From this European political media junkie’s perspective, life in America seems to increasingly resemble a Neal Stephenson novel. International corporations are so drunk with power they are usurping to themselves the powers of government at home and abroad.
Commenting on articles in the NYT and on Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Walmart’s attempt to co-opt liberals in the current edition of the New Yorker, Barbara Ehrenreich illustrates how the the quasi-military corporate uber-states that lie behind the smiley faces of the likes of Walmart and Target work at the employee level:
[…]
…the illusion of state power is not confined to Wal-Mart. Justin Kenward, who worked at a Target store in Chino CA for three years, wrote to tell me about his six hour interrogation, in 2003, by the store’s “Asset Protection” agents, who accused him of wrongly giving a fellow employee a discount on a video game a year earlier:
After about an hour of trying to tell them that I don’t remember any thing about that day let alone that transaction, I had to use the restroom. I asked if I could and was denied. This goes on for about another hour when I say “Look I have to pee, bad, can I go to the restroom?” Once more I was told no. So I stand up and start walking out the door, and was stopped. At this point I thought to my self “They’re looking to fire me!” So I start to think of ways that transaction might have came to be. I say something like “I would never give a discount unless an L.O.D. (Leader On Duty aka: a manager) or a Team Lead (aka: supervisor) told me to ……” I was interrupted and told that it sounds like I was trying to place my mistake on other people. 3 hours in to this and still needing to pee I was told that I need to write an apologetic letter to the company with the details, every detail, that we just went over and then I could use the rest room…
Kenward not only lost his job, but faced charges of theft.
My efforts to get a comment from Target were unavailing, but I did manage to track down a person who worked in security for the Chino store at the time of Kenward’s detention. Because she still depends on Target for her health insurance, she asked not to be named, but she writes that Kenward’s experience was not unusual:
What I know for a fact is that they took each of the twelve youngsters [Target employees] to their office separately. They locked them in an office without a telephone, would not let them phone their parents or anyone, and kept them there browbeating them for six to ten hours. They never told them they were being arrested…only that Target was disappointed in them and if they would write a letter of apology that they’d dictate they could go and all would be forgotten. None of these children knew their rights…all of them ended up writing the stupid letter. Of course this too was a lie…as soon as they had the letter in end the police were called and that person was hauled off in handcuffs and arrested.
This is the workplace dictatorship at its brass-knuckled best. When companies start imagining that they are nation-states, entitled to spy on, stalk, and imprison their own employees, , then we are well down the road to an actual, full-scale dictatorship.
As above, so below.
One might almost be tempted to call them Sovereignty Corporatists; myself, I like to think of this developing style of international corporate government as Devolved Dictatorship.
There. Doesn’t that sound kinder and gentler already? Now smile, you buggers, it’s the weekend, get out there and shop till you drop. The corporate state is depending on you.
– Palau
