Tired, underpaid, overworked, and I've got Stockholm Syndrome
You work like a donkey all day, five days in a row. Your first day off is spent in a stupor of recovery while your second day off is spent carefully conserving your energies for the ruthless five-day grind ahead. You repeat this obstacle course another three times and scarcely does your month of back-breaking work bear fruit when more than half of it is swallowed by the hideous triumvirate of rent, bills, and taxes. The remains must be used to get through the upcoming month and whatever meagre scraps are left over – if any – can either be used as savings or for leisure.
Such is the unbalanced condition of the working class who survive rather than live through this bounteous life in which every material comfort comes at a steadily increasing price.
They say that if you do what you love then you’ll never work a day in your life. The flaw in this saying is that it implies a choice, as if the job which will bring you the fulfilment and satisfaction you’ve been lacking this whole time is simply waiting for you to get it, if you’d just get off your ass. Unsurprisingly a large majority of us don’t have jobs we love, which means that we work almost every day of our lives. Working a dead-end job which you don’t particularly want to do but you stick with it anyway because the lights have to be kept on is one thing. However, when that dead-end job is seething in a toxic environment and anxiety grips you at the merest thought of arriving at work, that is an entirely different monster. And considering how almost all Gen-Z and late Millennial youths suffer from depression or social anxiety or some other kind of nervous condition, that leaves a huge population of young workers trapped under the claw of this work monster.
Yet, a behaviour most perplexing can be noticed among many such workers who loathe their jobs because it’s sucking their vitality out of them: they refuse to quit. Not only do they refuse to quit but they’ll make excuses for why they should stay.
You probably know a person like this. They haven’t a single positive thing to say about their job. Each time their mouths open on the subject of their job, all that comes out is a complaint. But curiously, upon the suggestion of quitting their job, they can give you a whole list of reasons why they shouldn’t. The usual suspects are financial reasons, self-esteem, loyalty to the staff or company, and sometimes time-based excuses where a person will say they’ll quit after working for x amount of time but keep delaying their expectant resignation.
Inherent masochistic tendencies can’t be the reason why many people choose to prolong their degradation through soul-sucking and toxic labour – but let’s not rule that explanation out for an exceptional few. So what makes these twisted work dynamics more common than they should be?
A glance at the behaviour of many people under the thumb of their jobs will show just how similar they are to the behaviours associated with Stockholm syndrome.
For those of you who don’t know what it is, Stockholm syndrome is a rare and baffling psychological aberration where a hostage or victim will begin to identify themselves and empathise with their captor or oppressor. The bones of this condition are that there should be no prior relationship between the victim and their captor, the victim begins to form positive feelings for their captor, the victim believes in the humanity of their captor and justifies their treatment of them, and finally, the victim refuses to cooperate with anyone trying to emancipate them from their captor.
The condition was first noticed in the aftermath of a bank heist in Stockholm, Sweden. The perpetrator, Jan-Erik Olsson, took four of the bank employees hostage and locked them, along with himself, in one of the vaults for six days as a ploy to negotiate the release of one of his friends from prison. Eventually the cops managed to foil Olsson’s plans by drilling a hole through the wall and filling the vault with tear gas which led to Olsson surrendering. However, during those six days the hostages formed a bizarre attachment to their captor, sympathising with his motives and even criticising the police – who were ultimately trying to save them – for escalating the situation. Even more peculiar was how the hostages straight up refused to testify against Olsson in court. And their attachment wasn’t brief as in interviews years after the incident both their sympathies for Olsson and criticism for the police and government persisted. An imbalanced power dynamic - whether it stemmed from Olsson waving a gun around in the hostage’s face or the police risking the hostage’s safety by pushing Olsson too hard – was clearly the reason behind the hostage’s off-kilter behaviour towards their attacker. In a position of helplessness, the hostages put themselves in league with the person who held all the power in that situation.
As it stands, Stockholm syndrome is only a proposed condition and many hard-line psychologists continue to dispute its validity over the dearth of proper scientific studies conducted regarding it. The circumstances in which Stockholm syndrome manifests (abusive relationships) are just too particular for any conclusive and varied experiments to be carried out. After all, how do you lab test an abusive relationship? At any rate, the behaviours associated with Stockholm syndrome have been noticed and documented on more than one occasion. This proposed condition serves as a perfect model for the imbalanced power dynamics which exist in many workplaces and the abnormal behaviours they drive workers to.
The source of inordinate power in the workplace is obvious; the person who signs your payslips and ensures your financial survival. And it’s when people start to mistake financial survival for survival itself that they become subject to the immense power an employer holds. But that’s an incredibly easy mistake to make considering how money really does ensure your quality of life.
One could say that life is but a collection of memories and experiences, while another could say that life is but a collection of expenses; both are so equally true they’re almost synonymous. On top of rent, bills, and taxes, there are a plethora of expenditures which go into making a happy life possible. The craftier and less materialistic among us can forego a lot of those expenses and still retain relative happiness, but there are certain expenses that even the most twinkly-eyed of us can’t evade. Basics like food, commute, and clothing.
For the working class, especially those who have families to support or young workers without familial support, the basics are the absolutes. The questions of a roof over their head, food in their belly, and clothes on their back are answered by their continued payslips.
All of this is magnified to a relative degree depending on what city you live in. An expensive metropolitan vortex like London or New York or Paris entails a far more vertiginous brink for those to plummet down from who can’t feed the voracious appetite of comfortable survival, a brink which yawns over homelessness.
Of course not all working-class people spend their lives in such jittery financial misery, it would be an affront to the human ability of finding happiness to suggest such a thing. But it would also be an affront to the stark troubles of those who do spend every day of their lives wracked by financial stress by not acknowledging the state of life lived by much of the working class.
So considering the linchpin that money is to the sustenance of life in modern society and the cost-of-living crisis currently raging in the UK, it’s easy for many workers to build a dependency on their jobs. A warning espoused by former drug addicts and those with foresight is that the moment you form a dependency on something is when the certainty of abuse is born.
