Its Gone Now wrote:You say that but surely it depends on the Salary? a salary as low as $20,000 (which isn't that much) is still more than working full time on minimum wage, so I think the "working" Man in general has it bad these days whether on a salary or not. But we are Human and we all think what we do is harder than what their neighbors are doing.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I can only base my thoughts on things I get from pop culture and the behavior of, say, my mother. There's a different attitude about work in the Far East that can be pretty alien to Westerners.
When I refer to the average salaryman working conditions as "miserable," I say that because it tends to end in heavy drinking. Just by saying that, I've betrayed some of my own attitude towards alcohol. I feel there's a fine line between greasing the social wheels and running from your problems, and I think many salarymen are past that line... though, I can't say that many of them would agree.
There's a level to which the department or section one works in becomes something of a surrogate family. For example, my mother has expectations of her subordinates that go well outside of the office. Now, I'm still just a scrub, myself, so I haven't personally immersed myself in American office culture, but I never got the feeling that a manager could just call up one of his subordinates and ask them to water the plants while he was away on a trip. This, I think, is a rather normal thing in East Asia.
So, for one, reports of Konami shifting employees to different branches and even departments—from whitecollar worker to janitor, based on anywhere from whim to grudge—seems double-damning when I think of it from the perspective of work units being secondary families. No wonder Nikkei would report on that.
Or the matter of security cameras. Sure, it's common practice for management to abuse security cameras to watch their employees, but it's rare for them to install cameras
only for watching employees, that are positioned in such a way that they're utterly useless for workplace safety. I can't think of a company that could get away with that, on either side of the Pacific.
I guess you could say it's the little things, the ones that seem to be personal in nature, be it measures used against specific employees or ripe (if not outright designed) for abuse by vindictive managers, that strike me as the main point of the scandal.
Holy shit!