Episode 187: Undercover Boss, Uber-Driving CEOs, and the "Empathetic Executive" Schtick

Episode 187: Undercover Boss, Uber-Driving CEOs, and the "Empathetic Executive" Schtick

"New Starbucks CEO plans to pull barista shifts in stores every month," CNN announces. "Uber's CEO moonlighted as a driver and it changed the way he operates the company," Fortune insists. "Your DoorDash driver? He's the company's co-founder," the Associated Press smirks.

Month after month or week after week, we seem to hear the same stories about bold corporate executives who've decided to roll up their sleeves—metaphorically or otherwise—and join their lowest-level employees as a delivery driver, barista, or retail worker. Their stated goal: to "stay connected" to and "better understand" the company, its customers, and its workers.

While these attempts to foster and express empathy may appear noble on the surface, they're anything but. In reality, the CEO-as-worker stunt is an entirely self-serving project, creating a pretext for worker surveillance and a distraction from labor abuses like poverty wages and union-busting, all the while seeking to convince the public that corporate executives are honest, hardworking folks, Just Like You.

Today, we will be dissecting the past and present of Undercover Boss-style corporate maneuvers, looking at the ways in which the C-suiter-in-the-trenches routine advances the squishy concept of "empathy" in order to obscure and undermine the material needs and demands of labor.

Our guest is Ligia Guallpa, Executive Director of the Worker's Justice Project, a community-based, workers' rights organization in New York City.

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Episoder(374)

Episode 238: The Fictional, Racist, Paranoia-Sowing "Sleeper Cell" Media Construction

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20 Mai 1h 30min

Live Show: 'How to Sell a Genocide' Book Talk at The Word Is Change Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY

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13 Mai 1h 3min

News Brief: "Peak TV," Streamer Studio Accounting Gimmicks, and the Precarity of Hollywood Labor

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6 Mai 47min

News Brief: How the Right Invented — and Exploited — the "Liberal Media" Trope

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In this News Brief, we talk with A. J. Bauer, assistant professor at the University of Alabama, about his new book," Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press". In...

22 Apr 51min

Ep 237: How Selective, Patronizing 'Deradicalization' Discourse Pathologizes Anti-Colonial Struggle

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15 Apr 1h 21min

Ep 236: Manufactured Austerity and the Media Assisted 'Public-Private Partnership' Rip-Off

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In this episode we discuss how privatization was rebranded 'Public-Private Partnerships' and unleashed decades of raiding of the public coffers by Wall Street. With guest Donald Cohen, founder and exe...

8 Apr 1h 6min

News Brief: As American Troops Hide in Civilian Hotels, US Media Ignores Pentagon's Use of 'Human Shields'

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In this News Brief we examine CNN, the Atlantic, Washington Post and NYT's blatant 'human shields' double standard as reports emerge of US troops hiding from Iranian attacks in civilian infrastructure...

1 Apr 17min

News Brief: How Decades of Media Distortions and Lies about "Iran's Nuclear Program" Lead to War

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In this News Brief, we discuss a recent poll showing 70% of Americans are fundamentally wrong about the nature of Iran's "nuclear program"—including 1 in 4 who think Iran currently possesses a nuclear...

25 Mar 34min

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