Here comes the petty tyranny of the corporate state.
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As we get ready for an administration committed to “getting government off the backs” of people — and especially, it seems, off the backs of companies — this is a good time to scrutinize that tired rallying cry.
We hear all the time about how bad the government is. The idea of course is that anything tax-funded is inherently inefficient, unresponsive, uncreative, sometimes paralyzing, and that the alternative is always better.
Yet this old political slogan fails to acknowledge some structural realities. First, government entities are practically built for appeals; there are supervisors, plus, in many cases, other entities to go to if you don’t get any satisfaction initially. There’s also a small army of at least theoretically voter-accountable elected officials and their staffers, whose job is to hold accountable those federal bureaucracies on behalf of constituents.
As problematic as the government can be, it is ultimately our friend when it comes to protecting us from the very behemoths we’re now being asked to liberate. Which brings me to one of the great neglected stories of our time: our growing victimhood at the hands of large corporations.
Donald Trump, whose Cabinet appointments lean heavily toward billionaires and near-billionaires, is almost certain to exacerbate this phenomenon in which we are all sharecroppers on the great corporate plantation, making the man in the big house richer while the rest of us struggle.
Few in positions of influence consider the full significance of this. A sense of powerlessness grips us, and — as we’ve seen in recent days — can even lead to deadly consequences.
We know of its many manifestations, from the sometimes fatal denial of medical care to the consequences of automation and outsourcing on workers.
Perhaps most conspicuously missing from the national conversation are the uncountable daily indignities every person endures at the hands of entities focused solely on new sales being rung up and ever-greater profits kept rolling in.
Of course, cheerleaders for the vaunted system of “private enterprise” have another defense at the ready: We consumers are free to take our business elsewhere.
Sure — unless we’re dealing with a monopoly, or a race to the bottom. In reality, with the growing gap between the very wealthiest and the rest of us has come an ever-accelerating cycle of consolidation and control. Even when we do have choices, we tend to go with the company with the largest footprint.
Which brings me back to my favorite recent example of the mindless incompetence and indifference baked seemingly by design into so many of these outfits: my dealings with the household products giant Dyson.
When last I recounted the surreal experience of trying to fix a mess created by the company, I described Dyson’s utter inability to take care of a simple thing. An expensive air purifier I bought from them required service, so they told me to send it back, which I did.
Getting it back to me after servicing is another story, one crammed with farcical conversation loops with a rotating cast of first-line corporate defenders requesting me to do things I didn’t need to do, or had already done, and routine promises that the matter would soon be resolved, or personnel would call me back within a specified window — all of which were broken time and again.
That saga began in the spring, that article ran in September, and here we are in December, a half year after this began, with no resolution.
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Assigned to bear the brunt of our rage, increasingly, are foreign call-center personnel not equipped with much of anything besides scripted apologies. They have no personal agency, and frequently no effective means to get things quickly rectified. And even when things are “escalated,” people at the next level up also have limited agency.
I am often told that personnel at these companies literally do not even know where the corporate offices are, nor do they have any information on how to contact higher-ups to get satisfaction. On a few occasions recently, I was, believe it or not, told I could send a complaint letter by snail mail.
Many of these companies accidentally (or not) disconnect you, usually when transferring you — surely everyone has had this experience — and they rarely reconnect you when that happens. Which means you start all over again, waiting interminably, then explaining every detail to a new person, all over again. And then, of course, they, too, disconnect you.
Dyson, as it happens, is a UK company with a large footprint in the US. It is entirely owned by one man, Sir James Dyson. Good luck getting him to care. The vacuum cleaner inventor is now the UK’s wealthiest person, basically the British equivalent of all those billionaires who flocked to Donald Trump and will now be running US government agencies.
As I noted the first time I covered this topic, if you look him up, you will find allegations that Sir James had backed Britain leaving the EU, largely because he wanted to outsource the manufacturing of his products to Singapore, thereby saving him a lot of money; allegedly, that kind of off-shoring would be difficult to do if he had to follow European rules. I also found that workers in some of his factories have been trying to take legal action against the company in connection with allegations of forced labor.
