There is a distinct technique used by capitalists to bypass the legal and contractual rights of workers which to my knowledge has no name currently - so I’m giving it one - Lunch Grinding.
Lunch Grinding is a manipulative erosion of worker rights both in and out of the workplace. It bypasses legal and contractual standards through informal social pressures which the bosses cannot be held directly accountable for.
Lunch Grinding is named after one of the most common examples. It begins by asking a few employees to skip lunch in order to finish a project. Workers who are already insecure about their position due to economic anxiety will see this as an opportunity to prove they are a good employee. Those who refuse to do so may receive blame for failing to finish the project on time.
The issue becomes compounded when the bosses begin to purposefully schedule less time to complete the same projects. A distinct class begins to appear ignoring their contractual right to a lunch break - who become hostile to those who refuse to work during lunch for being “lazy” or “the reason we didn’t finish on time.”
At this point the management no longer needs to influence anyone directly to work through lunch break, simply by keeping up the sense of constantly being a little late for the project they have ensured the lunch-grinders will apply pressure to their peers who aren’t working through breaks.
As workplace hostility increases towards the “unproductive” members who are expressing their formal right to a break - they will be replaced with new individuals who may not even realize they have the right to a lunch break because working through the hour has become normalized by their peers.
Thus formal written standards from contracts and legal code become functionally non-existent. After which a new standard will be identified by management for erosion some examples include:
+Accepting uncertain hours. +Working off-the-clock. +Staying “On-Call” at all times. +Finishing projects / responding to emails at home. +Never using time off or sick leave.
All of which are socially conditioned in the same format - starting with “The Good Worker” who does a little favor for their boss - and ending as a peer enforced pressure and a perpetual hostility from management claiming productivity isn’t as high as expected.
your boss is not your friend
Lest you think this is only applicable to office work, this sounds just like my experience as an Early Childhood Educator, except we had the added pressure of "you're doing it for the kids".
We all wanted to make sure the kids had the best possible experience, but it created an environment of constantly taking work home, working through breaks (or skipping then entirely), and doing our paperwork on our lunches.
Nobody talks about it because ECEs are almost universally women, and often WOC or immigrant women. But it's extremely common, and leads to a high burnout rate when educators never get time to recharge from being depleted.
