Ask a Manager: Has AAM Become More Anti-Corporate?

[minoanmiss]

I’m a very long-time reader and fan. Recently, I’ve noticed a subtle tone change in your responses to be more … not pro-worker, you’ve always been pro-worker … maybe anti-corporate? For examples, on a response to a question about AI, you recently called this a “dystopian hellhole,” which is kind of more blanket negative than I’ve come to expect. You are more blunt about the things that suck widely in the world of work and less … measured? in your responses.

This is by no means criticism. I too have gone from “there are good companies you can work at, you just need to find them” to “yeah, this is a corporato-crazy nightmare and it’s all falling apart and any place you work might get eaten by the system at any moment.” I’m currently at a place that, until recently, I was happily planning on retiring from and had invested nearly 15 years in … now I’m glancing around nervously and leaning into side hustles because I just can’t see anything good coming out of the current chaos. And I’m far enough in my career, that I’ve been through three mass layoff / economic downturns (the dotcom bubble, ’08, and Covid) and it never felt like this before.

You might not feel comfortable answering this, and if so I get it! I was just curious about the change I sensed and the impact that your role has had on you.

There’s been a definite evolution in my perspective over the years! Watching the choices a lot of companies made during the pandemic was a major turning point for me, but I’d probably been moving in that direction for a while. You can’t read years of the mail I get with unending stories of people being harmed by their employers and not be influenced by it.

The other factor, and it’s a big one, is that when I started writing the site I was writing from the perspective of someone for whom the system had worked pretty well, and I didn’t have enough appreciation of the fact that while my approach had worked well for me, it wasn’t going to work well for everyone … or enough appreciation for all the reasons behind that. Over time, I’ve become a lot more aware of that, and that hopefully comes across in my writing here.

Beyond that, our culture as a whole has become much more clear-eyed about the systemic injustices built into our labor system as it’s currently practiced (along with a whole bunch of other things, like growing income inequality, stagnant wages, soaring costs, and the absolute catastrophe that is our health care system) and I’m no exception to that.

Comments

[matsushima]

You love to see it.

[mrissa]

I was writing from the perspective of someone for whom the system had worked pretty well, and I didn’t have enough appreciation of the fact that while my approach had worked well for me, it wasn’t going to work well for everyone … or enough appreciation for all the reasons behind that. Over time, I’ve become a lot more aware of that, and that hopefully comes across in my writing here.

May this keep happening to all of us, in the directions it needs to.

[jadelennox]

amen.

[watersword]

I noticed this a while back, specifically in Allison's attitude toward unions, and remember commenting about it!

[green_grrl]

We stan a workers rights queen!