All it takes for a job - one which you love or not - to transform into a flaying of your well-being is your employer or someone else above your position finding out that your livelihood relies on this job. Such a discovery is more imperilling in difficult-to-obtain career jobs like finance or healthcare etc, rather than dead-end, unskilled and low-paid work precisely because your boss – just like Olsson from the bank heist in Stockholm – controls your security and future. But the threat to your future, once your boss figures out you rely so completely on your job, is no less real in unskilled and low-paid work such as in the hospitality and retail sector. In either case, once your boss knows that you’re reliant upon your job, they possibly begin taking liberties with how far you’re willing to go to keep yourself in work, and, whether intentionally or not, they’ll push the line at which the job isn’t worth it anymore further and further.
It is at this point that things begin to turn ugly for you. You’re expected to give more than you’re already giving – and can even give – to this job, and when you fall short of this unrealistic expectation then the treatment from your boss becomes all mixed-up and passive-aggressive. Honest mistakes are met with vitriolic admonishments, requests which are well within your rights as a worker are denied, you’re singled out from your colleagues for shame, and you’re made the workplace pariah.
Before everything I’ve outlined so far begins to sound like conjecture, let me tell you a few stories about workers whom I’ve spoken to so we may learn about the nature of their entrapment. Perhaps some lessons on perseverance exist in their experiences for us to take into our own rotten jobs. Where money is the first and obvious answer to why these workers and many others in similar situations choose to stay in jobs they detest, it’ll become clear that the roots of this problem run deeper than money.
All the names have been changed.
Marzia is a 24-year-old Aussie with a spark in her eyes which - filtered through her slightly wonky plastic spectacles – will brighten your day. With the candid heart of a typical shit-talking Australian, she recounts her time working in a café located in Kensington, London. Unlike the posh, pricey, and commercial offerings characteristic of the area, this artisanal, independent café has a more down-home feel. Her responsibilities were concentrated on the food section, the likes of preparing all the ingredients and assembling the food, but like the rest of the staff she was expected to do everything else too.
She used to be on the other side of the counter before she began working there. She visited the place a couple of times and “I fell in love with the place because the coffee was good, the matcha was excellent, and the customer service was good. Not just a few bored people, hating their lives, serving burnt coffee with a sneer on their faces.” So when she saw a piece of paper taped to the window telling of a vacancy, she wasted no time in applying, and because the place was nearly always looking for staff, she got the job.
An intrepid traveller, Marzia wanted this job so it could fund her frequent wanderings about the Earth, and she emphasised this point during the interview. “Equally I wanted this job as it could be casual, flexible, and wouldn’t lock me into a 9-5”, which considering the level of the job isn’t an outlandish expectation to hold. Hospitality has its own anti-social hours, starting late during the day and finishing at some godless hour of the morning, but only if you work in a bar. Marzia was applying to a café after all, and past a certain time of the day, coffee does more harm than good.
“I wanted work that I didn’t have to think about when I wasn’t there, and that would allow me the freedom to make the most of living in a new city.” Indeed, Marzia had just recently moved to London too after finishing an interior design course at Edinburgh University, and London being the swirling concrete maelstrom that it is, the line where the freedom to live exists requires a job to get to it. Unless you’re rich.
In the beginning, Marzia was entirely reliant upon the income from this job to feed the insatiable eater of rent, bills, and daily living expenses. Between those, she had peanuts left over, and those weren’t going to take her very far around the world. In the name of fairness, on a part-time contract (which Marzia was working) it’s unrealistic to expect anything more than covering the essentials, especially in London. But frequently having her already slim hours cut wasn’t helping, so “when I found myself barely making ends meet I had to find another job to help me.”
Despite London’s extensive transport system, it’s very frequently out of whack because of strikes, delays, and incidents, something which didn’t spell good news for Marzia as her tricky commute to work was under constant threat of lateness. “I have felt anxious when I’m inevitably running a few minutes late” and her anxiety wasn’t unfounded either because her slightly late arrival never lacked the bitterness of a calling out.
Things steadily declined as the job which she didn’t want to think about when she wasn’t there began following her home. Marzia felt like her boss, a combustible Italian, was giving her a particularly hard time out of everyone else. Her boss was pedantic to an absurd degree and liked things to be done a very particular way: his way. And as it goes, when things didn’t go his way, Marzia would instantly find herself in the firing line of her boss’ verbal aggression. Little and honest mistakes would be confronted with fiery castigation, and the safety of being at home, away from work, didn’t shield her from it either as she’d often receive messages from her boss highlighting her shortcomings. “I have felt stressed on my days off when I receive yet another condescending or passive-aggressive text.” It appeared to Marzia that her name was indelibly marked in her boss’ bad books with a black Sharpie because no matter what she did he’d be the first to pick out the faults in it.
Her boss had conceived this wild idea that Marzia wasn’t entirely committed to the job. Where might he have gotten this impression from? Perhaps the seed grew out of a conversation he had with Marzia where he reportedly said, “It’s not enough that you’re here on time every day and you do the job completely. I want you to do more.” Having set these unattainable standards, her boss just couldn’t stand the idea that she wasn’t entirely devoted – in mind and body – to the cause of work. Understandably when you own the business you’re completely dedicated to every aspect of it, and it would be a great bonus if your staff shared your dedication, but to expect your staff to share it is just inviting disappointment.
Given Marzia’s boss viewing her as some kind of abomination, you can just about imagine the treatment she got when she approached him for requests. “I felt guilty when I asked for specific days off and genuinely scared to ask for time off to go on a 4-day holiday (which they knew I would be doing when they employed me)”, and this guilt wasn’t natural but imposed as her boss would often make her feel blameworthy when she simply asked for things that are well within her rights as a worker. There was ever-present this ludicrous rhetoric that Marzia was letting her colleagues down somehow by asking for certain days off, and this rhetoric was stuffed down Marzia’s soul like gunpowder down a canon. “I hate that if I needed to request time off or let someone know I was running late it had to go through a group chat, it felt like group shaming and this group chat, for me, was immensely toxic.”
Ahhh the workplace group chat. What an enigmatic, bastard thing. Group chats in themselves, even the casual ones you have with friends, are such a flawed and unstable creation. They’re like old bombs lodged into the ground, the relic of some ancient air raid, keeping everyone on edge over when the thing is going to explode. No one knows exactly when the real purpose of the group chat is going to be blasted away by the shrapnel of random memes and multiple simultaneous conversations, but it’s going to inevitably happen and blow up your notifications along with it. When the ensuant chaos of the explosion reaches its zenith, people simply leave the group and this empty chat remains like a black crater on their chat list.
