Today’s private sector worker is not only disenfranchised, they are disciplined and passivized. Their rights are not abolished by direct repressive measures, but are obscured by the language of “positive psychology” and “professional development”. The private sector today does not function outside the broader logic of capitalist production, but as its most effective form of labor discipline. Instead of unions, workers are offered stress-management workshops. Not to improve working conditions, but to make existing ones more bearable. Not to organize against exploitation, but to make private sector workers accept, rationalize, and remain within the clearly defined boundaries of the company.
At the end of every year comes the moment of collective relief: team building. In that choreography of smiles, games and false rewards, the whole year’s dissatisfaction is annulled. Silent indignation and insomnia are extinguished, small rebellions are erased in the silence of emails, all those moments when the worker, even for a moment, felt that they deserved something more are diminished. Team building is not a prize, it is a ritual of coming to terms with one’s own subjugation.
One of the most damaging narratives that exists among private sector workers is that they are all replaceable. This platitude not only destroys the dignity of work, but directly exploits the human being to the limits of physical and psychological breakdown. If you are replaceable, you are not a person, you are not a subject, you are not even a worker. You are a resource, a number in the table, a card that can be replaced by another, faster, cheaper, more obedient one.
Moreover, the difference between private and public sector workers is used as an additional weapon. Workers in the public sector are stigmatized as a symbol of idleness, a source of anger and cynicism, while at the same time the private sector is mythologized as the only “real” working environment: dynamic, efficient, successful. This imaginary of privatization as a cure for all social ills is not only a political narrative, but a deeply embedded ideology that amputates the worker of the 21st century from any thought of a common struggle. Everyone stands alone, everyone fights for themselves, everyone is replaceable.
Can a private sector worker voice discontent?
In theory they can. In practice, they can schedule an interview with the HR department, the main instrument of soft management control. And there, with a smile and through “assertive communication”, they will listen to them. They will be told that their feelings are understood. That their contribution is valued and that it is very important for them to be a team player, because that is the “culture of the company”. Thus, rebellion is redirected into an emotionally driven conversation, anger into a “feeling of acceptance”, and resistance into additional adaptation through a culture of emotional management.
The worker exists
The worker of the 21st century has not ceased to exist. They just forgot that they are workers. And therein lies the root of the problem. Without awareness of one’s own position, there is no possibility of change. The private sector has succeeded in what the factories of the nineteenth century did not. It has produced a worker who smiles as they are exploited and hopes for promotion as they disappear under the weight of their own replaceability.
Therefore, if today we ask the question of who is the worker of the 21st century, the answer is not only in the definition, but in the demand that the worker be recognized again as a worker, as a subject of struggle, and not as a disposable commodity on the labor market.
The worker who trades their own dignity for a sense of belonging has not ceased to exist. They stopped knowing what it means to be a worker, and without that knowledge, work remains just another name for silent disappearance.
Isidora Cerić has a degree in philology and is a student of communication studies. She deals with the analysis of social, political and cultural phenomena through theoretical and analytical approaches, with a special interest in the topics of resistance, political engagement and philosophy.
Translation from Serbian: Andraš Juhas
