August 27th, 2010
Hard times for workers: Hollywood says time to laugh
NBC’s new fall show “Outsourced” and New Line Cinema’s 2011 movie “Horrible Bosses” speak volumes about our attitudes toward job loss and abusive workplaces. Both projects promote dilbert-like fun while simultaneously mocking employees. It’s all a distraction to prevent our focus on employers making horrific decisions — dumping working Americans on the street while chasing cheap labor elsewhere or propping up horrific bullies instead of purging them. Are they laughing at us or with us?
Outsourced, NBC-TV show, premieres Sept. 23
From the network: “Outsourced” is a comedy where the Midwest meets the exotic East in a hilarious culture clash.
HaHa. Notwithstanding the crude stereotypes of Indians and the idiot American overseers who treat the workers like children (at least in the preview that the network must be proud to circulate publicly), there are serious problems facing Indian workers.
In India, the industry sector is called the ITES-BPO, information technology enabled services-business process outsourcing. India currently accounts for 46% of all global offshoring. The appeal, according to a 2003 NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) report, is “an unbeatable mix of low costs, deep technical and language skills, mature vendors, and supportive government policies.” Even with the influx of offshoring financial services, the industry still provides mostly standardized and routinized services of low complexity, emphasizing mass production and customer service. To better understand the pressures faced by Indian call center workers, read Premilla D’Cruz’s 2010 article described elsewhere at this site.
The dilemmas facing Americans are more dire. Losing 500,000 more jobs in July 2010 and several million displaced since the great recession, laughing about offshoring or outsourcing domestic jobs is no laughing matter. Lost jobs in the U.S. means more than in most other industrialized nations. Everyone in the world who loses a job loses wages , but in the U.S. you also lose affordable health insurance when you need it most to cope with escalated stressors, you risk losing your home to foreclosure and for too many there is the loss of identity.
Horrible Bosses, the movie
A movie produced by New Line, with shooting that began in July, 2010, is expected to a summer 2011 R-rated blockbuster with an all-star cast. The storyline according to one Hollywood “insider” trade publication:
Three best friends who, fed up with abuse from their employers, enlist the help of a scam artist called MF Jones to help murder them. Two of the horrible bosses are a coke-addled heir to a chemical company and a nymphomaniac dentist. The publication then gushes that almost all of the roles in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and ex-”Freaks and Geeks” star John Francis Daley are “great.” Then, seemingly without irony it states — “it’s a very funny, enjoyably mean-spirited piece of work, and with a cast like this, could be one of the better comedies of next year.”
The problem I have with the premise is how “funny and enjoyable” is juxtaposed with “mean-spirited”? This semantic pairing baffles me. After decades of media pounding us with “sex and violence,” maybe Hollywood next wants to package funny and mean-spirited to go together. Wonder if bullied targets think the abuse they endure is very funny?
Don’t think I reject funny. Those who have seen me speak have seen my brand of humor. And I have spent lots of evenings in comedy clubs; I love slapstick.
But I resent the fact that before the media ever get around to seriously exploring workplace bullying in depth (NBC cancelled its airing of a full Dateline show on bullying in 2007), they want to trivialize it as if it were a joke.
So are the overpaid hollywood moguls laughing at those of us unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of the recession while the wealthy have unconscionably profited? Or do they think they are providing cathartic healing? If the latter, it’s snake oil.
Another funny hit, dilbert the comic strip, can be easily seen as mean spirited, too.
In conclusion, there’s money to be made laughing at, not with, the down and out during tough times. It’s a variation of the blame-the-victim theme rampant in our society.
Tags: call centers, horrible bosses, India, ITES-BPO, layoffs, NBC, New Line, outsourced, Premilla D'Cruz
This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Media, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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The ironic part about this post to me is I used to work for a call center before I took a job at the Workplace Bullying Institute. I sold Helio cell phones until they closed the call center and shipped all our jobs to the Philippines. They sent the American manager overseas to train the employees just like they depicted in the video clip. It’s nice to know that Hollywood thinks a funny premise for a sitcom is to make a joke out of American workers losing jobs at American companies so those jobs can be sent to cheaper foreign labor. “Americans will identify with the plot!” they’re probably thinking. Yeah, it’s a hip cultural reference of shame and we all get it! You still suck for making a show about outsourcing.
It boils down to this: there would be no problem with high levels of unemployment in America if American companies were patriotic enough to hire their fellow Americans.
So true. Same issues with sex harassment. While sometimes it’s helpful to have some humor injected into these situations because we can see how foolish these bosses look, sex harassment and workplace bullying are rarely laughing matters. We all know the damage that is done to personal targets of bullying and what can happen in workplaces where everyone’s afraid of the boss. It’s more than ugly; it’s criminal.
Kathleen