Growing up, the biggest lie ever told is that there is some benefit or virtue to working for a small or medium sized business over a mega corp such as FedEx or Walmart.
This fucking cancer is everywhere. ‘Support your local business!!’ ‘At least my boss is chill and cares about me’ You worthless liberal piece of shit.
The quality of my working life has been directly proportional to the size of the organization I’ve worked for.
I have been abused mentally and physically by every boss I’ve had at these sorts of companies.
‘Oh but medium sized companies are the sweet spot’
Is the likelihood of me being harassed by the VicePresident who wrote the fucking HR rulebook greater than zero? Do you have a shot in hell at unionizing? How much ‘free pizza’ is bring forced down your gullet after working hours? Did you work 14 hours and thank god that you’re salaried you effete fuck?
‘In capitalist America, the people yearn to work at Walmart’ all things being equal…yeah, welcome to hellworld. But if I can just get some solace, drone strike every fucking small business into fine dust.
‘Support your local restaurant!!!1’ brother I will buy a TV dinner from Kroger across the street to put you out of business
This kind of post comes up regularly. I can only assume it’s a USA thing, because I’ve never seen this experience from non-USAians.
That or just over-generalisations? I’ve been mentally and physically abused by managers at large-scale companies.
Probably some mix of both.
North american entrepreneurs could be uniquely evil and unwell. But it’s true. Maybe the tax codes and culture of non-settler countries don’t encourage a “fuck everyone, my personal business dream is paramount” ethos in the petite-bourgeois as much.
Small businesses are a YMMV case. Can be rather suitable, can be a really bad experience, or anywhere in between.
The one thing I really like about them is that it’s easier to understand the entire workings of them. It’s much harder to keep secrets at a company with just one location. Something about seeing the stupidity of the owner firsthand is oddly comforting to me.
All work sucks. My best experiences have been in government because no one’s trying to make money, and local branches of international companies. They’re trying to make money, but no one working there directly owns the business
Depending on where you live, working for the government directly can be extremely toxic because there is too much influence from politicians who poison everything they touch. Government agencies that are not in direct contact with politics and are also not prone to austerity are probably the best workplaces
I just finished working a seasonal job at a mom-and-son owned place and ughhhh. What did I experience?
- sexual harassment from the boss on multiple occasions (I’m a cis guy);
- wage theft (not being paid despite being at work on time because the clock started and stopped when the boss felt like it).
Complaining about any of this just meant getting screamed at by the boss and having my job threatened. And nobody will hire me to do anything here. So I took the abuse.
I also spent about forty minutes a day, six or so days a week, for about five months, alone with the boss. In the beginning, we were friendly, and I even liked her, and I had to tell myself to not like her too much, since she was bound to fuck me over sooner or later as a petite bourgeois. And she did. She expected me to be a psychic, and then got furious with me when my psychic abilities failed to materialize. She herself caused an accident (when I wasn’t present) that resulted in thousands of dollars of damage, but she was much more patient with herself than with anyone else. If I had caused the same accident, she would have fired me and possibly sued me to recover the lost money. I made her about $600 per day for the entire period I worked for her. 5 x 4 = 20, 20 x 6 = 120, 120 x 600 = I made this woman $72,000 before expenses. She probably grossed a total of about $600,000 this summer.
So after she exploded with rage, I stopped talking with her except when necessary. As far as I could tell, she had no idea that I was basically just nodding along with whatever she was telling me. Or she didn’t care. Almost all she would do was complain about her competition. Which was just a bigger, better-organized business. I wanted to tell her that she liked capitalism and so she shouldn’t complain, but I needed the job.
At the end of the season, she told me that she had made more money than the previous season. This was of course because of my labor and the other workers (seven of us, including her son, worked for her). She’s at retirement age and was also working a truly unhealthy amount—basically sixteen-hour days seven-days-a-week for five months. I have known many small business owners who work like this, and it’s part of the reason they’re almost always such fucking assholes. For one 24-hour period in between two sixteen-hour days, she worked continuously. Her neighbor, who was the same age and I believe retired, died while I was working for her.
I’ve had mostly good experiences working for big business (as good an experience as you can have in hellworld, anyway), and really good experiences working for the government. One restaurant I worked for was okay. But the petite bourgeoisie is almost always bad news. Incompetent, ignorant, petty, unpleasant. Their political views are usually all over the place or just blatantly fascist.