Workplace group chats are doubly weird because they actually work properly. There’s something uncanny about a thing formerly so useless suddenly operating perfectly, your mind can’t quite accommodate its two states – uselessness and usefulness – within itself. Workplace group chats have a few needles pricked into their skin to ensure they operate smoothly without turning spasmic. For one, you’re not allowed to be yourself. Keep things purely work-related. Imagine LinkedIn but as a group chat. Secondly, and most crucially, you’re not allowed to leave. Imagine being in a meeting but all the attendants are handcuffed to their chairs. The best you can do is mute notifications but that risks missing some important piece of communication, so that isn’t an option either.
Anyway, with that gratuitous ramble about group chats out of the way, the specific group chat which was the source of Marzia’s gripes was essentially the post on which the condemned is tied to be executed by firing squad. Not only were all of Marzia’s requests for days off or specific shifts – a business which should only be between the employee and employer – put on display for all to see, but also for everyone to see were all the disapproving replies against her requests. In all fairness to Marzia’s employers, they did grant almost every request she made but not without a good barrage of public shaming, both on and off the group chat, that it completely soured her mood and filled her with anxiety if ever she needed to request specific days off.
No self-respecting individual would put up with such behaviour if it came from just anybody, but most of us just roll over and receive it when it comes from our employers. We hold our tongues and choose our fights against our bosses sparingly because the more we defend ourselves against the tirades of a work tyrant on a power trip the more uncertain our job security becomes. “No point humouring this person and getting fired”, you tell yourself, “just grin and bear it.” This runs the risk of desensitizing yourself towards your employer's unpleasantness to such an extent that it just appears normal to you. Marzia saw no point in calling them out on their egregious treatment towards her either because “I think that there would be an apology, and then those behaviours would continue to happen.” No matter how pointless it may seem to confront your employer’s abusive behaviour, do it anyway. The satisfaction of having stood up for yourself is alone worth it. If no one personally stands up to these megalomaniac bosses, we’re allowing them to turn us into their plaything. State your views. Furthermore, do it with a refined tact where you’re calling out your boss but in such a calm and neutral way that you’ll never slip down to their level as that’s exactly how you throw fuel on the fire and get yourself fired.
If called out on their unprofessional behaviour, sometimes an employer will play a certain card against their worker; telling them to be better in order to be treated better. Marzia thought that she’d be “told to do better so that these behaviours wouldn’t be warranted anymore” if she called out her boss. Which on the face of it is a good argument. Be better and you won’t be criticised all the time. And in a healthy work environment which isn’t a psychological battleground this argument works. But this line of reasoning is flawed in a toxic workplace because when staff are expected to perform well under dreadfully tense situations with their bosses breathing down their necks, micromanaging and shouting at them at the slightest slip-up, they’ll just make more mistakes and their performance will stagger. Without the proper nurturing staff deserve from their employers to feel comfortable and confident working somewhere, a vicious cycle is set in motion where stress leads to failing performance which then leads to more severe stress and failing performance when caustic criticism is all they get to nurse their wounds.
For around 7 months Marzia worked there. Apart from money, what made her stay as long as she did? “I didn’t feel comfortable leaving this job without having something else to fall back on, so finding other employment was a big factor.” A factor which was maximised by her living in London where a long stretch of unemployment can burn a yawning hole into anyone’s finances which will take months to recover. It’s downright foolish to leave a job without having another lined up, but some people just have better luck with finding jobs than others so it’s a case-by-case thing. “However, I do know that if I had found another job I would’ve been pretty nervous about informing them of my leaving because I know they would’ve reacted angrily and accused me of being ‘disrespectful’ and other such ridiculous terms.” Fortunately for Marzia, she did end up finding another job but her prediction came true as during the last few weeks of her employment she constantly had her hours cut and the few days she did work were made rigid by a palpable coldness in her boss’ behaviour towards her.
Marzia believes guilt to be a massive determinant in people’s decision to stay in jobs they hate. On top of the guilt that’s fabricated by malicious employers and piled on their staff to erase their boundaries, the guilt Marzia refers to comes from your own conscience. “I would’ve felt pretty guilty about leaving my co-workers and the company in a tricky spot if I just quit.” Co-workers make sense because given all the things people go through together at work, it’s difficult not to form a complicit bond with them. But the company? What favours does Marzia think she owes them in return for the glorious way they treated her? “That’s just me and my skewed moral compass. I feel bad if I don’t do right by people and don’t wish to cause any harm or damage by my own actions.” Even though these people are causing harm to her. “There’s definitely an aspect of people pleasing involved.”
What Marzia is speaking about isn’t unique to her; many people act similarly, especially in the workplace. We go to great lengths to ensure the comfort and happiness of other people, which in itself isn’t a problem, but when it’s for people who don’t deserve it or are causing discomfort to you, what does that say about the society in which we socialise? The expectation of being polite and proper, not causing a fuss or making a scene looms large over all our interactions. Centuries of social conditioning have sculpted us into light-footed beings who can tread on eggshells without breaking them. Perhaps it's just a British thing? But to suggest that all British people are socially considerate creatures is a generalisation and walking down any British high street on a Friday night will disprove that. Or maybe wanting to stay on other’s good sides is just an attribute of a kind and good-natured person. However, you can also become too kind for your own good.
Balance and boundaries are everything.
Regardless of whatever spiteful treatment you might receive from your work, take a page out of Marzia’s book and fend it off with stoic humour and a cool exterior because the irrational jabbering of an employer drunk on power isn’t worth getting your emotions in a stir over. As difficult and seemingly contradictory as it sounds, learn to separate your job and the reason you’re doing it from the people who control the circumstances and conditions of your job. This takes a steely resolve which, although tricky to harness, is inherent in all of us: the resolve of survival.
However, sometimes survival requires us to stay in places which are detrimental to our health and well-being. If it slowly chips away at our vitality, is it even survival anymore?
Indigo is a 21-year-old Swedish girl, with a face as soft and welcoming as her nature, who constantly has a nimbus of kindness emanating from her. With a candour which comes from a past long-forgotten, she tells me of two jobs where she was trapped under the necessities of survival, all the while the very thing she was working to keep alive was losing its substance and even occasionally under threat.
