USA: A national tale of Employee Abuse
With a background in behavior management and human resources, I have spent my time working with employees and employers from six continents – over 100 countries – studying how detrimental behavior manifests in different situations and cultures. My main focus has been on supporting and empowering employees who are experiencing something I choose to call:
Employee Abuse; when an employer systematically uses abuse tactics to gain and maintain control and power over one or more employees.
What my experience has shown me is that fundamental abuse tactics are the same, regardless of the players, settings, situations, or even country. This has allowed me to note down several indicators of possible Employee Abuse, how advanced the abuse is, how to best identify all the players, and how to tackle the situation.
I've noted through the years that as the fundamentals for Employee Abuse are always the same, so are the fundamentals for abuse in general. I've worked with individuals who have faced abuse in various settings in their homes and relationships, and all of them recite the same fundamental behaviors from their abusers, themselves, and all surrounding parties.
I generally don't give much thought to any abuse other than Employee Abuse, I am an HR professional after all, my focus is on my employees and the workplace, and not on their personal problems. But watching what is happening in the USA has been terrifying, as the administration of this nation increasingly validates and increases the use of abuse tactics against their own citizens.
I'm not an expert in nations, or how to diagnose nations, nor do I have the vocabulary to discuss anything… nation-related… stuff… I don’t know. But I do know the key indicators of an abuse culture, and I would like to share some of them with you.
The first thing I do, is to interact with management (think: administration) and I try and gauge the level of trust they have for the employees (think: citizens).
Is there a lack of trust towards the employees?
Is said lack of trust directed against everyone, one or more specific groups, or individuals?
Are they vocal about this portrayed lack of trust with other groups who are deemed "more trustworthy"?
No, I don't check it the employees/citizens trust the management/administration, as that is irrelevant. There will always be at least one employee/citizen that goes against the management/administration and this is normal. But for the management/administration to not just distrust, but create discord and antagonism between groups in the workplace (think: nation), that is a sign of a ripe abuse culture.
One of the most severe signs of an abuse culture I have noted within employers is when I see management use segregating tactics to “limit contact with the undesirable employees”, use prejudice in their recruitment and promotional efforts to hand-pick individuals they feel will best assist in their abuse agenda, or even blatantly spout hate speech and blame towards a certain individual or group about everything that goes wrong, could go wrong, is wrong, or even is imaginary and somehow wrong.
Communications in the form of a barrage of misinformation is such a common abuse tactic, that it quite honestly falls on the “oh gosh, can’t you at least try and be original?” end of the abuse spectrum. This tactic has been used for centuries in warfare in order to disorient and break down the “enemy” by chipping down their mental fortitude, one single message at a time. Except here the enemy are the employees (or you know, the citizens).
If communications from the employer will take the form of misinformation that confuse the employees - and even have detrimental consequences for the business entity - this is a sign of an abusive intent.
This barrage of misinformation is meant to distract, confuse, overwhelm, and divert attention while also driving in the point of “who is really the problem” (spoiler: it ain't the employer).
This results in employees who are so exhausted and confused from weathering a constant storm of misinformation that they become docile from confusion and show lethargy from the constant barrage – i.e. easy to control and manipulate.
Does any of this sound even remotely familiar?
Yes, greed is a key indicator of an abusive culture, and yes I am talking about simple greed, and not just greed for monetary gains but for power, recognition, and even for simple praise.
Greed for recognition and simple praise often comes in the form of sycophants, or “toadies” who take on the role of a minion, or at best, a lieutenant in the abusive culture. An example of a toady is someone who blindly allows and accepts for abuse to happen as “it's the abused one's fault anyway”.
A toady will note an abusive individual using economic resources for their own personal gain and either help them or even actively participate in it.
A toady will repeat unchecked lies from an abusive individual, blindly following their lead in hope of recognition or praise for their participation.
A toady will even go as far as to listen to unchecked lies from a random person and immediately act upon them, as long as that random person has an imagined investment in the toady’s cause.
And a toady is usually right next to an individual whose greed is based upon economic resources, and the toady will be expertly used so the economically-greedy-person can carve out employees'/citizens' rights and demolish organizational structure while lining their own pockets, shill their own products or services from organizational headquarters (think: White House), and inflate the worth of their own stock in order to increase their self-worth.
