Coercion versus care

September 6, 2023 10:51 PM

Coercion versus care. The problems that always develop when an organization deliberately deprives their employees of the ability to make things right in favour of funding the ways to enforce compliance with the policies as written, or as predatorily enforced.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (37 comments total)

Great article, very thoughtful.

I'm not sure the author has thought through the economics though when it comes to things like this:

One extra person working to care for passengers would negate the need for half a dozen punishers kept mostly on standby, but that doesn’t even seem to be an option the airport and airline consider.

Once an organisation has committed to having a coercion apparatus on standby, it doesn't really cost much more to keep deploying it. So financially you might as well cut your care costs to the bone.

That is, once the organisation has decided to oppress a minority, it might as well expand and oppress as many people as possible...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:20 AM on September 7, 2023 [15 favorites]

Of course, we're talking about Ryanair here, the airline notorious for nickel and diming passengers to the bone as a business model.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:44 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

This all just feels like fascism is winning. (Because what is fascism, at its core, if not coercion over care?)

As a non-confrontational human, this makes me despair.
posted by maxwelton at 2:39 AM on September 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

This is a really nice piece, thanks for posting it.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:03 AM on September 7, 2023

From the blurb I thought this was going to be about being employed in a bureaucracy, and bring subject to more means of control than resources to effectively do your job. I work in the public sector and the systems designed to "prevent waste and abuse" are god awfully expensive and ineffective.
posted by entropone at 4:24 AM on September 7, 2023 [14 favorites]

For some deeply human reason, the systems we currently build are unquenchingly thirsty for coercive resources to punish tiny acts of resistance to the inadequate and failing services they provide.

Orwell knew what this deeply human reason was. The Orwell scholar Christopher Hitchens explains in this must-see talk Orwell's contention that power is at its core a venue for satisfying deep perversions. E.g., O'Brien in 1984 pointing out that the only way to be sure your subjects are doing your will—not just doing what they would've done anyway and it happens to align with your will—is to make them suffer. And so such systems select for roles of authority those types of people who want to make others suffer. Also e.g. Orwell's own experiences as an Imperial policeman in Burma, which Hitchens gets into more detail about.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:42 AM on September 7, 2023 [27 favorites]

Sarbanes_Oxley came to mind. Punish all the little people, let the big crooks continue as before, make it look like something was accomplished.
posted by nofundy at 4:55 AM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Brings to mind this story from yesterday about Air Canada. Couldn't take the time to clean the seats properly, didn't want to compensate passengers denied boarding, so instead they threatened the passengers with being put on the No Fly list
posted by jacquilynne at 5:30 AM on September 7, 2023 [23 favorites]

I work in the public sector and the systems designed to "prevent waste and abuse" are god awfully expensive and ineffective.

I remember a time when Australia actually had a workable public sector instead of the present tatty patchwork of vestigial departments that serve mainly as fig leaves over the unbelievably expensive and corrupt consulting firms who now run this country.

Upper-class twits, whether they be conservative government ministers or C suite executives, love to shrink the wages budget regardless of how much doing so actually costs.
posted by flabdablet at 6:11 AM on September 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

The solution can only come from the bottom up: organized labor.
posted by rikschell at 7:03 AM on September 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Air Canada is unionized up the wazoo, so that doesn't necessarily help.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:06 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a good post, thank you.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:17 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mid-level managers where I am love to toss around the word "Governance", like it's a magic incantation that will get their projects approved and money flowing. After all, who could possibly be opposed to Governance?

Asking if anyone ever does a real ROI analysis on "Governance" gets you labelled as unprofessional, or at least unpopular.
posted by gimonca at 7:26 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is increasingly something that happens in healthcare settings, I think, particularly emergency rooms and settings that cater primarily to the poor and working class.
posted by flamk at 7:47 AM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

FTFA:

It’s sickening, really, but without ever making a tactical plan, without even raising a complicit eyebrow, each woman knew almost to a cellular level the precise method of confusion and de-escalation the situation required.