I’m probably going to end up working for her again next summer. She was a Ukraine lib; her son was an insufferable DSA “socialist, but not a communist!” whom hexbear would eat alive.
I’m probably going to end up working for her again next summer.
reading this part punched me in the stomach
Money is money, feed yourself to the machine
Capitalist firms at scale are simply better because the owners physically can’t eye ball or harass every single employee in a given business day, the owner may be an absolute monster, but if you never meet them then the tyrant experience only shows up through indirectness and distinct shouts down the chain of command, resistance is easier and more opaque to the capitalists under those conditions, the owners can’t create cult-like conditions and personality traps as easily as they can in a constrained workplace
It’s easier to overwhelm through numbers when your immediate boss is a worker like you
This is one of the rarely spoken boons of capitalist centralization, it doesn’t just centralize the means of production, it also centralizes and socializes far more workers than the hyper-personal pressure cookers that small businesses inevitably devolve into
This is one of the rarely spoken boons of capitalist centralization, it doesn’t just centralize the means of production, it also centralizes and socializes far more workers
Yeah this was one of Marx’s brilliant insights. Industrialization took a scattered labor force, mostly working in the home and spread-out geographically, and put them under one roof in a factory. The revolutionary potential of this new association is clear. It makes me wonder why capitalists fight remote work so hard, when in my experience it is very alienating although in the short term I hate going in to work.
It makes me wonder why capitalists fight remote work so hard
I think (could be wrong) that it comes down to a few factors including the landlord capitalists renting out all that office space not wanting their assets tovlose value if even a significant chunk of people move to work from home, the general difficulty capital has seeing beyond the next quarter or two, and a push by middle-managers needing to justify their position to their higher-ups
History didn’t continue linearly from the 1800s.
As capitalism advanced further, the expansion of vertical process integration in the same location was not observed: factories were offshored to pit the proles of different nations [further] against each other, domestic production became distributed instead of continuing the trend of centralization, retail prevailed over wholesale as the “consumer-based economy” took hold, logistics became dominant over production as transportation and warehousing became cheaper than ever. An automotive worker today makes a few parts in a factory to be shipped off to another, and is arguably more alienated and atomized than an automotive worker a century ago who might have seen all the recognizable steps to make the specific product done in-house.
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie in Western countries honed their propaganda skills, secured their grip on the state apparatus, eliminated all serious communist upstarts, and made arrangements to mystify the acquisition of wealth while getting masses of proletarians to eagerly embrace all the financial instruments that both cemented themselves inside class relations and obscured those relations.
The foremost place where we really see arrangement/division of labor in a categorically more efficient and encompassing way is in a country that had a successful socialist revolution, skipped over the presumed necessity of organic capitalist development, and proceeded to beat the capitalists at their own game without ceding terms of the game to the capitalist powers.
150+ years later, the contradictions have not led to a resolution on their own, nor are they truly any closer to doing so. Victories have emerged from coherent movements with clear goals, fighting for something that necessitated a break in the continuity.
Small business owner I currently work for is a board member at the country club, where his buddies talked about cutting off the food as a solution to all these protests. The owner goes off on how great capitalism is and how awful communism would be, completely unprompted, apropos of nothing, almost like a nervous tick. Yeah, I can see how the petty bourgeois are the core constituency of fascism.
nervous tick
imagining a huge bloated insect wearing golf pants, gorged with blood, forehead sweating
bonus prescriptivism
(tic)
imagining a huge bloated insect wearing golf pants, gorged with blood, forehead sweating
Accurate
(tic)
Thanks for this valuable contribution
sorry wasn’t trying to be annoying I just liked the mental image of a tick in golf pants
All good, I’m feeling petty this morning, but you actually nailed the guy’s aesthetic :>
I’m a homeowner (manufactured home)and I’ve been ripped off by every independently owned contractor I’ve ever hired. At least the megacorp will send their underpaid employee who has no incentive to rip me off. More times than not they’ll give me free advice, free assistance, all mutual aid from one prole to another.
My experience as a homeowner has been the exact opposite. Independent contractors I can chat with and come to an understanding. Big corp employees don’t give a flying fuck and the company just blows me off.
