Main Street

The World According to “Undercover Boss”

So last night showed Larry O’Donnell, president and chief operating officer of Waste Management, going undercover to pick up trash and clean portapotties, along the way learning valuable lessons about how hard his employees work.

But what did the viewer learn about how the world works? Or at least, what was the message the show wanted us to absorb?

Well, it goes without saying that Larry O’Donnell is a great guy. Warm, kind, loving family, committed to his workers. He’s shocked, just shocked to find that the productivity goals he has set force women to pee into coffee cans to make their goals.

But somehow it escapes his attention that another thing he’s shocked at – that workers at one facility are docked two minutes of pay for each minute they’re late – might also be related to productivity goals he’s set. No, that one he pins on middle management. He tells the manager the workers have identified as the one docking their pay that that’s not the way the rules are supposed to work and he doesn’t want it to happen anymore.

Now I’m quite sure that there are plenty of nasty middle managers out there, bullying the people below them. But these are not people with a lot of power, either. It may feel that way to the worker who loses two minutes of pay for being one minute late, but it’s at least as likely that the manager is responding to pressure from above, and knows that he will face a bad performance evaluation or worse if he doesn’t treat workers badly. But Larry O’Donnell doesn’t take responsibility for that. No, that whole docking-pay thing is a mystery to him.

Similarly, when he meets a woman doing the work of three people, his response is about her as an individual; he doesn’t wonder whether it’s a widespread issue that his facilities are understaffed and have seriously overworked and underpaid staff. And it’s great that her situation gets resolved—she gets a better job, she gets to keep her house. But what about the other Waste Management employees working as hard as she was who didn’t spend a day with the company president? Does their situation improve?

Or the guy who makes cleaning portapotties fun. That really is a remarkable gift. I say this without sarcasm. But the fact that the response was basically “wow, our company would benefit so much if everyone enjoyed this as much as you” is telling. It suggests that personal qualities are the answer to anything, not, you know, paying a decent wage.

We don’t hear much about wages, in fact. We know that workers are terrified of losing two minutes of pay. We know that the woman doing multiple jobs is nonetheless in danger of losing her house. But that’s not a lot of context. What kind of an employer is Waste Management?

In fact, Waste Management is the kind of employer where workers die on the job and “OSHA violations rose by 28 percent between 2003 and 2007.” It’s the kind of employer that tries to break pension agreements. It’s the kind of employer that hires scabs to break strikes.

But what “Undercover Boss” wants us to see is that Larry O’Donnell is a nice guy, and if he just knew what was going on, he’d fix it, one worker at a time. We’re not supposed to think that maybe these problems are company-wide and affect many workers, and that workers shouldn’t have to rely on having a compelling personal story that the boss sees in person and decides to fix. The problems are collective, and the solutions should be too.

What else did you notice?

Tags: Undercover Boss