By Elizabeth C. Tippet, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Oregon. Originally published at The Conversation.
Companies offer all sorts of benefits and extras to attract the most favored workers, from health care and stock options to free food. But all those perks come at a price: your freedom.
There’s a reason labor historians call these perks “welfare capitalism,” a term that originated to describe company towns and their subsidized housing, free classes and recreational activities. Like government welfare, offering any benefits that people come to rely on is also a convenient vehicle to mold their behavior.
And just as Henry Ford sought to transform auto workers through a generous though invasive profit-sharing program, today’s employers also use perks to influence our behavior in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
The Dark Side of Corporate Perks
You might think of compensation in terms of your hourly wage or salary. Companies see it differently.
Back when I drafted employment contracts and policies as an employment lawyer, companies tended to think in terms of “total compensation,” which also included commissions, bonuses, stock options and sometimes benefits like medical insurance and vacation. And that’s where they stand to influence behavior.
Under state and federal law, companies aren’t allowed to mess around with your hourly wage. A company can’t dock an entire day’s pay if you show up five minutes late. Or issue paychecks only once every six months.
However, that’s not true of other types of compensation. Lawyers like me attach all sorts of policies and restrictions on these benefits as a way to influence worker behavior. The aim of such policies generally ranged from a modest goal like getting you to work harder to making it painful to leave for a competitor.
For example, companies such as Facebook, Dropbox and LinkedIn have offered free food, but it’s not necessarily for employee well-being. It’s for the bottom line. And if your employer offers a gym, free dry cleaning or – heaven forbid – a nap pod, don’t assume it’s an act of charity. As former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff observed, perks of this sort mean “that employees are expected to work very long hours and not leave the office too often.”
On the other end of the spectrum, benefits can be laid out in a way to encourage sought-after employees to stay longer. Stock options are typically earned slowly over four years, an especially valuable tool in Silicon Valley, where workers are prone to jumping ship. Vacation never seems to accumulate fast enough for new workers to take holidays off.
Even signing bonuses – purportedly a rewarded for starting a job – are sometimes structured where you have to pay it back if you leave in the first year or two.
Company Town, Corporate Control
But as I learned recently while researching a book about how companies – with some help from courts – exert control over workers, it gets a lot worse. It turns out there is a rich history of employer experimentation with benefits as a behavior-modification device.
Benefits, particularly those that employees deem necessary or exceptionally valuable, enable employers to exercise surveillance over workers and demand behavioral change in ways they could never do through threats alone.
Historically, company housing sat at the sweet spot of valuable and necessary.
If you were operating a new mine in the early 20th century and there was no housing or transportation nearby, you likely had to provide housing. But like stock options or paid vacation today, once companies started offering it, they couldn’t resist the urge to meddle.
For example, company towns commonly restricted the consumption of alcohol, according to historian Angela Vergara. Pennsylvania coal companies even included a provision in their leases requiring workers to move out within 10 days if they went on strike. Not only would the prospect of eviction weigh heavily on workers’ decision to unionize, companies could use the vacated housing for strikebreakers.
And although Henry Ford is famous for paying his workers US$5 a day – an extravagant wage at the time – that’s only half the story. Ford actually paid his workers a wage of just $2.50 day.
The other $2.50 was a profit-sharing dividend. To qualify, a worker had to submit to a home inspection by Ford’s sociological department and allow inspectors to interview his family and friends. Reasons a man might fail such an inspection included debt, having a wife that worked outside the home or being an immigrant who did not speak enough English.
Ford also had an honor roll for employees with the best inspection scores, but even that status was precarious. According to company notations, one worker was booted off the roll for “selling real estate.” Another was dropped for being “drunk” and having a “Polish wedding.”
Health Care and Cellphones
Although few employers provide housing nowadays, workers still rely heavily on employers to provide another basic necessity: health insurance.
While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act places some informational barriers between your employer and your health care provider, employers still choose which insurers and wellness programs to offer workers. And they send a pretty clear message about how they want us to behave outside of work.
My employer-provided health insurance, for example, uses a “health engagement model,” which charges higher premiums and deductibles unless you agree to fill out a lengthy questionnaire and commit to change two things about your identified lifestyle failings.
Admittedly, no one interrogated my friends on whether my wedding was excessively “Polish.” But the questionnaire did ask, “How many servings of cookies, cakes, donuts, candy, soda or packets of sugar do you eat daily?” I mean, come on. My cake intake is a private matter between me and my supermarket cashier.
Screenshot of health engagement model questionnaire. Provided by the author.
Another necessity of modern life is a cellphone – which college students apparently preferred to food in an experimental study involving “modest food deprivation.”
