-
palvaro
3 years ago
|
link
| on:
What do I do when a colleague is taking all the credit for my work?
Does the issue of “credit” just have to do with giving talks at conferences? If so, does this person acknowledge you as a contributor in the talk? If not, that is unacceptable and you should bring it up directly with him or her.
If so, then I’d argue that this person isn’t stealing thunder but doing marketing that somebody needs to do (and only one person can do). I’d love to have someone else spend 13 hours on a plane just to present my work!
Now, if others are getting opportunities to speak on joint work and you aren’t, that’s not cool. Make it clear to management that this is important to you. They might be at fault here.
here is a lesson I learned reading this deck: let us all endeavor to be “wage slaves,” and to educate our colleagues to be wage slaves. it really gets under this guy’s skin (he hates them precious!) that some people might actually know the value of their labor. organize!
Wow, what a novel concept.
“Wage slaves… hate em!”
I wonder if he realizes that this meme comes from an incompetently evil anthropomorphic octopus (Ultros in Final Fantasy VI).
Probably not.
What is the “wage slave” phrase supposed to mean? The way it is repeatedly used (and juxtaposed against other categories of employees) sounds more like jargon than just an off-hand choice of two words. At face value the phrase seems to be an oxymoron, as slaves weren’t known to receive wages for their work.
Internet searches yielded definitions which were unhelpful, and seem like they could describe any non-management employees of a company. What am I missing?
This is kind of a second-order usage of the term that I’ve heard now and then. Wikipedia covers the original usage fairly well. It was more widespread in the 19th century, when wage labor wasn’t yet fully normalized, and roughly boils down to an argument the theoretically free choice to work or not work for someone often has a significant degree of coercion involved in it, since many wage laborers, especially in the traditional working class, aren’t in a position to say “no” to work they need in order to live. In the U.S. context it was a particularly big debate in the post-civil-war abolition movement, which split over whether abolishing slavery had accomplished its goals, or if things like the mining camps and factories still represented a type of unfree labor that they should push to abolish.
Anyway, the second-order usage is that terms like “wage slave attitude” were coined by 20th-century management people to describe workers who have a version of that viewpoint, “I work because I have to work to survive, it’s a job right?”. That’s seen (by such management people) as too cynical and insufficiently motivated by love of the job and company etc.: they come in, put in their 40 hours and do competent work, but you don’t really want that at AmazingCorp, you want people who believe in your amazing mission!
The theory goes back to Marx: that a low-status worker is not appreciably better off in terms of lifestyle than a slave.
In practice, what he means is “worker aware of his low status”. He wants his peons not to know that they’re peons, because they’ll work harder. So in his usage, “wage slave” refers to the Gervais/MacLeod Loser class (as in, Sociopaths, Clueless, and Losers). Here’s a place to start, on that: Gervais Principle.
The OP is a Sociopath who wants to hire only Clueless (low-status workers unaware of their low status). Note that MacLeod Sociopaths aren’t always sociopaths or bad people. I’m a MacLeod Sociopath but not a sociopath. All of that said, the OP seems like a sociopath in addition to being a (MacLeod) Sociopath.