Skara is a small town in Sweden where the main attraction is a cathedral. This imposing and splendid cathedral, however, plays no part in the story I’m about to tell. Our story takes place just a twenty-minute walk away, at an establishment as religious as Skara Cathedral but lacking in all its sublime architectural and spiritual aspects. McDonald's. Situated on a derelict stretch of road with islands of grass sprouting out of it like a haphazardly shaved face, the only thing more pathetic than this McDonald’s is the perpetually empty petrol station across the road. It was at this cathedral of early onset heart conditions that Indigo worked at the age of 16.
You won’t have to think too hard to imagine the quality of clientele Indigo had to serve daily. The most exemplary candidates of rudeness would often dine there. These customers hadn’t the decency to speak to the staff respectably, such an idea was lightyears from their minds. To these weird people, shouting abuse at the staff was a completely acceptable and rational thing to do. “One guy started yelling at me so much that it made me cry because the kitchen had gotten his order wrong. I only took his order.” I imagine that’s a rite of passage for most McDonald’s staff, they’re truly initiated into the team once something or other about the job has caused them to break down in burning tears. These exceptional customers also took the abuse of staff to a whole new level by using them for target practice. “They often threw food at us, nuggets and dips usually.” Indigo remembers how tremendously entitled the customers were too, always demanding – with the desperate zeal of an addict going through withdrawal – the staff to stick around longer and serve them after closing time. Nonsense complaints about why the food didn’t look the way it did in the pictures were also the usual fare.
Whether in an expensive, luxurious restaurant or a filth-ridden fast food place, it's fascinating how equally entitled and stuck-up the customers are in both these environments. There’s just no pleasing them, they expect perfection both when they spend a ludicrous amount of money or nearly no money at all.
Anyway, you get the idea about the type of white trash Indigo was face to face with while working at McDonald’s. But it wasn’t just the customers who were making her work life intolerable, the main source of her grief was coming from her own allies. Most of her colleagues were older men, in their late thirties and early forties, which is about the most comfortable environment for a 16-year-old girl to be in. Surely these aged men would act within the bounds of social propriety, especially with an underaged girl… right?
“So these guys would make some pretty sexist comments about me and the other girls who worked there. One time I was taking the bins out and two of them came over to tell me that I’d won. They had been rating all the women based on whom they’d like to date most, and they chose me. I just looked at them uncomfortably and said, ‘I’m only taking out the bins here guys.’”
“There was this other time when I was drinking water and one of them walked past me, and while he did that he touched my stomach and passed his hand across my waist.”
“One of them texted me out of the blue asking me to be his girlfriend.” Need I remind you that these men were old enough to be Indigo’s father at the time?
“Another one of them came up to me and asked me if he could take me out for a cola. I was underage then so I couldn’t drink which is why he asked to take me for a cola.”
Something which I fail to understand every time is why older men refuse to stick to their age group. You’ve seen this too, in the form of middle-aged men dancing in a club marketed for and populated by university students, or an older man approaching a group of girls at a bar, or an old celebrity married to a woman a fraction of their age. Makes no sense. It’s like the older they get, the hungrier they are for fresher meat. I don’t know what kind of reverse oedipal magic is at work here but it’s as if these men want daughters to fuck rather than make it with someone who shares their age.
Anyhow, after a litany of attempts at courtship by these shrivelled old men, Indigo finally felt terrified enough to take the matter to the management. Little help they turned out to be, what with the fractured management running the place. “There was one manager who cared too much and micromanaged us, there was one who didn’t care at all, and then there was one who cared the right amount.” Indigo went with her complaint right to the one who cared the right amount, but when you’ve got three horses pulling a cart in whatever direction each of them chooses the cart goes nowhere and instances of sexual harassment against a minor are dealt with warnings rather than actions.
Although the warnings succeeded in protecting Indigo from the depraved behaviour of these old men, they didn’t tackle the real problem by correcting their behaviour or making an example out of them by simply firing them.
For six months Indigo worked at that McDonald’s for the obvious reason of being financially dependent on the job. However, is financial survival really that important that a person can be willing to trudge through the grossest kind of harassment against them? “I think when someone faces abuse at work they always minimise it by thinking ‘it’s not that bad’ or ‘it could be worse’ even though it really is that bad. And many people don’t realise when they do it because their job is for some reason important and they don’t want to lose it.” Indigo strikes a mournfully important point here about the depths a worker is willing to sink just to keep a job. The perceived prospect of doom and struggle with unemployment is so great that they’d rather disbelieve their senses and contradict the horrible reality of their work. How long a person is capable of carrying on this dissonance between their perception and reality differs from worker to worker but they all eventually reach the point where the assaults from their reality can no longer be ignored and the outcome is usually a nervous breakdown followed by quitting the job. So if the outcome involves quitting the job to escape hell anyway, why not do it much earlier and save yourself the nervous breakdown and months of defence against abuse? That’s a crude and over-simplistic way of putting it, I’m aware, but if certain contingencies are put in place such as searching for another job the moment your current one turns ugly then this over-simplistic notion can become a real option.
Four years and 1600 kilometres later, Indigo is a 20-year-old woman studying music in London and has a clear idea of what she wants to make out of herself, but survival keeps getting in the way. As an international student who doesn’t get a maintenance loan to spend on survival or blow up on alcoholism as the British do, Indigo took a job at Knot, the people responsible for those pretzel and coffee stands you can find in every other Underground station. For identity protection reasons it needs no mentioning what station Indigo worked in but what I will state are the gruelling conditions of her work.
To open the stall at 6:00 in the morning, coinciding with the start of the Underground timetable, Indigo had to rise before the sun at 4:30 am, get ready, travel to work, prepare the pretzels, set up the coffee machine, open the stall, all within that frenzied hour and a half. A tsunami of morning commuters with sleep weighing their eyes down would crash on the shores of the coffee stand to form a vague and disorderly queue. After a flustered Indigo would fight her way out of the morning rush, the rest of the day was propelled by random periods of busyness during the peak hours and moments when she’d be standing around doing nothing. On and on it went, for 9 or even 10 hours, and without any help or company because Indigo was expected to work the stall all by herself. Making and serving the coffee and pretzels as well as opening and closing, all of it she’d do alone on her shifts. Not only was she expected to carry out two people’s work but execute it perfectly too otherwise her hot-headed Italian manager would tell her off in a blood-curdling manner.
