Monday, February 22, 2010

SW Reviews CBS's "Undercover Boss" -- Calls it a "capitalist fantasy"

Have you caught any of this fabulous new weekly 30-minute commercial (I mean TV show)? America's top CEOs go undercover as regular workers to get the scoop on what life is really like for their lowly exploited laborers, and then they have great epiphanies about how they really should appreciate those workers more and then decide to change their ways, leaving CEO and proletariat to live forever in peace. SocialistWorker.org tells us what it's really all about here. Here's an excerpt:

By the end of the 7-11 episode, for example, Waqat, who had described his job as a "dead end," is now telling the camera that DePinto "cares about me," because he has offered to be a mentor to him. "Only in America" could a boss care so much, says a delivery driver named Igor--who, we are informed at the end of his show, was given his own 7-11 franchise and "continues to live the American Dream."

Nowhere is there a hint of words like: union, strike or benefits. Instead, the underlying, insidious message of the show is that getting through a shitty job--literally, in the case of Fred G., a worker at Waste Management, whose job is to remove human waste from porta-potties--is all about having a "positive attitude."

It's really enough to make me queasy.


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