But beware the company-issued cellphone or laptop. Not only does it set up the expectation that you are always on call, all of the information on those devices technically belongs to the company. Even apps you might download on your personal phone to punch in to work can track your location.
The Nanny Employer
Historian Christopher Post observed that company towns all had one thing in common: None of them had a town council. The company was the government.
And in that sense, all of us live in the company town when we go to work each day.
Unless you happen to work in a unionized setting – and most of us don’t – the workplace is the most command and control environment in our lives. The company gets to decide who is worthy of the most coveted perks, and how best to dangle them.
Which is why I find employer efforts to use workplace benefits to control our personal decisions so grating. Some days, you just want to go home, crack open a beer, and eat cake in front of the television – without worrying whether your boss will approve.
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When I was very young someone I knew told me to be wary of anyone who would withhold information from me that I should know, and also anyone who wants to know information about me they shouldn’t, because anyone who does either of those things is attempting to control you.
Every employer I’ve ever had has done both remorselessly and without consequence.
> . . . My cake intake is a private matter between me and my supermarket cashier.
The company wants you alive and healthy so its profit from your labor is maximized, but eventually it will be a not so private matter between you, and your doctor on how to deal with diabetes, and if you don’t cut the carbs from your diet, your pharmacist too.
I have a friend who worked for a major cancer researcher when we were postdocs at the best medical school in the country . Breakfast was included every day for his lab full of 30 people, there was a kitchen available with commercial refrigerator/freezer, and comfortable places to rest or lie down for a nap. No reason whatsoever to ever leave the new, purpose-built building, and the unmarrieds among graduate students and postdocs hardly ever left. The perspicacious among them knew what was happening, but at that stage of a scientific career work never ends. Now, many years later those who have managed to stick it out know that the work still never ends. But in this neoliberal age of market fundamentalism with its diminishing returns and support for science, they wonder what the hell happened to them. As I frequently remind my largely clueless academic and scientific colleagues, students, staff, and faculty alike: Just because you are not interested in politics doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you (Trotsky?).
So, Eric Schmidt was right: if you’re eating bread and don’t ant anyone to know about it, maybe you shouldn’t.
One of the many reasons I believe access to and payment for heath care should have no linkage whatsoever to employers/ employment.
Extending the control over the terror of lack of health care to employers is immoral and quintessentially American.
One streamlined care remuneration system, available to all, cradle to grave, owned, regulated and controlled by the collective WE.
So you want even worse? The government to handle it? Get ready to give up half your check. Health care is a privilege not a right. Medicaid, Medicare, and SS should all be disbanded to encourage people to save and the private sector to come up with efficient solutions to healthcare.
I want 5 dollars a scrip, free transportation to hospital, private room, DIrect TV, no more than 50 dollars for any admittance to the hospital and full care, but I want to sue if they don’t put a pacemaker in my father at 95, and free home health care 24/7, cooking, cleaning, rehab, and hospice at home with Dr visiting every other day at no charge. I want life insurance bought at 80 for 10 dollars a mo for 4 m coverage. I don’t want the government to pay a penny and apply all social benefits to the national debt immediately. University should be free. Taxes taken from check no more than 5%. 2% for anyone in the top 5% of earners. You should be able to stay in the hospital for 4 weeks after birth. No more than a 125 dollar annual deductible.
I don’t have time on my break to properly address this, and I try to respect the site prohibitions on ad hominem, so I’ll just say… is this meant to be satire?
I think Cotton is ranting along the lines of our being offered short-term choices in a top-down world where making new options are solely the purview of the profit-seeking or unmotivated.
I can sympathize. Human problems are rarely simple, therefore the solutions can also be complex, and sometimes it seems the only people with the power to alter any particular dysfuction aren’t even half trying. Throw our hands up in exasperation and mutter a jumble of deeply-felt phrases? I have so been there.
I may not be clear on what, exactly, Cotton meant, and yet I suspect I know how he feels.
Dude, he’s just ranting that it’s takers exploiting makers. Nothing more reasonable than selfish demands for people to shut up and take it.
I don’t know how the Canadians do it. They must be superhuman. Maybe the round bacon?
You almost want to ask him what he would do if he had monozygotic triplets, each with cystic fibrosis. Save a lot of money for their care. Or just go bankrupt and still not be able to take advantage of recent developments in symptom management and outright drug treatment with chemical chaperones for CFTR.
And actually, back in the day of Blue Cross being a Co-Op and working for a large state university, 35 years ago, our deductible was $100 per year ($245 in current dollars). After a problem birth, 5 days in the hospital resulted in a $4500 bill, with our contribution $25 because all the rooms in the Family Care Unit were private and BC/BS didn’t pay for private room. If things had stayed the same, M4A would still be necessary but not nearly as essential for the most of us.
