I’m watching Telemarketers and it’s reminding me of shady jobs I’ve had in the past.
I worked for Rent-a-Center doing collections. It’s a place that preys on the poorest people in America, getting them to pay extortionate interest on rent to own furniture, appliances and electronics. We had customers who would end up paying thousands of dollars on a couch that wasn’t even new when they got it. Even worse was people who would hit hard times and get their stuff repoed and end up with nothing to show for thousands of dollars in payments.
My job was to learn when these customers got paid, or when they got their disability or welfare check and hound them over the phone or in person. If they didn’t pay, I’d be sent out to knock on their doors. If that failed I’d be sent to repo it.
It was a soul crushing job. I’ve had shit jobs, but I’d never had a job that made me feel like I was doing harm to people before. Some of my coworkers would deal with this by demonizing the customers, acting like they were all deadbeats who deserved to get fleeced. Others would blame the customers, saying shit like, ‘Anyone stupid enough to buy here was going to get ripped off by someone, and it might as well be us’.
I couldn’t do that, so I started getting fucked up at work like Pat Pespis. I started pretending to do my job, dialing the number and then hitting the flash button and faking the calls. I’d get sent on a repo and my coworker and I would go out to eat or to the mall and pretend they wouldn’t answer the door. I expected my collection stats would fall low enough that I’d eventually be fired, but they barely moved at all. It turned out that hounding people to pay a bill wasn’t actually doing much.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a job that felt morally right.
I worked at a housing association that I thought would be useful in helping the unhoused with a type of co-operative housing, especially as they’re regulated. But no, it was all ‘pass on the poor folk to other associations’ and ‘try to grab property for cheap’ with the pooled rent money while skimping on repairs and improvements.
I worked in renewables for a while, and profit is always king there too. Safety was never the priority.
I worked at a crisis centre for victims of SA, which was also run to the bare minimum and largely existed as a flex for the person in charge to get write-ups in the Guardian. I can’t remember actually being able to successfully connect anyone with the therapists due to the length of the waitlist. We gave the bare minimum of advice. It existed on the lowest wages possible because everyone working there was supposed to feel good that they were essentially doing charity.
I did some advocacy work where I was connected with people that were unhoused, and where the job was to help them navigate the system in order to get assigned a home with a local housing association. Each case took months and nobody in the relevant council departments and housing associations gave a single shit. The clients were distressed (naturally), but were still given false information from every angle, and then it was all consistently used against them or leveraged to try and make them accept a lower standard of housing and/or care. They were treated like criminals for simply not having access to shelter. I worked hard and felt sad constantly. There were some successes, but a few people just quit trying to get housed because living on the street and sofa surfing were somehow less humiliating.
Those are the most ‘moral on paper’ roles I’ve held, and even they were a disgrace.
I briefly worked for a cold call company that did nothing but harass retired people and try to trick them into “Medicare Advantage” (a
era grift that fucked people out of their Medicare benefits by draining them into private corporations).A big part of the job was implying that I was from Medicare without actually saying I was from Medicare, just to avoid liability.
The most haunting call I made was to a lady that replied, “well, my husband’s been dead for about 10 years now, but since you assholes keep calling me, will you stop if I find a shovel and dig him up?”
I quit shortly after that.
That grift is still going on.
Medicare Advantage is still syphoning billions every year in overpayments. That’s on top of the main profits they’re making by this privitisation scheme. They kick the most sick people off their rolls by denying their coverage until they leave. That leaves them only the most profitable people to insure.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/its-time-to-end-the-medicare-advantage-scam/
Working retail always made me feel like a scumbag when we were forced by the boss to upsell.
The worst was working in pet shops, dealing with living creatures as commodities was pretty terrible.
The fish and live pet food are treated the worst. I don’t want to talk about it any more than that.