Indigo’s manager wasn’t one to shout or raise her voice, her face alone was sufficient to achieve that effect. With a stern attitude so rigid that you’d need a pickaxe to get through it, it’s no wonder that Indigo – with her sensitive disposition made more delicate by her social anxiety – was constantly flustered around her. So when Indigo was unable to get things done according to her exacting standards, the manager would simply ignore the unrealistic workload already dumped on Indigo and would tell her off in an icy and tense manner that it would rattle Indigo till the end of the workday. “The way she spoke to me sometimes just made things more stressful than they needed to be. Sometimes it would be over very little things like something not being where it's supposed to be and she’d just tell me off in such a tense way.”
Often enough, near the end of the shift when Indigo would be itching to run away, her manager would ask her to stay an extra few hours in a manner which made refusal on Indigo’s part a foolish act of self-endangerment. All right, that was a bit overly dramatic, but keep in mind her manager’s intimidating, prison-warden-type face, her cement-like demeanour, and her nit-picky micro-management, then tell me you wouldn’t buckle under her pressure, especially if you have social anxiety. So Indigo’s answer, whether she liked it or not, would be “Of course I can stay longer.”
This predatory behaviour where a manager or higher-up bends their workers to their will is predicated entirely on fear and intimidation. Such unscrupulous employers choose their prey among the socially sensitive or those who are just too kind and obliging. Handling their staff members with rough abandon and thinly veiled aggression, the management makes them do things they don’t want by putting them on the spot and expecting an agreement otherwise the historic pattern of ill-treatment continues. They strongarm their way through the workplace and manipulate the staff with threats disguised as requests.
Indigo ended up working at Knot for six months and apart from money she stayed as long as she did out of a fondness for her co-workers. “I really liked the people who I worked with. I normally was working alone but sometimes, very rarely, I’d be put on the rota to work with another person and in those times it felt like we were properly staffed. It didn’t feel stressful or overwhelming. And if we knew that the manager was going to be in later we’d quickly clean everything up before she got here because we knew she’d say something.” Being so deprived of help and company at work, the few times she did receive it she made strong bonds with her colleagues as they had shared experiences of enduring the hardships of the job. Forming such a bond of camaraderie with your colleagues, especially if you work under the thumb of a power-hungry boss, is just unavoidable. It’s the spirit of working, and in some cases suffering, alongside one another which cultivates this bond. So it’s no surprise that many people use sticking around for their work friends as an excuse to stay in jobs which are corrosive to their sanity. A sense of guilt can be imagined over abandoning your work friends to the continued torture this workplace has been inflicting upon you all. But this guilt is entirely self-induced, it’s all in your head and you’re overthinking this. After a long stint of being forced to put other people before yourself, once the opportunity presents itself to escape, be selfish and leave. If your friends at work try to guilt you into staying then they’re truly undeserving of the title because no friend would stop a person from doing something that’s good for them.
While working at both McDonald’s and Knot, Indigo was completely wiped out by the end of every shift and would fall into an exhausted stupor the moment she got home. And every day off after a consecutive stretch of workdays would be completely smothered by such similar stupors which meant a whole day off wasted where she could’ve been focussing on what she wanted to really do with her life, music. Her time outside of work was being largely controlled and shaped by her work and through this realisation did the stresses of work follow her back home. Indigo described her mental health during both jobs as “quite awful”. She was usually withdrawn, was losing sleep like water from a leaking bucket, and the volume of her anxiety was turned all the way up. To worsen matters, Indigo also has a sensitive immune system which is vulnerable to, among other things, exhaustion and excessive work. This left her falling ill very often which meant either a further lack of energy at work or calling in sick, which exacerbated the management's rubbish treatment of her.
Sometimes it appears that employers are so obsessed with the operation of the business and all the workload that comes with it that the staff, in their minds, cease to be a human element and become amalgamated into the machinery of the business. The staff should be an indispensable part of the business, doing what is required of them to the best of their abilities, but they shouldn’t be expected to be perfect and to carry out these responsibilities until and beyond all humanity is drained out of them. Zygmunt Bauman once wrote that perfection is the point where a thing ceases to exist, so following his logic when staff are expected to be perfect by their employers their humanity ceases to exist. At that point, the management treats them no better than the stock, only acceptable if it’s in perfect condition.
Indigo is working at another café now and she’s started to notice some pretty unignorable red flags lately about the management she’s under. “I’m looking for a job in music now, anything, no matter how small. I don’t feel as if I’m properly appreciated here even though I give so much to this job.”
Indigo’s story represents how survival, particularly in a modern capitalistic society, isn’t an entirely life-giving exercise. When done under duress and toxicity, survival is something which perniciously erodes your sanity and vitality until there’s only a brittle and hollow shell left to keep alive for the sake of instinct. Thankfully Indigo never got to that point because the journey to those gallows is quite long, not because the path is a short one but because we, as titans of resilience, fight every inch of the way for our favour.
Though it makes the world go round and round until it’s dizzy and nauseous, money isn’t everything. Once someone starts making enough to assure continued survival – at least on a basic level – they can start focussing on things that are actually important. Progression. Self-improvement. Development. Growth. And sometimes a job will fatten you with money but completely lacks the nutrients needed for healthy growth.
The two people whose stories I’m about to tell you have absolutely nothing in common. You couldn’t find a better demonstration of a dichotomy than standing both of them together. Their names are Alberto and Joseph and they are 29 and 30 years old respectively. Alberto looks like he’s constantly stoned while Joseph looks like he just took an icy shower. Alberto’s wild and scraggly hair spirals out of his head while Joseph’s is neatly disciplined by the furrows of a comb which ran his hair back and off to the side with pomade. Despite being of similar age, Alberto’s dishevelled appearance adds the impression of age to his look while Joseph’s meticulous tidiness subtracts. Each time Alberto opens his mouth nothing but the most irreverently hilarious nonsense comes out, made even more comical by his nasally Sardinian accent. Whereas Joseph - by no means lacking in a good sense of humour – in the name of personal decorum is one to laugh at jokes rather than make them.