Dyson — shades of the Trumpian war on the media — sued journalists for reporting this; after a long and protracted battle, the company abandoned the suit.
And then there’s my experience with Chase Bank, where a check it mailed was stolen somewhere along the line and cashed by a competitor bank. No one disputed the fact that the check was stolen.
For several years, Chase could not resolve the problem, and would not return thousands of dollars to me — because, it said, the other giant bank had not responded to its inquiry.
Government entities and elected representatives agreed this was ridiculous, but the people I spoke to were unsure who had jurisdiction.
Despite the anecdotal evidence most of us have of corporate rather than state failings, there’s little public discourse around these ubiquitous daily indignities. Usually, it takes a major public scandal or tragedy — like an airplane company’s engines failing repeatedly, a la Boeing — before these outfits face the fire. Meanwhile, there’s a steady drumbeat, especially in right-wing media, about how government is the bane of everyone’s existence.
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Of course, examples of excellent government service are also commonplace, just as they are in the private sector, as I was reminded recently when two encouraging things happened.
The first was that a singular employee at UPS took it upon herself to fix the mess involving Dyson, although this wasn’t her responsibility. All she was trying to do was confirm to Dyson, the shipper, that UPS had investigated and that the shipment never arrived. This kind soul has repeatedly contacted Dyson with this information — and she has experienced the same kind of crazy circularity and non-resolution as I have. As my self-appointed sympathizer, she calls regularly to update me on her admirable but so far futile efforts to resolve this apparently intractable problem.
The second thing that happened to rekindle my faith in the notion of customer service involved another corporate behemoth, Apple.
I had a problem with one of their products, and instead of calling them up or trying to navigate the help pages on their website, I went for the first time ever to a brick-and-mortar Apple store and checked in at their “Genius Bar,” where I was quickly greeted and told exactly how long my wait would be. Encouraged by this air of competence, I left to do some errands in the neighborhood, returned at the exact time I had been assigned — and almost immediately found myself in the hands of a friendly, compassionate, competent staffer.
My problem was quite technical, so my Genius Bar helper ended up getting me connected on an Apple phone with the company’s tech support. That person was also kind and competent in all respects. He spoke to the in-store colleague and they took my faulty component and shipped it off for repair. Within three days it was back, delivered to my home at no charge. The tech-support person also scheduled several calls with me to make sure the repaired component was working as promised. On each call, he rang me at exactly the time we’d agreed, and even accommodated me when I had a throat ailment that rendered me temporarily unable to speak.
The profound quality gap between Apple and Dyson service underscores that private enterprise can be a lot like government: Where you stand depends on where you sit.
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How important is it that we the public, when things go wrong, have the option to deal with actual human beings at large institutions who actually listen, who are trained to treat us courteously, and who have the resources to get our problems resolved in a prompt and fair manner? Anyone who has gone through an infuriatingly hellish encounter with the “customer service” department at a large company or government agency can supply their own answer.
The other day I was reading how Trump — presumably buoyed by members of his “billionaire Cabinet” who consider it a personal affront to be obliged to pay taxes — will likely gut the IRS and its ability to collect revenue for the government. It’s all part of a concerted effort to defund, and hence destroy, any agencies of government that actually serve the public, while keeping the parts that hand out lucrative government contracts to Trump-adjacent oligarchs like Elon Musk and his “government efficiency” partner Vivek Ramaswamy.
Speaking of the IRS, which the tycoons are so eager to neuter: My experience with that much-reviled entity over the years has been mixed and, while I know plenty of horror stories, on balance I’ve found it to be relatively well run, fairly responsive — and, most importantly, not so difficult to get an actual human being on the phone, which is always the first step to getting your problems resolved.
As I was finishing this essay, I finally got a call saying that Dyson was in the process of adjudicating my issue and would be calling me shortly. But that voicemail message was not from Dyson. It was from the decent woman at UPS. Who is still calling Dyson on my behalf, even though she doesn’t have to.
And — surprise! surprise! — still no call from Dyson as of the time I write this.
All of which reminds me of that clunky appliance we call government, which, despite its massive limitations, often does return your calls, eventually.