When it comes to Employee Abuse, an abusive employer shows either incompetence themselves and/or fills key positions with incompetent sycophants. Either way, supported and encouraged incompetence becomes obvious somewhere in the workplace.
And the reason for this is simple. If an abusive individual surrounds themselves with incompetent individuals, those individuals won't be capable of questioning the abuse tactics, nor even know if the abusive individual is incompetent.
Before you get all up in arms for me even suggesting that there is any incompetence in the USA administration, please remember that what you are feeling is empathy for your highest ranking officials, and in the never dying words of one of the highest ranking one:
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”
Funnily enough, while I’m working on identifying an abusive individual the one thing I do look for is lack of empathy. But I digress.
Incompetence can be evident in small details, such as spouting absolute transparency, while giving no data, or loudly proclaiming how a manager/administrator has reached their goal while results showing otherwise.
Funnily enough, the incompetent individual will not be tackled directly, but will proclaim that they've “decided to leave as they’ve accomplished all they ventured out to do”. I've seen this exact sentence so many times, for the exact same reason, time and time again, I don't even question what is happening behind the scenes anymore.
Honestly, I could go on with more indicators, but no one would bother to read it. The USA fit my model of Employee Abuse so perfectly these days that it is terrifying to watch, albeit I admit I'm part devastated and part intrigued by seeing this happening in real life. Honestly, after what we learned from 1930's Germany I didn't think history would ever repeat itself. But here we are.
In my work, my focus is always on minimizing all detrimental effects on individuals, and I have always offered my employees two solutions to their predicament, as quite honestly "removing the problem" isn't an option most of the time:
Leave, hope for a better employer elsewhere.
Stay, and actively go against the abusive employer.
For employees the first option is usually the only option they have as the second option will at best result in termination, and worst: increased abuse tactics directed at the individual.
But for an entire nation?
Leaving means you will watch your fellow Americans and the country you love so much, slowly succumb to its bleak future (talk to a historian). And if you don't want that, your only choice is the second option.
Which is all today is about, isn't it.
But what I do hope you understand from this text of mine, is that you're not just fighting for one single day and hoping it'll be enough. This fight will take more than four years to see through, as your problem isn't just with a toady orange who farted their way into a prominent position, but with an abuse culture that has been decades in the making.
That's right, decades. Signs of this deterioration of your culture into an abuse culture have been prominent for decades now, even before the toady orange. The toady orange just got lucky with claiming power while the US citizens were at their weakest.
But I am hoping that you will band together as a nation now, and actively go against this abusive culture, working your way from being seen as a nation crippled by a forming dictatorship, and rise again as a functioning democracy where “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is again (and truly) your catchphrase.
And the even worse news? This fight is your own. No one from outside of the USA is coming to safe you from the rising toady orange dictatorship you’re faced with.
Europe, North-North-America (sorry), Oceania, and even parts of Asia have already begun preparing for a world where the USA are not a significant player anymore, and are even preparing for a world where the only objective of the USA seems to actively try to start World War III, and not as an ally.
We've sat and watched how the current administration in the USA has systematically stripped its citizens of their rights (thank you, President Musk), isolated their citizens from the world stage by random actions from highly competent international affairs employee (thank you, toady orange), and quite frankly, nobody believes that there will be any change unless the citizens of the United States of America themselves take matters into their own hands and band together against the rising situation.
We all hope that we can speak of the USA as a friendly nation again. I myself lived and studied in the USA (GO BRUINS!!!), and I regret to say that the USA are now both some of my most desperate clients that I am not qualified anymore to assist as their issues go beyond the workplace, as well as a country I actively avoid as I know there is nothing I can do except sit back and hope the future is brighter than it's current state is.
We all hope that we'll see the USA go from stripping its citizens of their rights, to building a good support network for all citizens, focusing on prosperity and well being for all. We want to stand with you as equals, and not see you as a possible threat to the safety and security of our own nations.
But please know, we all support your protests on April 5th, 2025.
Source: USA: A national tale of Employee Abuse
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