As I said, nothing in common, but what brings them together in this account is what was missing from their previous jobs.
Alberto was the head barista at Harrods, a titanic department store in Knightsbridge, London which might as well be called the Grand Church of Consumerism. As Roast and Bake – the café Alberto worked in within the store – did takeaway only, he had a very cosy position indeed. Take an order, make the coffee, hand it to them and get them out of the way, rinse and repeat with ease. No nonsense to do with seating the customers, taking their orders, kissing their feet, and hoping they don’t give you any trouble. The team he worked with was a strong and competent one, so they operated smoothly like a well-oiled machine. “And at the end of it, I made £2,200 a month which included my service charge too” reported Alberto in a nasally high octave while clapping his hands in satisfaction.
Meanwhile, Joseph formerly worked for a big commercial marketing firm in London. For the sake of educating both myself and anyone who might not know what the hell commercial marketing means, it’s trying to sell a product in a purely profit-oriented manner. Whatever it takes to turn a considering customer into a paying buyer will be employed in marketing a product. The product might be marketed to individual customers like you and me, or to other companies. Either way, this kind of marketing pedals goods to the consumer horde by forming a relationship between the product and the prospective customer and convinces them that the purchase they’re about to make will be a beneficial one. Before telling me anything else Joseph looked over both his shoulders cautiously to make sure there was no one he might know from his professional circles. With the coast clear, he said, “It was a very bigfirm. With multiple layers to the company, there was bureaucracy everywhere. I was excited about working there at first because it looked amazing on my portfolio but soon I realised the conditions of working in a place like that.”
Back to Alberto. It was within a short amount of time that he went from being a basic barista to head barista and he wasn’t going to stop there. He had the assistant manager position in his crosshairs. As long as there is the possibility of progression, of more responsibilities given to him, his motivation to work remains strong. With his goal of becoming the assistant manager within the next year seeming a reasonable possibility, Alberto was very happy with the job.
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt, it had given many – including Alberto – paid time off for a year under the furlough scheme. He was living it up during that year. When he wasn’t getting stoned every day he was beginning to show symptoms of a different kind of virus which was spreading through the house-arrested population; making bread. He was unaware of it then but all the free time Alberto had to bake focaccias and sourdough loaves came at a cost to his professional ambitions. It was noticed when the lockdown lifted and Alberto, along with everyone else, was allowed to return to work. Many people can agree, things felt altogether stilted and askew when we returned to work, as if some great languid force was bearing down on this integral environment from a distant past where we spent most of our lives. More tangibly, changes were made in every workplace to adapt to the post-COVID world. In Alberto’s case, the alteration he noticed was certain positions at work had been gotten rid of, including the assistant manager position he was gunning for, to save labour costs. This dealt a heavy blow to his motivation to continue working there as all prospects of progression had been reduced to ashes. Without the assistant manager role to aim for, the next jump up the hierarchy was the manager. However, the manager of the café, due to more positions being slashed, doubled as the manager of the entire Harrods food court. Just to demonstrate how far out of the question becoming the manager was for Alberto, the current one had been working for the company for twenty years… With a bit of luck, by the time Alberto would turn 47 years old, he’d finally be able to boast about his life pursuits leading him to become the manager of a food hall! Contrary to the expectations and behaviours of most of the management at Harrods, Alberto didn’t wish to spend his entire life working there. Thus, the seeds of doubt were sown which would burst forth from the earth in a stultified harvest.
Here's how Joseph’s been doing in the meantime. Upon finding himself in a company which resembled a Rubix cube that kept rearranging itself, a veritable bureaucratic labyrinth, he was being made to swallow some pills too bulky for his oesophagus.
“There was a lot of red tape in this company, meaning getting simple things done was so difficult because there would be this complicated and honestly unnecessary procedure required. You’d have to send requests and wait until it climbs up and down the company before any result would show. Also, apart from the work that I was doing during my time in the office, my boss would give me all these extra-curricular tasks which I’d have to do in my own time, meaning I was working outside of work too. My boss kept telling me these tasks would be good for my career development but the way he kept giving me these jobs with no consideration for my time made it look like he was just dumping extra and unnecessary work on his staff.”
Needless to say, all these extra-curricular tasks were unpaid.
It wasn’t long before Joseph began to doubt his work and wonder what on Earth he was doing here. The desire to leave this job for another was beginning to manifest but there was an obstacle in the way, namely the giant chasm of financial perdition. Quitting his job without another one lined up would mean leaping into this chasm without anything to help him climb out. London is a big city with plenty of low-paid, unskilled jobs in sectors like hospitality and retail going around but finding career work might indispose a person for months on end. Some people are luckier at finding these elusive jobs than others, however, even a stint of a few months in unemployment in a costly city like London will completely fuck a person.
“I also felt like I owed my colleagues some loyalty, which is why I worked there for a few months because I was close with some of them. Pretty soon I realised how stupid this reason was and so I took my chances and quit.”
Thankfully he had another job waiting for him at a private equity firm, whatever the hell that job even entails.
Harrods wasn’t too dissimilar from Joseph's commercial marketing firm in the sense that both places ran under the cumbersome strictures of corporate bureaucracy. Every movement and action must be recorded and logged. A specific procedure must be followed for everything. Essentially, everything must be made into a big deal. One step out of line and the full bulk of corporate correction comes tumbling down on you.
Alberto experienced the sluggish manner in which that bulk descends on the workers, like a slow migraine which spreads avalanche-like over the skull. By the end of this occurrence, Alberto would never again look fondly at a temperature meter on any fridge.
It was a regular morning in the café. Nothing untoward had happened so far and by all accounts it should continue to be just another regular day. Part of the café procedure was to note down the fridge temperature in a log book big enough to be considered a bludgeoning weapon. It was a relatively simple task; take a temperature reading from the tiny screen on the bottom of the fridge and then write it down in the book against the hour it was taken. Accounts of what happened next differ; some say the staff member taking the reading suddenly got lazy and decided to just approximate the temperature, others say he wrote the temperature down correctly but his handwriting that day was worse than usual so the number looked suspiciously like another. Bottom line is, the wrong temperature ended up in the book. But that’s ok, right? What difference could one wrong reading make? Besides another reading would have to be made in two hours and then another until the end of the day. One reading wouldn’t make a difference…
When Alberto came into work the next day, he found the food hall manager poking his nose around the café. Odd, thought Alberto, this guy usually never comes down here. What was he doing here?