Ugh, this is the part that makes me saddest, and the most confident that the System as it exists will never -- can never -- change of its own accord, no matter what incentives are placed before it.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:48 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

"suffer"

And happily co-opt religions that valourize suffering as a higher moral situation - a quintessentially human situation. Fuck me. I'll drink my beer at noon and do the obescience thing just to get by, but I will not suffer. Do not mistake my endurance as suffering. Good on the author and the other watchers who endured but did not suffer the fools. That's how we rise up?! Watch and rise up. Is that enough? Idk. It's something.

Back to the beer
posted by kneecapped at 7:52 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

This was a powerful article, especially the parts about how the women de-escalated the situation. But I kept getting distracted by what I think is questionable math. The author implies there is a 1:5 ratio of agent to guards, and that the problem could have been fixed simply by reallocating so there were instead 2 agents (and presumably fewer guards?) but that's not the case. there are not 5 times as many guards as gate agents in a terminal. While this scenario played out there were certainly dozens of other gates where nothing special was happening, and the ratio was 1 agent and 0 guards.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 7:59 AM on September 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Thanks, mrgoldenbrown, something was bothering me about the ration discussion and I couldn’t pinpoint it. You’re exactly right in that. Without disagreeing on the overall premise, I found there were a lot of questions raised about this specific airport situation that can’t really be answered, and that weakens the argument leading to the premise, but since there are so many other examples of coercion over care (even in this thread) it rings no less true in the end.
posted by Miko at 8:08 AM on September 7, 2023

This is why I haven't replaced my carry-on bag from 1999 which uses rollerblade wheels that are flush with the bottom of the bag.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:38 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

This idea of coercion vs care hits home. I work in a field that holds a small but very real veto over huge projects. We are increasingly understaffed and workload grows without corresponding resources. I see the veto used for inconsequential “technical issues” all the time. Frequently this is a metering exercise, giving the project manager a minor task that has to be requeued and another cycle of approvals run, buying the vetoer a week or two. Exhaustion leads to frustration. Less consideration is given to the whole circumstance and pretty soon everyone is just following orders. Without the power to do things properly the pressure builds to turn from teammate to inquisitor. It really is all around us.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 8:51 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is why I haven't replaced my carry-on bag from 1999 which uses rollerblade wheels that are flush with the bottom of the bag.


I think the theme of the article is that it doesn't matter if you're actually following the rules, the unhappy employee can still punish you. (It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this)

I made the mistake once of trying to similarly point out that my bag was objectively not oversize. The TSA agent made it clear that the actual rules don't matter - my options were obeisance , miss my flight, or worse.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 8:56 AM on September 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

Isn't airport security handled by the airport, not the individual airlines? That is, aren't the guards who showed up in this scenario government agents and not Ryanair employees?
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:03 AM on September 7, 2023

Isn't airport security handled by the airport, not the individual airlines? That is, aren't the guards who show up in this scenario government agents and not Ryanair employees?

At many international airports the security queues are at the gates rather than in a central location. In those cases it may be that the airline employees are handling both security and check-in.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:06 AM on September 7, 2023

Isn't airport security handled by the airport, not the individual airlines? That is, aren't the guards who show up in this scenario government agents and not Ryanair employees?

Airport security staff are generally not government employees (and certainly not agents) in the UK. They will likely be employed by Stanstead Airport/Manchester Airport Group (who own and operate Stanstead Airport).
posted by Dysk at 9:22 AM on September 7, 2023

(And there appears to be done confusion about how the process operates here. I have travelled from Stansted with Ryanair several times, and can tell you that this story takes place at the gate. Everyone involved will already have checked in (likely online, ahead of time), checked and dropped any check luggage, and been through security. Security are responsible for checking your boarding pass, x-raying your carry-on, and metal detectoring and possibly frisking your person. After that, you eventually go to your gate where a Ryanair employee will check your boarding pass, passport, and check that your carry-on complies with the airline's regulations thereon. These vary not just airline to airline, but different levels of carry-on entitlement can be bought with Ryanair as well. Therefore, security check that your prospective carry-on is safe, but it's the airline employee at the gate who determines if you have more or bigger luggage than your carry-on entitlement.)
posted by Dysk at 9:28 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Manchester Airport Group itself, it looks like, is a public-private partnership, with the private portion only making up ~35.5% - so they are government employees in a sense, but set up to allow for the worst parts of private companies, too.
posted by sagc at 9:29 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

They will likely be employed by Stanstead Airport/Manchester Airport Group (who own and operate Stanstead Airport).