Yah, an independent auto mechanic I “trusted” straight up robbed me
I usually become great friends with waitresses at restaurants so they’ll give me the dirt on their employer and a five finger discount (most will make an unspoken pact with you to deliver “free food” if you make the difference and tip them extra). I once salted a place for a union back in the day and everyone joined it
Worst situation I heard of was a pregnant lady that was then diagnosed with cancer being forced to work 7 days a week 5am-10pm as one of two waitresses at a very busy restaurant.
work 7 days a week 5am-10pm
Didn’t even think that that would be possible, not for more than a few weeks, let alone pregnant and with cancer.
she was honestly a tank of a woman. unfun fact people tip pregnant women far less apparently
“I once salted a place for a union back in the day and everyone joined it”
Incredibly based
Owning a small business makes one a fascist, it is empirical fact.
What sucks is the soulless megacorp knows what parts of the capitalist propaganda machine are real, and small business owners are overwhelmingly people who are more or less middle-men in many cases.
So they’re not making the money they imagine the self-made entrepreneuer should get. They’re buying into the stories and lies about their natural nobility, don’t understand why they’re still struggling, and the only recourse they have, because they’re sure as fuck not going to be negotiating with their suppliers, the business landlord, or anything else on basically any level, they want more money, their option is to fuck over the employees or their customers, or both
and because they believe they are, on some level, doing what you’re supposed to do in this society, they feel like their squeeze on their employees is justified
but like… we all know the truth of it?
the megacorp can take the hit, and its own sense of value and cost is warped compared to the small business owner - they’re just not hurting the same way paying somebody a ‘fair’ wage compared to the small biz tyrant.
it’s very funny in a way. Small biz tyrants are in some ways even more enslaved by the system, but their own internal logic absolves themselves and compells them to be terrible people. it’s amazing.
Yeah we’re seeing that with how many small to medium sized businesses have become dependent upon the Amazon distribution system.
I’ve worked for both and while both suck in their own ways I’ll take work at the average megacorp over mom&pop any day
With small businesses you basically have to suck up to your boss/owner for anything from raises (don’t hold your breath) to time off (prepare for the guilt trip), and since they’re the owner and directly impacted they’re way more willing to break the law & fuck you over in a million ways.
Megacorps also suck but in a more organized way. It’s more likely they’ll have a rubric for raises (or just outright tell you they don’t do raises but at least they don’t dangle the promise of a raise like a carrot) and it’s much easier in my experience to take time off (so long as it’s within their parameters of course). And they’re waaay less likely to do outright illegal shit since they have lawyers telling them how much shit they can get away with without being sued.
Basically big corps feel more honest about how they’re fucking you over while small businesses like to put on a friendly face while they screw you as hard as they can
seriously, small businesses are run by tyrants. that’s it. it’s either a tyrant or the business isn’t a business. it’s like working in a fiefdom that has a crown that just does whatever the fuck they want at anytime to anyone
To be just a number in obscure branch of an overcomplicated orgchart. Sounds like a dream.
Omg. My previous boss, who was the aforementioned POS VP, used to say, ‘Go work for AECOM if you want to just be a number!’ Oh yeah, go work for the largest full service firm in America where the benefits are triple what I give and because you’re just a number, you don’t get ground into a powder I can smoke.
Yeah no you’re totally right you fucking chud, why would I want to work for that! I’m supporting my local business that nickel and dimes the state government for every water system we design!!!1!!!
Aecom can gargle shit though lol. Hdr, jacobs, stantec, etc. too but yes agreed on all points.
After seeing the Walmart effect on people, I really don’t think there is any winning. Whether it’s small business or corpo, the job of a business is to extract wealth. Which means shitty attitudes; it’s just what flavor of it do you want.
I saw another comment somewhere that said that big business is easier to unionize, therefore the petite bourgeoisie is the real enemy of workers in the imperial core, although obviously the haute bourgeoisie also fucking sucks and consists of the luckiest and most bloodthirsty members of the petite bourgeoisie.
You would think. I can’t speak for all businesses but Walmart does something to people. They are very hard to unionize and can be very reactionary while they work there. Also weirdly antagonist to their fellow workers.
Don’t they have a daily Walmart pledge of allegiance or something?
I think it depends on the store
Some of this is buy-in to the power pyramid, and some of this is psychological association of the self with the company over several years (familiarity, entrenched habit, minimizing cognitive dissonance, sunk-cost fallacy, etc.), but these factors are present everywhere.
I’ve gotten that shaft too. I think it depends heavily on your personality type and whether you’re connected to the business’ owners which one will be better for your mental health. For me soulless megacorps where I can just do the bare minimum and go home (which is my current status quo as a contractor) is preferable to knowing my boss 9 times out of 10.
