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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.
But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.
Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.
Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.
[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.
"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Barenflimski on Tuesday March 03 2020, @02:54AM
...but its not that hard to figure out.
At one point, the boss felt they needed to be good to their neighbors as they'd see them locally. In small groups, you can't treat each other terribly. The boss couldn't do it without the workers and vice versa.
We have dehumanized almost every part of work. Spend most of your adult life at work? Don't talk politics or anything else personal on company time! You have a bad week or bad month? There are 12 more exactly like you right behind you and they aren't expecting a raise next month. Get fired? Who feels bad then? The company paid insurance to cover you for 2 - 6 months, so fuck you.
Every contracting company I have ever worked for or been apart of has never stood up for me, nor cared what happened to me. They suck as much cash out of you as possible. They rip you off on what they call "benefits." There is no soul in most of these places. For many companies this is the only way in the door, contract-to-hire. Half the people that were fired and re-hired as contractors. It seems clear to me that these have been huge tools for these companies to skirt our laws and compassion.
It would be great to live in a world where people were treated equally in these companies. There were times like that. There are places like that. It is possible. But for now, for the most part, we have chosen to take every single bit of emotion out of the equation. It doesn't need to be this way, but between lawsuits on the back-end and compassion on the front end it is way cheaper.