So many logical fallacies here it’s hard to know where to begin. But i’ll start and others can fill in.
“So you want even worse?” – False dichotomy.
More on the Ford Sociology Dept.
The cautionary tale for our times, but some are hard at work to make it a guide for the future:
When Henry Ford’s Benevolent Secret Police Ruled His Workers
https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-police-ruled-his-wo-1549625731
Henry Ford wanted his workers to be model Americans, and to ensure that, he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department (or the Sociology Department, or the Society Department, really, depending on who you ask. But you get the idea.).
What started out as a team of 50 “Investigators” eventually morphed into a team of 200 people who probed every aspect of their employees lives. And I mean every aspect.
Investigators would show up unannounced at your home, just to make sure it was being kept clean. They’d ask questions that were less appropriate of a car company, than they were for the modern-day CIA. They’d query you about your spending habits, your alcohol consumption, even your marital relationships. They’d ask what you were buying, and they’d check on your children to make sure they were in school.”
Just a note: there is plenty of info about this program. Due to time, I just grabbed a quick link.
Excellent tale that. The only difference between then and now is that you would not need 200 “investigators” or even 50 “investigators”. It would be all done my computers and the internet through apps, social media monitoring, accessing databases and in-home cameras. It would be so seamless that the workers would probably not even notice what was going on.
>which charges higher premiums and deductibles unless you agree to fill out a lengthy questionnaire and commit to change two things about your identified lifestyle failings.
Yeah but they actually communicate it as “here is the premium, but if you do these things you get a discount“. Jerks.
BTW, given the changes in so-called nutritional science I have to laugh at those questions , which are not grounded in any real hard scientific basis – just statistics with no good control groups and underneath that the forever “correlation is not causation” issue. These were the people that not long ago were feeding you Wonder Bread and Total cereal. And given the changes we’ve seen, I would at this point be comfortable to thoroughly disagree with cnchal, what you eat is at best a co-determinant if you, say, get diabetes or not. Better to ask what your grandparents actually died of and when and try to see if you can do anything about that. Your odds are not great, however.
On a positive note, I remember the grumbling from old people (and I thinking I was smart always thought “anecdote is not data”, my above paragraph would come as quite a surprise to my 30-something self) about how Grandpa had eggs and bacon every morning and he’s 93 years old. The bacon hasn’t been blessed yet, but the reputation of eggs has been completely restored.
Thank you!! My sentiments exactly, but you expressed it much better than I could. Plus I just wish there was one honest corporation that would help their employees avoid all the disease causing pollution that they (probably) and other corporations are dumping into the environment. I know, how about a questionnaire with questions about whether you live next to a fracking or mining site? You could get a lower premium if you agree to sell your house and move. ;)
Nutrition science is a fascinating study of human failings entering into the domain of “science”. The influence of Big Ag, groupthink, entrenchec power and status quo, filtering out dissent etc.
Gary Taubes breaks it down in his tome Good Calories Bad Calories. The first half reads like a novel almost, shows how human science is.
One reason I’m not inclined to automatically kowtow to the argument that Science must not be questioned by us plebes.
And Taube’s latest, ‘The Case Against Sugar’ is a real eye opener… and I’d add, ‘Tripping over the Truth’ by Christofferson… good history and science. Interesting how being sceptical of ‘science’ makes you an automatic evangelical-crazy… this knee-jerk black-or-white serves to hide a lot of truth – great propaganda trick!
There’s an immortal Simpsons episode about Welfare capitalism, You Only Move Twice. The CEO offering the too-good-to-be-true perks turns out to be a supervillain in the James Bond style. Very funny
I can appreciate the desire of employers to lower healthcare costs by “incentivizing” behavioral changes that are thought to lower morbidity. It’s another argument for M4A, that it eliminates this specific incentive of employers to seek control over employees. Of course, there are all sorts of other incentives that remain; those may be more intractable. Worker-owned cooperative enterprises, anyone?
And to think that I had a boss who would smoke pot with us, the employees.
Oh, and then there was the other boss who, if he really liked you and your work in his store, he’d let you dry fire his Glock. Yes, we made sure that we were only aiming in the back of the store, and only when there were no customers in the place.
Watch OUT? You might cross some “misinterpreted redneck allusion” line and have your perfectly apropos, evocative and astute comment disappeared?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/26/pers-a26.html
Not to worry, Svante, that rootin’ tootin’ bike shop has been out of business for almost 20 years. And I still miss the place.
Did I mention that we also had regular target practice? The target was posted on the inside of the delivery entrance door. And the boss made a blowgun out of a piece of bicycle tubing. The blow-spikes were sharpened bicycle spokes.
Good times, good times.