Right, but that's my point: if they're not Ryanair employees than this isn't relevant to their spending on care vs. coercion. It's an odd example to lead with.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:34 AM on September 7, 2023

Manchester Airport Group itself, it looks like, is a public-private partnership, with the private portion only making up ~35.5% - so they are government employees in a sense

They're employees of a private company that is partly owned by some councils in the North. Being a council employee (which MSG employees are not) is not the same thing as being a government employee in a UK context. The UK government does not own any part of MAG.
posted by Dysk at 9:39 AM on September 7, 2023

OK, but they're not Ryanair employees.
posted by sagc at 9:42 AM on September 7, 2023

Right, but that's my point: if they're not Ryanair employees than this isn't relevant to their spending on care vs. coercion. It's an odd example to lead with.

I'm not sure it's totally irrelevant, though. Ryanair didn't wholly design the way that airports and airlines handle the onboarding process, but it's not a stretch to see that staffing decisions could be made based on certain assumptions. For example, it would be easy to justify only needing one employee to handle the 2 boarding lines because, well if something really unruly starts happening they can just summon help from the airport security group. Obviously I have no idea if Ryanair did this here, but it's not unreasonable to assume they would.

In a previous life (about 10 years or more ago), Ryanair was my client. I worked at an airline software vendor and Ryanair was one of our largest customers at the time. For a few years, I had a somewhat inside view of how Ryanair does business. At least, how they treat their providers and what kinds of customizations they wanted. Here's a very high level summary of what that was like:

- They would absolutely use their "status" as a big regional player to aggressively cut our fees with them.

- 99% of the features they requested were not intended to improve the customer experience, they were always only intended to optimize profit.

- There was an episode where we had to explain to them that we could not do a certain thing they wanted us to do because it was illegal and would violate multiple consumer protection laws in pretty much every country. They still tried to ask us to do it a couple more times (we always refused).

But of course none of this is shocking if you've ever seen/heard/read an interview with Ryanair's founder, Michael O'Leary, a man for whom laws and regulations are things to be ignored, worked around, or even simply purchased in order to get what he wants.

All this to say, what I got out of the article is that this problem of coercion vs. care exists because we continue to allow Capitalism to dominate our societal experience. How can we ever care about any person when our entire economic and social system is predicated on the acquisition and control of capital?

We literally cannot fix these kinds of issues without untangling ourselves from exploitive systems of government and business first.
posted by Doleful Creature at 10:05 AM on September 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

It would make little difference if they were, given the fact that Ryanair operate something like 80+% of the capacity at Stansted - the guards are covering most the gates at the airport even if they were Ryanair.

I don't really understand that as a criticism really - as a customer or flyer, I don't really care who is employed by whom. But I'm certainly noticing if there is capacity to throw five on-clock security guards at a gate while there's only one actual service person, overwhelmed, and no capacity to spare a second. It implies overwhelmingly more slack in enforcement than service, to the point where the former is being deployed to cover for the deficiencies in the latter, in line with the article's central thesis.
posted by Dysk at 10:07 AM on September 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

In any airport, though, I feel like you're going to have, on average, more idle guards than idle agents at any given moment, because your ideal conditions are much closer to the guards doing nothing and the agents working whenever available.

IE, a guard's job, 90% of the time, is to stand around and respond to things that arise, whereas the agent ought to be able to be assigned tasks that take up their time.