I remember working a job that was technically retail, although that was only a small part of it. I fortunately had plenty of time without any bosses breathing down my neck, so I was constantly telling people “Don’t buy this, it’s so overpriced it should be illegal” and “this does not do what it says it does” and “you should probably google this before trying it” and “I have been told I have to say x” lmao
When I worked food service, unless my boss was staring down my shoulder I would auto-apply any coupons that made things cheaper
I did this for three years. In our case the fish did okay (I became a big fish guy and did tons of research) but we had many animals who nobody was ever going to buy and it was pretty shitty for them. We had tegus and monitors with very nasty temperament who were neglected. Then there’s the whole thing with the “feeder” mice / goldfish / crickets.
It had its moments though. It was fun to walk around the store with a mouse in my shirt pocket or a tarantula on my shoulder and freak out the customers.
I love working in research when a colleague starts speculating about the potential military applications of what we are researching and I have to smile and say “haha yeah it’s a great product”
Phone tech support for Bell DSL internet in Ontario and Quebec, Canada. The night I walked out was the night there was an actual outage that Bell didn’t want to declare as an outage because that would have lead to consequences for them. A full shift doing the same troubleshooting steps that we all knew wouldn’t do a damn thing. My last call was a little old lady on a fixed income, who my supervisor told me to tell to hire a local tech to look at her computer in person. I told her it was actually an outage at Bell’s end, signed off, and handed my headset to that supervisor.
Edit: We were also scored on our ability on the tech support line to upsell callers on Bell’s rebranded Norton antivirus subscription service. I refused to, so I got stuck with the overnight shifts.
I did dialup tech support and the same thing would happen. Certain numbers would go down all the time and the techs would know something was wrong. If they bosses acknowledged it, it would be considered downtime, so we’d do pointless troubleshooting for hours until it came back online. Tons of wasted time just to keep the fiction of 99% uptime intact.
Like someone else said in the thread, every job I’ve had (I’ve been working for over 20 years) has had its share of negative moral implications.
During the second Iraq war I was unemployed and needing work bad. My relationship was suffering and we needed money bad. Minimum wage was $5.15/hr at the time and my friend told me of a job that was hiring on a temporary basis for over $19/hr, more than three times what I had ever earned. The job involved dressing up as an “Arab civilian” and assisting as a performer during mock battles on a military base testing sensors to be applied on the battlefield. There was even opportunity to time and a half over time for shifts over 8 hours. It was a ton of hurry up and wait and I don’t remember doing much of anything but standing around. I still feel awful about it.
Now I have a union job working in a sort of Library, and I wish I could say it was much better. But there is racism, classism, soul destroying needless consumption on an annual basis to justify budgets, etc etc. I could go on about restaurants and grocery stores and landscaping and construction and housing but dear god let me tell you they all have a way of weighing on your moral compunctions. I get sad when I think about how this is gonna be it forever until it gets worse and breaks, but the breaking gives me hope.
I participated in capitalism (no ethical consumption possible)
Interned for a season at a small tax place for super rich people, like a 500k in rental income types, every single one would either do a nudge nudge or go on a rant about how much they hate taxes and it was my job to just stoneface at them until they finished and then arrange a “partner consultation” at a way higher billable hour. I made $14/hr there and it was not worth. They also didn’t write me a reference after because I “didn’t the follow dress code”.
The worst I’ve done is maybe working at a bakery/factory and thinking I was contributing to the malnourishment and diabetes of America. I’ve mostly just worked fast food and retail so you tend to hate and resent every customer and don’t really care if you’re feeding them slop or ripping them off. I’m actually working at the most morally good place I ever have now. That’s not saying too much but it’s a second hand store where a lot of our money goes to housing and getting social workers and at home nurses for people with disabilities. And while we employ some people with disabilities like Goodwill we actually pay them like anyone else. I mean, no one is paid what they’re worth anywhere but some of the people with disabilities here are getting paid more than me because they’ve been here longer. Could definitely be worse, so I’m happy to have this job.