“Do you know why all the temperatures in the log book are wrong?” he asked Alberto cuttingly, heaping all the responsibility on the head barista.
Don’t listen to the overdramatic histrionics of the food hall manager either, only one rather than all the temperature readings was incorrect.
“The temperature was wrong?” Alberto replied while feigning surprise to mask the fact he didn’t give a shit.
“Yes. We need to open an investigation to find out who did this.” the food hall manager announced matter-of-factly, as if to the whole world, and left.
Alberto was left with the feeling that if he ever turned into this guy things in his life had probably taken a horrible turn.
True to his word, the food hall overseer opened an investigation into this terrible crime. He gathered all the staff together and kindly requested a confession from one of them. When no one stepped forward the food hall manager’s veins contracted and his blood pressure shot up, forcing him to take matters further. The sleepless upholder of café procedure that he was, the food hall manager then interrogated the staff one by one in isolation, trying to crack a confession out of them. Alberto answered all the questions with the honesty of the innocent, and if someone confessed their mistake or not was beyond the purview of him giving a damn. All Alberto was concerned with was how much time and work this florid drama was wasting. Gathering the staff, giving them a strict talk, and promising repercussions if it happened again would’ve been suitable. All this FBI nonsense was plain superfluous.
While at Harrods, Alberto’s mental health took a massive plunge when it became clear that this is the furthest he’d come in this job. Performing the same repetitive routine of making coffee and serving it to the same customers at almost exactly the same time, all day, day in and out, made all his days contract into each other until there were no distinguishing characteristics between them. One long, monotonous, and featureless moment became the temporal condition of his work. No one’s mental health would escape unharmed from such circumstances. At times Alberto was molested by the persuasion that if a place as prestigious as Harrods could offer him no more growing and responsibilities, this is all his working life would ever be. And what a lacklustre culmination!
Quickly shaking himself out of this delirium, Alberto decided he needed to get out of Harrods or else he’d feel trapped here his entire life. So plans were made to jump ship. His job search, however, went on for over a year until he found a job where the prospects met his satisfaction. Where he eventually settled down was an independent Italian café where he’s now one of the managers and welcomes his involvement in the business. For the most part, he’s happy with his current job.
A side note, however. The reason Alberto’s job search for something which matched what he was doing at Harrods went on for so long was because all the positions available would just land him back where he started, as a barista, to work his way up all over again. For example, he got offered a barista position at some ostentatious five-star hotel in South Kensington where he’d get paid £16 an hour. What was the good of the job though, thought Alberto, if he was just doing the same thing as Harrods, stuck in the same position, but this time behind a smaller bar?
It appears whatever industry you turn to is saturated with low-level workers of all sorts doing the same thing, burdened by the same professional hang-ups. There’s a countless abundance of baristas, bartenders, cleaners, office assistants, under-agents, junior nurses, clerks,… The leap from entry-level work to whatever rung of the ladder exists directly above it is a long one and there’s a horde of people all trying to jump that gap. One could reason this is exactly how things should be, that workplace hierarchies aren’t only proper but necessary so that those who wish to move up can prove themselves worthy through hard work and initiative.
That may be true, but it’s no coincidence that the entire bulging throng of entry-level workers is also deemed expendable through their abundance. The population decreases with each jump up the food chain. Some dubious employer on a power trip will have a banquet of workers to screw over and terrorise because if they quit or are fired, another one will be waiting in line to replace them.
You’re probably already aware of the rat race metaphor that’s sometimes used to describe functioning in a society where capitalism and the pursuit of gratification are taken too far. People, or rats, trampling over each other just to get ahead. Sometimes it can feel exactly like that because the power structures which exist in society not only reinforce this metaphor but turn it into a reality.
The desperate need to acquire power, it seems, is hardwired right into our DNA because we’ve been doing it since we were roaming the land with fur on our bodies, clubbing each other to death with logs. But the world is different now. For the most part, we don’t need to watch out for incoming bludgeons that’ll bash our brains out. The threats we must now look out for are modern and invisible. With stricter laws around bodily assault and the inevitability of being caught red-handed by the numberless eyes of surveillance, brute force and physical domination are largely out of fashion while psychological and emotional subjugation is what’s happening. The concupiscent craving for power might manifest in a variety of ways. Taking advantage of someone’s niceness and coercing them to do things they’re not comfortable doing. Gaslighting people and making them doubt their memory of events. Abusing someone’s trust. Creating a tense and toxic environment which erodes someone’s confidence and defences. Making someone depend on you to take advantage of them. These symptoms and many more might occur in a relationship or a workplace, they may come from someone you know and love or a complete stranger.
That being said, a little bit of power is good for you. Stripping away everyone’s power completely will render humanity a passive species. But it’s imperative to be aware of how stiff a drink power is. It doesn’t take much to become blind drunk off it and the intoxication it causes is a solipsistic one. Under its influence we disregard the humanity and character of others and focus only on idiotic gain. This is the baggage that’s got to be thrown out to create a more nurturing work culture. Reasonable boundaries should be established between a worker and their employer and they must be respected so that both parties are happy and can work together with enthused efficiency. This is how a workplace, somewhere you’re going to be spending the majority of your life anyway, can become a second home rather than daily stretches of penal servitude. Defying this genetic programming which inclines us towards ceaseless gain and looking out for others is what will disprove the notion of society being merely a rat race.
But I have no hope in humanity, a species comprised mostly of imbeciles, ever coming together to achieve this so it’s prudent to have some rat killer ready.
Joseph has some parting words to say about the way we conduct ourselves in the pursuit of success.
