This is a continuation of my indefinite series, The Silicon Valley Problem. Catch yourself up by reading Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, in which I discuss the subordination of creative work, the deliberate ambiguity of algorithm function, and the inability to create an effective boycott.
Silicon Valley leaders aren’t blind to the power they wield. On the contrary, it’s what gives them their messianic complexes. Don’t click those links, there’s no new information in there; what’s important is that I arrived at those links by clicking the first six results from googling “silicon valley messiah.” The point is, silicon valley leaders (continuing readers will recall that I’m using “silicon valley” as the shorthand for break-as-you-go tech companies) have a knowledge of the power they wield, even if they don’t truly understand it. The problem is that their understanding of that power is largely rosy: They have the ability to control the lives of their users and their employees, but they are a fundamental force for good, that good being connectivity, union, free speech, et cetera. The word paternalism comes to mind: They know they’re more powerful than you, infinitely so, really, and so their duty becomes to protect you.
I’d like to propose an alternative term: amicism. It’s similar to paternalism, a branch of it maybe, but amicist companies are different in the way they present themselves and the kinds of things they do for their subordinates. I don’t have the space or knowledge to break down the amicist forces behind all of silicon valley’s activities, so today I’d like to focus just on their work culture.
Considering the Gilded Age
In the 1880s, George Pullman founded Pullman, IL just outside of Chicago for his workers. He provided housing, markets, libraries, and convenient access to work, all for the simple price of having to live there as an employee of the Pullman Company. This would become one of the earliest and largest examples of the company town, an idea that has become entrenched in memory as an example of the Gilded Age and was of course by no means limited to Pullman.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no Facebook, California (though maybe you could make a larger argument that Silicon Valley the location serves as a de facto company town for Silicon Valley the economic force), no company paying its workers in vouchers that can only be used at the company store, no company demanding its workers live on campus. Because the tech giants don’t present themselves in as blatant an oppressively paternalistic way as their Gilded Age predecessors, there’s been a resistance to calling them a kind. Yet just as in my last piece I discussed how Amazon and Google have managed a new form of monopoly that’s resistant to recognition as such, the tech giants have created a form of paternalism that’s more hidden, and acknowledging it means giving up certain things that make working there more palatable for the employee.
Defining Amicism
Where paternalism is the notion that a body with higher authority limits the free will of subordinates under the guise of acting as their protectors, amicism is when a body of higher authority limits the free will of subordinates under the guise of being their friend.
Where corporate paternalism creates the company store and the company town and forces its employees into it, amicism is more gentle. There’s an enormous food court of free lunch at work not because you have to eat there, just because we’re your buddy, let us buy you a bite. You want to go to the gym? Hey, I’ve got a gym, you wanna just come over and use mine? Traffic really sucks, you wanna ride my bus to work? Bring your dog? These things are offered to the employee as perks, and on the surface, they are. They offer convenient access to all things a person needs in their personal life, and generally for free. It’s the least we can do, says the company. Allow us.
On the surface, these seem like great ideas. There’s no pretending that American’s don’t have a work-life-balance problem, and if offering extra-curriculars makes an employee happy, what’s the problem?
Well allow me to propose two: 1) These amenities create an environment where the corporate campus becomes the employee’s whole life, whether they’re working or not, and 2) They allow the company to appear progressive while mistreating peripheral workers.
The Company College Campus
The new company town is free, and like any other community, it’s got everything you need. You don’t need to pay for a gym membership, you don’t need to pay for food or drinks. You can walk outside, through the park, on a bike trail, grab a coffee with friends, play with your dog. You can do everything you’d ever want to do, just short of living there—oh, sorry, you can do that too!
But nobody’s forced to live there; it’s not a municipality. Less than a company town, more of a college campus, and this is by design. College students don’t have work hours, and they don’t have a work-life-balance in the same way other adults do. If they get done with class, they’ll grab dinner, maybe hang out with friends, and then study afterwards. Or maybe they’ll stay up all night studying. Student’s don’t “clock out” the way that non-students do: If there’s work done and they’re nearby to do that work, they’ll go do it. This is especially the case in high-competition, high-demand majors like engineering or computer science.
Supplying all of the “life” side of the work-life dichotomy ensures that employees spend long hours on campus even after they’re “done working.” Especially in the Bay Area and Seattle, nobody wants to sit in traffic for an hour after work just to get to the gym, much better to have a gym on campus. The company is incentivized to to this because it keeps employees local just in case more work needs doing. Read the link above: Employees report being on call 24/7 for a period of weeks, during which time they don’t leave town and seldom leave campus.
Sometimes the company will outwardly discourage this with incentives like unlimited PTO, but again, this is a trap. Companies with unlimited PTO report less time off taken by employees, who aren’t clear on what the appropriate limits to this policy are. Furthermore, in a traditional PTO system, time you don’t take off gets paid back to you, while under an unlimited PTO system, time off not taken is money lost.
The result is that employees go from the culture of their engineering major in college (long work hours, little socializing, but convenient campus amenities), right to the same culture at work.
Friends Without Benefits
One of the saddest New York Times articles I’ve read in years shows two custodians: one a custodian for Kodak in the 1980s, one a custodian at Apple now. While the two got paid roughly the same in inflation-adjusted terms, the custodian at Kodak was a full, benefitted employee of that company, with four weeks of paid vacation, stipends to go to college, and advancement opportunities. The custodian at Apple wasn’t actually an employee of that company, but of a separate company contracted by Apple, and she got none of those benefits.
The truth is that most major companies don’t hire their own custodial or maintenance staff anymore, and instead contract out other companies. This keeps them, as they like to say, “lean and core-focused,” and offers up some kind of shining example of capitalism at its most efficient. But of course, if contractors get mistreated, it doesn’t reflect on the company that hired them in nearly the same way. Google famously got hit last year over its handling of sexual harassment complaints, but only after twenty thousand workers walked out over it.
Conclusion
Amicism looks good on paper. No, if you’re a recent college graduate lucky to have been hired by one of the largest corporations in history, amicism may look good in person too. For those lucky enough to be included in that friendship, you feel indebted to your company in a more personal way, more willing to give up time otherwise devoted to friends and family and return it to the company for free. After all, when the company becomes your friend, time spent there becomes time spent on friendship. This is necessarily exclusionary to the working class that allow a business to function, the result of a classist society in which it’s a rarity that a Stanford-educated programmer is friends with a custodian.
A business is responsible for treating its workers fairly and respectfully, but a friendship is an equality. When you cease to run your business like a business, you abdicate responsibility for treating well workers you don’t see as equal; when you run a business like a friendship, you invite in the classist underpinnings of the society in which you operate. Reinforcing that class system will always benefit the company: It allows them to overlook benefits and fair treatment to its working class, and incentivizes its deskworkers to free labor in the name of gratitude.