Oppressive Work Cultures — Intentional or Not?

What to look out for with company policies and what you can do.

Photo by Tiger Lily from Pexels

It’s common knowledge how the directors of a company, and to an extent its employees, can influence the future direction of the company — whether it’s through visionary planning, being in the right place at the right time, or just the learned ability to rinse their customers for a frighteningly large profit¹.

However, how a company treats its own employees is often carefully hidden from view.

Companies can all too easily operate against the general wellbeing and prosperity of their own employees in the name of preserving their own profit and therefore existence.

This is a complex business as a company can do this purposefully, indirectly, or innocuously — but they’re all equally dire if you’re one of the cogs in the machine upon which the profitability² of the company depends.

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Purposeful Negation

You’d have to be a big company to get away with this either in terms of sheer profit or in terms of being a popular and desirable place to work in spite of the (often) common knowledge of the conditions of employment.

Think the larger tech companies, multi-national banking outfits, or perhaps your common or garden startup as typical examples. I suppose you could frame this as either end of the economic scale of company operations.

Take the prohibition of overtime pay as a typical example.

Such excuses for this practice at the above outlined institutions may be,

• Company culture dictates that everyone gives 100% all of the time, if you’re not doing this then clearly you don’t want to succeed ‘hard enough’ — if you aren’t finished by 5pm just keep going!
  Expect management to describe you as ‘not hungry for success’ and note that ‘there are lots of people out there queueing up for your job’.
• Everyone else in the industry does this — the kudos of merely working in the industry requires that you put up or shut up.
  This is particularly prevalent in the finance industry. Allegedly.
• It’s always been like this — since the company was formed…