Let’s go ahead and set the temperature by stating a couple things. First is that this applies to a group that is, by and large, very privileged in society - but don’t confuse that privilege with being an elite, because, as the saying goes, you are far closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire. And second, the undeniable fact is, your labor bought that pizza to begin with. Your value to any company that’s at the “Throwing a Morale Pizza Party” stage of moral decay is a well calculated formula in an Excel cell in someone’s network share. Calling it a reward when you are a net profit for the company is disingenuous at best and an outright picking of your pocket in most cases.
White collar work has long been propagandized away from unions, on the whole. A few pop up here and there and they are not to be discounted. They are a triumph and, in fact, should be well celebrated! But let out a box of wild bats into a room full of cubicle jockeys and most of your rabies vaccines are going into non-union arms. But hey, at least you got to let out a box of bats!
Most jobs that fall into this slowly-diminishing category are not represented by unions and are often actively discouraged from forming one. Office cheerleaders will offer, unsolicited, that a union would result in a pay cut for everyone because of dues and bonuses would disappear in favor of lower-yield yearly cost of living increases. They will say they love having the freedom to negotiate on their own, but you know that worm said yes to the first offer and has been licking boot ever since. HR will play the ‘family’ gambit and, you don’t ask your family for contracts (you absolutely should, by the way - in any business dealings). Don’t rock the boat! Nobody else is thinking about this. You’re ALL ALONE. You know, the same shit cults and abusive partners say. One of the things they will bring up is the disappearance of perks. Perk. PERK! Wow. I bet they have lovely plumage. Do tell if you ever spot one in the wild!
A perk, again, falls into compensation. Whether expected or unexpected, a perk will not tip the company into the red on your output at any level that doesn’t have a VP in the title. And at that point, you don’t get pizza parties. You get coked up and regret saying ‘yes’ to that island vacation. Well, you would if you had a soul. But since that’s not on the table inside most of modern capitalism’s extraction probes’ boardrooms, it’s very unlikely. You don’t get to sit with us.
So, you’ve made it. You’ve graduated from college a few times and have 50+ years of high-level experience at 24. What’s this enscribbled down here….or equivalent. What’s equivalent? RIGHT! Your dad knows a guy! Sweet! Or maybe you’ve legitimately worked your way to a desk job at what you think is a stable company. However you were able to enter this brutal work-scape, you’re here. And once you get your bearings on that, that’s when a company generally starts trying to make sure you know you’re here on their terms. All of that unlimited PTO you were told about? Nobody is brave enough to take it. The stack-rank they swore they no longer used when you asked about it in a 3-day, 16 hour interview you had to do on 2 hours of sleep? Well, there are 25 heads and 10 heads worth of bonus budget…how does that get distributed? Not evenly, that’s for sure. A rose by any other name is still a competitive incentivization strategy built on outdated psychological theory that discourages teamwork and introduces stressors to a work environment which reduce productivity and cause attrition of the smartest people since jumping jobs once you’re IN the system is often more lucrative and less stressful than trying to maintain a hostage/captor relationship with the people who get to say whether you have a home or not.
You strive to become salaried, which now ties your performance to output but no longer pays you for hours worked beyond your standard forty. You are pushed to complete menial tasks that have nothing to do with your job, eating up countless hours of productivity. Concentration and cognition have limits and you can’t squeeze more work out of less time without breaking something. So you stay longer. And you get more responsibility. And that takes more time. So you stay longer. You start getting calls on your time off. You start taking half-weekends. You are part of the hustle! Not BEING hustled! Right? Right? Hey, anyone…right?
You give up a little more of you every day. At a rate that far exceeds your compensation, even if you are a money weirdo who obsesses over your net worth. People are let go, but the workload doesn’t change. You sink that cost for free, as far as your employer is concerned. New merger? Gotta trim the fat! Oh, you survived the culling! Congratulations, you’re so very lucky and would be wise to remember that. Look at all those sad goodbye e-mails from people you called ‘my buddy at work’ or ‘work fam’ or if you’re a trash person with lifetime middle-manager written all over you, your ‘work spouse.’ That’s if they’re lucky enough to get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’ll just see them marched out with a box of shit they didn’t care enough about to leave at home anyway. Or in the Work From Home days, they’ll just not appear in a call one day. Like some guy you used to raid with who died IRL but nobody told the guild. They said “have a great weekend!” on Friday and today their profile picture is just their initials and you have all of their tickets in your inbox.
