The ideal workforce for most modern corporations is a totally elastic labour pool that can be scaled up and down at a moment's notice and can be monitored very closely to ensure they're extracting the absolute maximum possible value from each employee. They do not want to be in a situation where key individuals are important enough to their operations that they can ask for more benefits of better conditions. In fact, they would prefer that an entire population of employees and the government that protects them isn't powerful enough to do that. If labour conditions improve too much in Bangalore and it hurts the bottom line, take your call centre to Manila.
Obviously it's been an imperfect dream and only patchily applied, but every step they take to implement it harms the wellbeing of the people who are meant to be working in those environments.
- Wages and benefits obviously get suppressed or actively taken away. It's hard to agitate for better pay and conditions if you're easily replaceable
- Opportunities to advance are the similarly reduced. The idea of starting in the mailroom and working your way to CEO is laughable when the mailroom will almost be certainly outsourced to a third party vendor the second it becomes profitable to do so
- A sense of achievement in the work performed is hard in a service or knowledge based role at the best of times, but even harder if you're one tiny part in a thousand and the credit for the final work product goes to a VP that did little more than secure the funding for the project and the work process actively discourages any one person being critical to the final outcome
- Work relationships are actively discouraged, inasmuch that organically formed close friendships imply that there are people who aren't a part of that friendship group. Moreover actual friends tend to speak to each other genuinely, which on occasion means arguments. HR would much prefer a baseline politeness in its work force with as little conflict as possible, especially if one half of your team works remotely in Morocco and barely speak English.
Quiet quitting might have had an effect 20 years ago, but with the state of automation today, plus recent breakthroughs in natural language AI, I honestly think the next step will be to do away with huge swathes of human employees entirely where possible. If it can be repeated it can be automated. A chatbot trained on the company's knowledgebase and hooked into your account data can easily do the work of thousands of customer service staff. Legal departments will have far fewer lawyers and no assistants, they'll just have bots to summarise and highlight the key parts of complex legal agreements and a human or two to double check the work and sign off. The bots never ask for wages. They never get depressed. They don't care if the work they do is pointless or actively stupid. They're the dream of every CEO since the production line.
