work perks as glamour magic

see: title

Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash.

perks. remember the golden era of perks at work? i do. my first introduction to work perks was at a pr agency where they had wine on tap. this would have been in the 2010s, so at that time it was exciting and sexy, i felt real adult going to work at an office that had wine on tap.

eventually the thing was put out of commission because it had mold. illusion shattered. :( i don’t think the tap was ever repaired, at least not before i got let go for reasons definitely not related to mold. at least not for me. the image of moldy wine on tap has stayed with me, though. maybe for this post.

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“If we delve a little deeper, we can see that a corporate perks culture is also a useful tool in remaking our perceived relationship to our jobs -- turning it from something burdensome into something fun.” - J. Maureen Henderson, “Don’t Trust The Free Beer: The Dark Side Of Workplace Perks”

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the start of my argument here will be about perks at the workplace function as glamour magic. the reason i say ‘start’ of the argument is because this topic has gone deep and i only have so much space, we all have things to do.

first off, let’s come to terms: Deborah Castellano defines glamour magick as: 1) what makes you exciting and interesting to others, and 2) an illusionary spell. “Society relentlessly tells us that a real person of substance would never become involved in actually using glamour (definition one or two) of any kind to improve their lot in life. That sort of behavior is reserved for strippers, social climbers, those without means, drag kings and queens, people of dubious gender and sexual identiy, drifters, grifters...”

the history of how perks became a thing tells us something about anger, and how we might be tricked out of it. in short, a group of managers in 1894 found that if employees were given perks (i saw the phrase “treated nicely” in the research at some point) they were less likely to mash up the place. through the 1920s onwards this idea of work perks expanded and expanded and expanded as an extension of the hallucination of corporate welfare.

perks work to form a bond between one ‘class’ and another; note that they are always given from those in power to those that don’t have power in the relationship. the bond that is formed makes it more difficult to call out the boundaries of the relationship. this works especially well on young people who are more likely to go with the flow, do as their told; implicitly or explicitly. this is covered in the book Influence. a company realizes that they can get a lot more money back if they give a small thing away first. perks, as a concept, are the same mechanism just working ina slightly different context.

the actual perk as glamour distracts the employee or recipient from the true intent of the employer or giver. they just give you free lunch, they don’t tell you they’re trying to extract an extra 25 minutes of labour. everyone just gets their gift at Christmas, it doesn’t come with a card that says ‘just a reminder, we’re the dom in this relationship.’ the glamour is the shiny thing you’re paying attention to that you got. i am making it sound pretty evil and i’m not sorry for that.

what happened?

according to this article, the whole ‘wacky work perks’ era died somewhere in the late 2010s.

at some point everyone stopped “believing” in perks; ie they became less exciting. lost their glamour. at one point you could entice people who were desperate to start their careers in with things like ping pong tables and beer on tap (ew). for a few years, people entering the workforce for the first time thought going to work would be more fun than going to school, because you were making money! so the magic of perks worked better because it seemed like you were getting something “awesome” (didn’t really matter what it was) on top of getting paid.

there was always a dark side to work perks, but i don’t know that we really think about how dark. not only were perks useful for distracting younger employees from being underpaid, they were also used to extract more labour. providing lunch for employees is a legacy of this culture that continues today. the use of perks in this way, to create and maintain an illusion that covers up a deeper intention, is a form of glamour magic. and while the era of wild work perks might be dead, the glamour is still there; it might just be a question of who it is being used on.

maybe the answer is a lot simpler; the glamour wore off with layoffs.

behind the paywall i talk about a modern-day example of how a company might use perks to maintain its class system.