Business
Foremen who once ruled colonized peoples bring the same habits of command to immigrant workers from those lands. Workplace authority becomes a straight transfer of the colonialist authority they had exercised over the 'natives'. Bosses address workers as grown-ups speaking to children, and fear holds the arrangement in place.
Mass production breaks work into a small set of choreographed motions repeated without thought. The worker is shrunk to those motions, and his body becomes a resource to be consumed while the product gets all the care. The result is a pervasive mindlessness and a deep habit of submission.
Beyond the wage itself, management takes time in small slices: minutes 'stolen', worked but never paid. Added to heat, nausea and hazardous chemicals, these petty takings make up the everyday texture of exploitation.
On the line, the official skill grades that set pay and status track a worker's origin rather than his ability. The distinction is made in a perfectly simple way: it is racist, with Black workers fixed at the lowest grade, right at the bottom of the ladder.
The factory is first a set of relations between human beings, conducted through the things they make and handle. How people stand toward one another, who commands and who obeys, who is valued and who is used up, is built into the work on the objects themselves.
The assembly line pulls together workers from many nations and cultures whose home societies have been destroyed, broken open and ravaged. That uprooting is what supplies industry with its lowest-paid labor.
Workers who are themselves targets of contempt can carry other prejudices built into their everyday words. One can say a man 'can't be Jewish' because he is good, since 'Jewish' has come to mean simply 'something not good'. The slur lives in the vocabulary even when the speaker holds no hostility toward the actual person.
Endless repetition breeds a temptation toward death, a wish to give up entirely. But life revolts and resists. In every man on the line something silently cries out 'I'm not a machine!', and that refusal is the raw material of any strike.