of those could ne monetized and were better than the (often toxic, underpaid) dayjobs.

It was a conspicuous phenomenon now called the great resignation. Our capitalst masters compain how no one wants to work, but it’s evident to the rest of us that it’s the toxic underpaid conditions we don’t like, and we’d be glad to work if conditions were better.

I suspect laziness isn’t a real character flaw or deadly sin so much as the desire to not suffer as we work. (There is avolition, a symptom of mental illnes such as major depression, and this is what drives people to couch-potaro for weeks or months at a time.)

There’s a lot of intersection between the set of folk who believe in obligatory work and who believe in culling undesirables.

Having been called lazy all my life (despite having had lifelong major depression) I’m more than wary of when people like to suggest, as Thessalonians advises The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.

When my symptoms were most severe I was so unwilling to work I spent nine months in my bed, barely able to crawl to the kitchen or bathroom. I had no will to work or play or watch TV, or lift my limbs.

So, yeah when someone opines a work mandate, I get spooked.

Let the disabled starve?

Allow for bonded servitude?

Perhaps you might want to elaborate.

In actual civilization, yes, we are.

Basic accommodations are a human right according to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Jesus had a few things to say about feeding the hungry, but Paul didn’t fully agree.

Curiously when Trump appointed Gorsuch, a case came up in which a truck driver chose to abandon his truck and not freeze to death and was fired for it. Gorsuch ruled in favor of the company.