Obviously not an excuse for anything, and clearly there's such a thing as so few agents that you basically can't deal with anything unexpected, but it goes some way to explain why there were 5 idle guards and not agents.
posted by sagc at 10:17 AM on September 7, 2023

I don't really understand that as a criticism really

What's not to understand? If the people making decisions about "care" aren't the same ones making decisions about "coercion", then it falls apart.

But I'm certainly noticing if there is capacity to throw five on-clock security guards at a gate while there's only one actual service person, overwhelmed, and no capacity to spare a second.

This is precisely the problem with anecdotes like this: you're noticing wrong.

You, like the article, are trying to imply some kind of relationship between # of guards that show up at this gate and # of workers at the gate. But there isn't: the gate agent is fixed to the one gate while the airport guards aren't. Ryanair made the call to only have one gate agent, not the airport, unless airport regulations require it. The airport made the call on the number of guards, though we have no idea how many total guards for all these gates there are. It's entirely possible that the airport has a completely reasonable number of guards overall, and these were just the ones who responded to an incident call.

In fact, it could very well be that the guards themselves are overstretched and overworked, and that these guards are the only ones monitoring this entire area of the airport with a SOP of all converging on a problem call.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:29 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

In practice, airport operations are a large integrated system. It requires all of the parties to work together to make smooth operation possible. And again, as a customer, I don't care about the employment and corporate structures - I'm not "noticing wrong" I just don't think finger-pointing between parties who are collectively responsible for running a system to get passengers onto airplanes is pointless, and not my concern. I just don't want to bring an individual-responsibility framework to bear on this - that's for the ops guys who are responsible for figuring out how to effectively deliver service. I am just noting that adequate service was not delivered. Between them, Stansted/MAG and Ryanair had made decisions that it was okay to understaff gates, and use an excess of security staff to plug those gaps. It would have been more resource efficient for there to be two gate staff, rather than one gate staff and five security staff. Deciding that this is not and issue or unsolvable because there are two separate corporate entities involved is the exact same late-capitalist logic that creates these issues in the first place. Look at the larger system - stupid decisions were made, and things were handled badly. If Ryanair and MAG not having their internal affairs in order, or the mere fact of them being separate for-profit entities is the cause, then great: we can look at addressing that to effect the required change. Especially in the context of this being an issue with late capitalism, insisting on Ryanair or other individual corporate actors being viewed in a vacuum, is begging the question.

(And the article's author is not blind to this either: "The resources the airline and airport put into care, that is, providing the actual service they’d been paid for, were purposely minimal... One extra person working to care for passengers would negate the need for half a dozen punishers kept mostly on standby, but that doesn’t even seem to be an option the airport and airline consider." To decide that each actor can only be looked at individually is a political decision, one that I am not willing to make.)
posted by Dysk at 11:09 AM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

The TSA agent made it clear that the actual rules don't matter - my options were obeisance , miss my flight, or worse.

Isn't the same true off immigration? You can have passport and visa all in order, a visa that was granted (in my case) by a detailed and lengthy interview, and it's still up to the officer on the desk whether they feel like letting you in.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 1:17 PM on September 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

i call this development "sovietization". it's actually a side effect of the many interlocking contractions that occur in late capitalism, when all the easy robber-profits have been used up & it's seen as time to squeeze everyone who's not a top manager (the alternative would be to start sharing more from the top down). the pity is that the overton window also moves, & people put up with coercions they would not have at an earlier stage. it's only in retrospect that their rationalizations can be seen as the acceptance of fascism.
posted by graywyvern at 2:58 PM on September 7, 2023

It's much the same principle that governs Walmart retail operations - they are very quick to call police to deal with issues which, arguably, are not even criminal matters.

And it stands as a broader issue - too many commercial/contractual arrangements are escalated to criminal processes. Tolls, parking fees, etc. attract criminal sanctions such as licence suspensions or criminal court proceedings. Failure to comply with directions can result in arrest or detention.

I don't understand how people can think that imposing and enforcing criminal sanctions makes for a better society.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:59 PM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]