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I did it for almost 10 years. Most of the work we did was fine, but some was utterly opposed to my personal values. I started making donations to my favorite charities (mostly Planned Parenthood and ACLU) every time I had a new work project that I felt was working against their goals.
When my husband and I were financially stable enough, I noped out of that job and found something that paid less but was affirming instead of soul-crushing.
Take their money. Give your very best every moment you're at work. And find a job that you can better live with. Or better yet, build one.
Your first priority should always be to take care of and protect yourself and your family. Build systems that enable you to be as self-reliant as practicable. You can't help others if you, yourself, are are constantly being knocked flat on your ass.
A friend of a friend worked at a petrochemical plant of some sort. They took the job reluctantly, because they had been struggling to find work for the kind of engineer that they were without it being somewhere deeply unethical. They reportedly ended up covertly feeding intel to climate action protesters and direct action groups.
Apparently it helped somewhat, but it was still pretty stressful
ITT: Some people would rather face privation than compromise their morals, some would not. Saved you some time.
Unionize
next question
Poison the well.
Slowly.
If the company is doing crime, document and blow the whistle. If it's evil in a way that doesn't have legal consequences, try to start a union so they fire you, then cost them as much money as you can with lawyers.
I mean, as long as I'm not directly working on a weapon, its fine. Every job you do for money is contributing to the GDP and indirectly supporting your country, any corruption, police brutality, human rights violations, persecution, war, everyone is contributing to it in some way.
The only way to truly decouple yourself from the system is going offgrid and farming for yourself, otherwise, everyone is complicit, we are all "sinners" in this world.
The Good Place talks about this. You buy a random tomato and you are contributing to climate change, you lose points for it, you end up in "hell" (The Bad Place).
I don't?
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences ...
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.
(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.
(3) Misfile essential documents.
(4) In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done.
(5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
(6) Hold up mail until the next collection.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
(1) Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job ...
(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can ...
(3) Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.
(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
(9) Misroute materials.
(10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
...
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
...
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion ...
...
(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.
I worked at a company that made software for multi-level marketing companies (legalized pyramid schemes). Some of our clients sold snake oil remedies and were always getting in trouble for claiming they could cure cancer. I liked my coworkers and the job itself, but I hated the nature of what we were supporting.
I don’t think you can separate one from the other.
The company was always getting screwed over by dishonest clients, but we never sued because it would be bad for our reputation. The financial pressure grew until we started acting like a much dumber business: taking bad deals, outsourcing to cheap overseas teams, forcing everyone to work crazy hours, doubling up on the “we all have to make sacrifices” kool-aid, the list goes on. I didn’t stick around for long.
I’d do it again if I had to, to keep food on the table, but that experience taught me there’s no “right way” to operate in a bad industry. Eventually you either assimilate or go out of business.
I don't.
Money can't buy morals or ethics. If I hate the company, guarantee you I won't be there in six months, let alone five years.
Maybe other people can. I can't. Inevitably, I get into some kind of spat with a boss or a manager over morals, ethics, or how we're being treated. Or how I'm being treated. And they make up a reason to fire me, or I get so mad that I quit.
I work in gambling and have done for over 3 years. I do it for the paycheck.
Edit: My last job was in adtech doing web attribution online and I initially thought at least the gambling customers are willingly signing up instead of just being spied on without their consent in many cases... Then I read some of the comments on my company's subreddit and it made me wonder if certan customers were able to consent in a meaningful sense.
I don't need to because I wouldn't get a job there in the first place
I thought this was an fairly insightful piece on the topic: https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-not-build-the-torment-nexus/
I think the author is it a bit unrealistically idealistic at times, but I appreciate what they have to say about the subject nonetheless. It's easy to tell someone to turn down a big payday on principle, but in reality most laborers are just trying to pay rent and buy groceries.
Money
I fucking don't.
If it's the only job you can get you make it work.
Ive had enough choice to be able to pick companies with culture I agree with, at least for a few years until i got sick of it.
Most people dont have that luxary, which must be soul killing.
Feeding ones' family
Do you code for a living?
This is part of why I went into accounting. Can do it at any company, don't need to work anyplace I think is evil, every organization uses this skill set, most everyone needs something accounted for.
But - when my oldest wanted to go into physical therapy work I pushed hard for her to do the training in the Army because she could easily meet the physical requirements, they pay you while training instead of you paying for school, and yes you are indentured for 7 years while you get the best possible training, but are not used in the field just in the hospitals in safe areas, and don't do anything evil just help people. She could not countenance it but I still think she'd be better off, would have finished all that by now. So I guess I have still no problem rationalizing working for an evil empire if you are doing something good for people, and getting good pay and training for yourself, that you can then take out into the world to do good and make money.
I worn in Automotive despite hating cars and believing the industry is fundamentally at fault for the state of the world currently (Leaded gasoline, micro plastics, and climate change) and is working on contributing to the death of privacy and owning things.
There are a few different things that help me sleep at night, though I don't sleep well in general.
First, I have poor self image. This means both that I struggle to believe I can find work elsewhere and also that I don't feel like I'm good at my job. You might think that would make me want to leave more and believe me I do, but it also kind of Uno reverses the act of working for them. If I think I'm bad at my job and my job is at an evil corporation, then I'm actively draining the organization of money that could be spent elsewhere.
Second my work mostly doesn't touch on the things that are vile and awful about the industry. I'm a programmer and my work primarily deals with displays and control interfaces. A display not coming up isn't going to harm the industry in any meaningful way, but it will impact a person using the end product. Since that's where most of my work lies it is easy to rationalize doing those things.
I'm unhappy my industry exists and has done such damage to the world, but until I can find something better I'm stuck.
I would never
I suspect most of us have jobs that are adjacent to (or at best a few business connections removed) from what you're talking about. Wealth concentration and corrupt governments tend to do that.
Millions of people are holding down useless and/or society-damaging jobs because they are living in countries ravaged by Late Stage Capitalism. They have kids to feed.
As for the people working in the most obviously "concentrated evil" types of jobs you're talking about: some of them will be the type who delude themselves into thinking they are being patriotic, defending the nation, the usual BS rationalizations. Few villains realize they are villains.
It's like a corollary to the saying "there can be no ethical consumption under capitalism".
No matter who you work for (even if you are self employed), some evil will result. I'm not going to sit on a high tower judging someone working in an Amazon warehouse just because that's the way they are able to keep food on their table.
Like you said, it's best to judge those who working on concentrated evil. If someone's working on the AGM-114R-9X Hellfire Sword Missile, they really should be asking themselves if they are the baddies.
Unfortunately, our society does a really good job of minimizing the quantity of evil people needed to do evil aims. According to the US national park service, 500,000 people worked on the Manhattan project. It's probably a fraction of a percent of those people who even had a clue they were working on a weapon. It's probably a fraction of a percent of those people who actually knew what caliber of a weapon they were working on, and many of those people probably assumed such a destructive weapon would never need to be used (also what Gatling and Nobel told themselves).
Does anyone else remember the source of the phrase "concentrated evil"? I do.
I do as little as possible while taking as much resource up as I can.
Also I spend a very sizable fraction of my time hitting my weed pen in the parking lot instead of actually working.
Just do the minimum to not get fired and rack up the companies expenses as much as possible. They'd just replace you with a cheaper, and more efficient replacement any who.
Its quite simple, I know what I will eventually get a better job ideally at a business with an IWW affiliated union
