. @WholeFoods management have found a cost-effective way of managing employee dissatisfaction. Instead of providing adequate pay and protection, they're tracking union activity with an "interactive heatmap" that prioritizes union-busting activities.

https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1

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What signals does the heatmap incorporate to predict unionization? It's quite a list: "employee 'loyalty,' turnover, and racial diversity; 'tipline' calls to human resources; proximity to a union office; and violations recorded by OSHA."

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Also: "Local economic and demographic factors such as the unemployment rate in a store's location and the percentage of families in the area living below the poverty line."

It's basically an immiseration index.

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Fighting unions is expensive. Between 2014-17, US companies spent $100m on anti-unionization "consultants."

But it's still cheaper than paying a living wage and providing a safe work environment.

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Ever since mass digital surveillance burst on the scene, I've been asking myself "Why spy?" What utility does mass surveillance provide to the states (and firms) that procure it?

https://archive.org/details/2015.01.15.Mindenki.Joga.CoryDoctorow.CEU.Budapest

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I think the answer is that unequal states are intrinsically unstable. Every era has needed a narrative to prevent the many from redistributing the concentrated wealth of the few. Once, it was the divine right of kings: aristos are richer for you because God made it so.

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Today, we hear stories like "meritocracy" (the people on top are the best people, and if you're better you can join them) or "shared prosperity" (allowing the natural leaders of the genetic lottery to dominate will produce more for us).

But these stories are wearing thin.

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People are increasingly unwilling to accept fairy tales about how someday they might rise to the exalted heights (the spectacle of the idiot children of the rich frolicking in pools of vintage Veuve make it obvious that rewards are not allocated by merit).

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And the cod-eugenic explanation wears thinner by the day, revealing the white supremacist face behind its mask.

Absent a normative tale of why we should accept inequality, elites turn to other methods. Historically, these are either:

* Redistribution, or

* Guard labor.

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That is, you can either suffer yourself to be taxed for schools, hospitals and roads, or you can pay armed guards to prevent proles from building guillotines outside the gates of your manor.

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Redistribution is obviously a nonstarter for plutes who take it as gospel that "taxation is theft."

If you're a neo-aristo who doesn't want to normalize being taxed, you can engage in a performance of redistribution through "philanthropy."

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This allows you to retain the moral position that there should be no democratic say in the allocation of the wealth of the nation, but rather, that the super-rich alone should decide what social programs we'll have and how they should run.

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This has the side-benefit of allowing dilletantes like Betsy DeVos and Bill Gates to do things like remake our education system in forms dictated by their pet theories, irrespective of the evidence to support those theories.

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But if you yank on the philanthropy lever long and hard enough, it'll break off in your hand, so you turn to guard labor.

Guard labor costs! You have to pay for guards, and then you have to fret that they might turn on you and stage a palace coup.

https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

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But automation is a great boon to guard labor. Not only does it act as a force-multiplier (the Stasi needed one spy for every 60 people in the DDR; the NSA can effect global surveillance at a ratio more like 1:10,000) - but computers don't stage palace coups.

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As our friends in the right like to say, "Solve for equilibrium." The more "union heatmaps" you have (assuming they actually work), the less you have to pay your workers in order to maintain a stable workplace.

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Rather than squandering resources on either paychecks or indiscriminate unionbusting, you can direct your fuckery budget with laser focus, targeting only those shops likely to organize.

eof/