Workplace Control Quotes

Employers crave the power to fire workers whose performance is judged inferior-not just to get rid of those particular workers, but more importantly to motivate and discipline the rest of the workforce.

To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative" to determine the products.

If a man surrenders all power of self-determination in regard to the profits, management or ownership of the place where he works, he not only loses that special prerogative which marks him off from a cow in a pasture, but what is worse, he loses all capacity for determining any work. This is the beginning of a slavery which sometimes goes by the name of security.

... the place where [adults] pass the most time and submit to the closest control is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world economy's ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody's productive activity, it's apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is _not_ the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.

But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.

People are responsible adults at home. Why do we suddenly transform them into adolescents with no freedom when they reach the workplace?

No woman should have her personal health care decisions dictated by the religious beliefs of her boss.

Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.