So instead of getting fair market value for your labor (you’re not getting the fruits of it…not in THIS economy), you’re getting some fraction of a savory pastry that, ironically, requires pi to calculate. What toppings would you like on your wage theft? Just kidding, shut the fuck up. We’re getting whatever the “office VP of FUN!” has in their quick-reorder cart at the middlest rated floppy-slice joint in town. It’s probably going to be a single pepperoni, one plain cheese, something with broccoli and red onion bullshit going on, a supreme that has so much vegetable matter on it that it’s four times thicker than any of the other pies and feels like eating a pineapple upside-down cake made from the Veggie Tales after they finally drink the Kool-Aid, and the wiltiest Caesar salad you’ve ever drank, complete with chicken that has sharpied-on grill marks. I’m just playing the odds here.
What would have been time and a half is now two greasy triangles of your third choice and Carl definitely pawed at one of them and he definitely didn’t stop at the sink on his way out of the restroom. But by this point, the fight has left you like a 1940s cartoon ghost, so you pretend to consider getting a salad bowl for half a second, grab a third slice - the broccoli bullshit, god dammit - and go eat at your desk because even chewing should have some guilt for not toiling. You then have to spend 15 minutes looking for paper towels because Carl - christ man, please just stop being…all this for half a second man! - dropped them all in the pepperoni oil when he took his four slices after pushing to the front of the line. Pizza…the perfect food for people whose primary job is pushing buttons on a keyboard. It’s 8:45pm, you have heartburn already and you’re pretty sure it’s sticking around for the rest of the evening. You’ve shaved another crescent of flesh onto the flesh heap and you get an e-mail that says ‘Thank you, team! You really came through. This is a big deal and people will notice! - Your Boss, Probumbus Morklefleeb.’ And you’ll say to your SO, “oh, I really think this is going to look good for me! I really think this might be my ticket up!” And you’ll bang like you used to before you started spending 10 minutes in the bathroom crying into a wad of one-ply that looks like it fell off of a truck in the bad part of the Exclusion Zone every day. And at the next All-Hands, Prombumbus Morklefleeb will get a little golden whozit on a chunk of fake wood with a little bronze sticker that was laser-printed to read “For Solving A Problem By Throwing Bodies At It, And He Did It All Himself.” And he’ll say he couldn’t have done it without his team and he’ll point to someone who isn’t even in your department and smile then wave to the whole crowd like he was about to be played off stage. He’ll get twice his salary in stock that will probably bust before it vests and a trip to Sheboygan for a conference where he’ll try to make a pass at a mascot for one of seven startup AI companies with an anus logo, knowing full well it was a robot. You’ll get a T-shirt with the company’s logo on it to be a billboard for them when you’re looking for a TV at Best Buy to put in one of the only two rooms left in your condo with no screen - you just really hope the shower won’t steam it up too badly. You get a room-temperature La Croix and a bunch of fake numbers that make it look like your company that makes fax software for minidisc distributors’ customer database ingestion look like it’s about to be purchased for a majillabillion dollars and NOT audited even a little bit! Your CEO is Zoomed in from somewhere that looks like Thailand. When your review comes around, you get stacked dead center and two of the people who pulled all-nighters were let go. One right after she got back from parental leave and another just before they started chemo. “Poor team fit. Remember, you are never safe! Thin ice breaks under many feet…CYA, IYKWIM!” It’s not said, of course. But it’s implied.
Once or twice a month, the janitor gets to risk getting fired for stealing the last piece left instead of throwing it out (it was the supreme, but Carl took all of the meat off of the slice and this time he had toilet paper stuck to his shoe, so god only knows….). A few hundred bucks that’s likely got some tax-deductable classification to replace thousands of dollars - again, just the market cost for your labor, not the value of the product of it. Getting forced to go curling or play whirlyball or get tick bites on your buttcrack or get shot in the throat with a paintball isn’t a reward. Some luke-warm spaghetti and de-breaded chicken nuggets with a little oyster sauce dabbed on them and a handwritten label reading “pod tie” isn’t a bonus. If it was, they’d have already stopped doing it.