How and why a person can get rejected for menial, slave-wage job? I was recently turned down for a housecleaning job and it really boggles me as to what did I do to deserve this honor. I applied for this part-time job (on some nights and weekends--about 15 hours a week) at the Potawatomi Bingo and Casino here in downtown Milwaukee and expected to be a shoo-in for the job. But alas, I was wrong! Now, I'm not mad at all. I don't really need this job--though having that extra cash would be nice--and I applied just for the heck of it and to find something to do in my free time.
The job requirements are very minimal; besides the fact that you are an able-bodied human being who doesn't mind walking around most of the time, you don't need to have a high school diploma and must be literate enough to read the instructions on the bottles of the cleaning agents, or at the very least, able to comprehend enough English to follow orders from your supervisor. What's so hard about that, you might ask? Well, it's not hard at all but there has to be a reason for my rejection.
One thing that comes to my mind is my history of working for the peace and social justice causes, including volunteering for political campaigns, which were all included in the resume. Corporations hate politically-active/conscious employees, who know their rights as workers, and most of all, their rights as citizens. Corporations brook no dissent whatsoever and demand abject loyalty and obedience from their employees, though this relationship only runs one-way. A worker who knows his/her rights can help educate fellow workers who hitherto are ignorant of their rights, thus sparking a movement to further strengthen the workforce as an aggregate, i.e. forming a union to increase their collective bargaining leverage.
Maybe I'm just overreacting over this rejection news. Maybe the company decided to give the job to a more deserving person, like a recently arrived immigrant from El Salvador, who needed the money to feed his/her family back home. Anyway, that's besides the point; the preceding paragraph about The Corporation serves as a nice segway for my next topic: The Corporation!
I went to see this highly-touted documentary called "The Corporation" at the campus theater last night. In a nutshell, it's a documentary that exposes the true nature of the corporation, revealing its mean and vicious side that has long been hidden from the public scrutiny. The documentary starts with the idea of the corporation as a "person". What? A corporation as a person? That's totally absurd, one might think, but the right of an American corporation as a "person" is securely enshrined within the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment in the US Constitution. The original intention of the Equal Protection Clause was to protect the newly freed slaves after the Civil War ended but in the late 19th century, through highly dubious judicial actions, the corporation was bestowed the status of "personhood," and thus, expanding the scope of the Clause to cover this newfound "living" entity. It's almost ironic to think that the Constitutional right that was created to protect the former slaves--and all of the US citizens for that matter--is also now being used to protect the corporation that exploits its workers almost to the point of virtually enslaving them.
The documentary also shines the light on other issues of corporate malevolences but it's the main question of the documentary that really grabs me: Since the corporation is constituted as a person--legally, at least--what kind of person is he? According to FBI's own psychological profile and the World Health Organization's checklist for mental health, a corporation can be safely diagnosed as a PSYCHOPATH. What? Good 'ol Ronald McDonald suddenly turns into Charles Manson? Or the affable Colonel Sanders is in reality the alter-ego of Ted Bundy? Unfortunately, this psychopathic behavior is not that obvious and easily discernable, yet the effect is far more devastating.
Think of a person who seemingly is devoid of compassion or guilt or empathy--a soulless human being, so to speak--and that's what a corporation is. Someone who willfully knows the adverse results of his/her actions on the society at large but but could not care less about them as long as his/her goal(s) are achieved, and that's what a corporation is. Someone who is unwilling to admit his/her guilt who would then repeat the same self-serving actions that would produce the same calamitious results on the society over and over again, and that's what a corporation is. Think of a person who is callous, deceitful, anti-social, selfish and cruel, and that's what a corporation is. Taken all these traits into account and one will have a full description of a psychopath.
I would love to write more about this topic but time and space wouldn't permit. Check out the film's website for more info.
Damnit! Where is that goddamn book I'm looking for? I need this book to write a paper which is due tomorrow afternoon. When a book is in Reserve, it should stay there and not to have walked somewhere else. For this hassle, I'm going to skip my Constitutional Law class and its "lovely" instructor and go find this elusive book.
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