“If you come from and are educated in a British society especially, you’re brought up around a lot of competition. There’s this desperate need to avoid falling to the back of the pecking order. No one wants to be the loser who’s still living in their home town.” To clarify Joseph a bit here, all throughout school and college (sixth form, whatever), university is given this holy status as the only place where all your efforts in lower education will be validated. But there’s an apprenticeship scheme in mechanics which looks really good! An apprenticeship?! Do you want to work in a respectable graduate profession or become a simple garage grunt? No university is the place to go child. So teachers try and ship off as many students to these educational meccas as possible so they can be converted into statistics on how many university-worthy students this school was able to produce. There’s this unspoken expectation that the university you go to must be a renowned one and, most vitally, outside the city where you live. But what if the city I’m living in has a great university? Forget about it child, what, are you going to continue living with your parents during uni?! So you move out of your parent’s place to another city to study an undergrad in law or psychology or computer science or photography or history or fine art. Great, now you’ve graduated and all without blowing your student loan on booze and grass and dropping out like all those other reprobates, but wait! Before you go out into the real world perhaps improve your employability with a postgraduate degree? Well, I really want a job in what I’ve studied, so another year or two of university won’t hurt. I hear my current university has a fantastic Masters programm…. What, are you going to stay here your whole life child? I hear there’s an even better Masters programme on the other side of the country. So you pack your things and trundle across the breadth of the county to study a postgraduate. Congratulations, you’ve managed to graduate again, and with your mental health somewhat intact. You can now go in one of two directions, either shackle yourself to academia and study a PhD for the next five to eight years only to score a teaching role in an increasingly defunded education system, or you can set forth in the real world where the overwhelming likelihood is that you’ll work a dead-end job for years before you end up even remotely working what you studied for. Either way, do it somewhere other than where you are now!
Some people fall out of this race, either because of exhaustion or simply not giving enough of a fuck to run in the first place, but most keep running, driven by the insatiable desire to make it, or at least look like they’re making it. So what you see all around you is a blur of people zapping from place to place, trying to grab whatever advantage that’ll edge them ahead in the race to not look like those who puttered out.
There’s this invisible force which doesn’t so much move but ricochets us from one endeavour to another, keeping many people in haphazard motion. Constant movement from one place to another gives the impression of mobility which subsequently gives the impression of success and productivity. Beware, however, this mobility is only horizontal. You’ll be moving around quite a lot without going anywhere. It is in service of social acceptance, that invisible yet palpable force, that many people move like rolling stones through society, trying not to gather any moss. Joseph continues unloading, “Everyone wants to be successful. This competition is all around the desire for social acceptance because people think that success will bring them social acceptance which will bring them happiness. But I think success only brings short-term happiness.”
Success comes with a tangled web of strings attached, especially one which is attained to please society because that kind of success is soon to lose its bliss when the collective opinion which defines your image demands more of you. Success is a transaction which comes with hidden costs, you don’t pay just with hard work and time but also with a piece out of your life. That piece might be taken out of your emotions, your mental health, your relationships, or your materials, it just depends on which aspect of your life saw you taken away from it when you chased after what you thought would bring you more happiness. The scales of the universe will always find a way to balance themselves. And if success is chased after simply to appease some social judge then after several achievements a person might not have anything else to give.
The current generation of graduate workers, those who don’t have ludicrously wealthy parents, have it pretty rotten. Throughout university, they’re inculcated with the idea that a graduate job awaits them shortly after their graduation, so they enter the professional world with a starry-eyed expectation. Months turn into years which multiply ever along while the only job they see is working in a café or bar or call centre or restaurant or supermarket. Pretty soon that post-graduation luminosity in their eyes has dulled down to flickering ember which constantly threatens to die out under the chilling breeze of poverty and debt. Entitlement turns into bitterness which then curls up into apathy as these workers just accept that this job is the best they’ll ever get out of the years they threw away during their education. When such a realisation descends upon a young mind under duress then of course they’ll continue working a job they detest. What else is even out there? they ask themselves dolefully.
Fulfilment is present or absent to varying degrees in everyone’s work lives, but the main reason people work is, on a rudimentary level, to survive and then improve their current mode of living. Stockholm Syndrome, whether in a workplace or someone’s strange basement, is given rise when the instinct and obligation to survive is highjacked by an abuser and they steer it off course to suit their twisted scheme. Alongside their personal reasons, survival is the common denominator out of all the stories I recounted of people feeling trapped in toxic jobs. They’re just trying to keep the lights on and food on the table while they attempt to make their existence worth it. By taking advantage of how far they were willing to go in the name of survival did their managers and bosses put our dear characters in situations where bending over backwards was a requirement. Up until the point our characters left these jobs they perceived no feasible way out, so these Stockholm-Syndrome-type behaviours were simply their survival instinct firing more intensely than they’d have liked.
The fantastic thing about humanity, however, is that the good among us aren’t defined by their situations, they define themselves despite their situations. Yes, a university degree is nothing more than demonstrating an interest in the subject you studied, but that’s about one of the only viable ways normal people have of breaking into professional work. If your aspirations are beyond any of the industries or jobs I’ve mentioned so disparagingly throughout this piece and you find yourself working those jobs then you must prepare yourself for a long stint in this soul-sucking work. It’ll be a while before you even see the work you want to be doing, and the intervening period will take absolutely every iota of vitality out of you. But please don’t give up and don’t delude yourself into thinking that this roadblock is your destination.
It’s imperative that in your free time, you look for the work you actually want to do and gather the skills you need to get it. Lie on your CV (within demonstrable reason) if you must, after all, this civilisation is built on lies and treachery so a bit on your part will only be considered as proper behaviour.
Your dead-end workplace will become toxic in the meantime - prepare yourself for this eventuality – and you will see malignant faces all around your workplace who want to abuse your situation. If you have thick enough skin, then pay them no mind (people are fucking idiots anyway). Otherwise, confront them tactfully. Abusive employers are often quite irrational and if you focus on what they’re saying, the holes in their logic are clearly hidden underneath their intimidatory tactics such as raising their voice or criticising your every movement. By staying composed and appearing completely unbothered against their vitriol you can simply turn their perforated logic back on them and point out how what they’re saying makes no sense. Whichever approach you take, just ensure you’ve demarcated your boundaries and aren’t letting your manager or employer trample all over your self-esteem.
A very wise elderly lady named Anita, age unknown, who wanted to weigh in on the topic extremely last minute says, “Many people who are stuck in unwanted jobs are either too scared to leave their jobs, or they feel too scared to change the situations which make their jobs so unpleasant. It’s because they think their situations can’t be changed. But they can be changed.” What she’s basically saying is, stand up to this abuse of power, don’t take this shit anymore, you’re worth more!