Slim, weren’t you originally from a beat Yankee rust belt city, with several very famous sports franchises, exquisite Eastern European food and spectacular venison, quail and pheasants? Along with, y’know a uniquely ambivalent experience with partisan politics? Ever feel our plebeian experience is being intentionally misconstrued (along with many other febrile hotbeds of uppity proletarian discontent?)
Yup, I am from Pittsburgh.
One of the workplaces I described was in the Burgh. That was the one with the boss who didn’t bogart his joints. The rootin’, tootin’, and shootin’ bike shop was in Tucson.
Another little scam employers do to recruit and bait-and-switch deals with PTO. They do this on two fronts:
The main scam is the “unlimited time off” scam, often by new tech companies.
Unlimited paid time off on it’s face….it sounds great! But are these companies crazy? No, they’re very smart (and greedy). They’re getting great publicity for these moves. But more importantly: they’re actually cutting down on their employees’ vacation time.
You see, tech environments tend to have tight deadlines and schedules to please investors (as well as bro dominated work cultures)….so it’s actually very hard to either get time approved off, or even if you do, you get guilt tripped into doing so. Americans don’t take enough vacation as it is. But, if you have the limited but concrete PTO hours to use…it’s much harder for an employer to say, “no”, because you actually have time that’s allotted you can point to to use you can point to that you are entitled to.
Also, the big scam with “unlimited time off” is when you do leave the company….they don’t pay you out your hourly PTO balance difference…..because there is no PTO balance. See what they did there.
The only true benefit to the “unlimited time off” is if you have a kid or get cancer or something….then it alleviates the tedious process of signing up for workman’s comp (and usually, an employer won’t guilt trip you for saying you need 2 months off because you broke a leg. If you need it to go on a tour of Europe however….that’s another story).
Not to say employers haven’t gotten around the PTO set allotted amounts as well (especially so they won;t have to pay a working leaving/laid off/fired out): not only do more and more employers not allow you to carry over unused PTO time from the previous year, but most employers now make you “accrue” the time as the year goes on. So, say you get 15 days a year: you don’t actually get all of the 15 days on Jan 1. You have to work and “earn” your PTO time: which sucks because say you want to take a week off in April because it’s school vacation for the kids, or go on a summer trip, you won’t have enough PTO to use to take the week off. Now, a good supervisor or manager (like the one I have now) can help you get around this by approving the time, PTO balance be damned, and just have you accrue it up later to make the difference…but say you leave the company after you do so….you actually end up having to OWE the company the money back you used. Which is serfdom personified, IMO.
Only some states mandate the payout of earned PTO. Companies don’t have to pay it out at all in many states.
I know the ASPCA in my area takes advantage of that lack of worker right.
Workplace genetic testing:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/workplace-genetic-privacy-bill-gina_n_58c6e4c5e4b081a56dee48cf?so8yer4oucswkx1or=&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-16/your-wellness-program-at-work-may-not-be-as-private-as-you-think
Boost corporate profits by levying fines and making employees pay more for health care.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-wellness-insight-idUSKBN0KM17C20150113
I live in a condo in Silicon valley. I used to have a community garden plot in Palo Alto, but then the garden was turned into a vacant lot. There are no other community gardens in that city or nearby ones that I would qualify to have a plot in. My husband’s employer offers garden plots – three by 15 feet or so. They are gorgeous. They are about a block from where I live. But in order to get one, my husband would have to sign onto the employer’s health improvement program. He’d have to answer innumerable intrusive personal questions. So I do not have a garden plot.
There was (and is) also the Bismarckian welfare-warfare state, which is the gobmint doing about the same thing, although so far they are exerting less control. But on the corporate front, I noticed employers getting into this sort of operation in the very late 20th century, seemingly a sudden fashion, sort of like other abominations like the Open Office (so they can watch you all the time, I guess.) It makes me think that there is a secret source of these ideas, a magazine or radio station only higher management can tune into.
We had these same questionnaires through my husbands gov’mt employer that we both were individually required to fill out annually or pay much higher premiums. They claimed to be in compliance with federal privacy laws but the fine print you were required to sign gave up all your privacy rights. This was my ex-employer that I left due to sexual harassment and it just drove me nuts to be forced to comply with questions like the number of pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, regularity of my periods, as well as my food habits. We demanded paper forms rather than electronic, and other than name, birth date and height, I left it completely blank and crossed out the waiver of my privacy rights and included a detailed refutation of their right to collect the information and the contradictions with in it. After the third year they stopped even contacting me and just processed the b.s. “health summary.” Quite a few others (spouses especially) joined in. We had evidence that the company they used were selling our information and were (despite denials) keeping a history on each of us. They finally dropped the program last year.