We Need to Ban the Word ‘Family’ From Job Interviews
It’s the phrase that sends a shiver down the spine of many a prospective employee. But we are right to wary of the company that sells itself as ‘one big happy family’. Beneath the veneer of comfort and support, there lies a host of exploitative tactics that are driving us further into a capitalist nightmare.
As we all know, job interviews are a slog. Unless you’re applying for your dream job, job interviews can feel like a theatrical performance — rehearsing your lines, dressing the part, getting into the mindset of someone who genuinely loves meeting sales goals. It doesn’t help that so often, interviews for minimum wage, entry level positions — bar work, retail, hospitality — make you jump through hoops that force you to really push the limits of the truth. It’s not enough to say you want a job because you have to pay rent, or that you’re passionate about a career in Tesco’s because you quite appreciate eating 7 days a week. But there is one dreaded phrase, so seemingly innocuous, that many of us find immediately off-putting in job interviews — ‘family’. As in, ‘we’re just like one big happy family here’. It’s a word used with a purpose. And it is a word with sinister implications, one that needs to be banned once and for all.
We are right to feel so uneasy when we are told to that the corporation we are about to enter operates like a family. The feeling can almost be compared to the uncanny valley — something that is almost what it appears to be, and yet not quite. There are certain parallels to be drawn between becoming a part of the workforce and being a family member. You are unlikely to get along with all of your colleagues, but are forced to feign some level of camaraderie as a result of being together for a large portion of your waking hours. Tensions may bubble under the surface if someone is not deemed to be puling their weight, or working maintain some level of fairness or stability. For some, your work colleagues may indeed be the people you spend your Christmas with. Clearly, none of these parallels are particularly positive — they feel almost like grotesque parables of the worst aspects of traditional family life. We all have different perceptions of family, based on our personal experiences, but for most of us are attitudes towards family are intrinsically emotional — family as a site of warmth and support, or of disappointment and pain. Indeed, what separates the family from the workplace, in both anecdotal experience and various strands of critical theory, is that the labour market is the domain of physical labour and alienation, whereas the home is the place of emotional labour. Having interviewed for a plethora of minimum wage customer service jobs, I have noticed that this ‘workplace as family’ model is but one tool in an arsenal of tactics used to emotionally manipulate prospective employees into declaring an emotional investment in the job that simply doesn’t exist. It might be calling the company a ‘family’, but it could also be listing a ‘passion for the brand’ on the job advertisement. It could be interview questions that focus less on actual skills and more on ascertaining your availability or willingness for overtime, or questions concerning your ‘5 year plan’. It could be a page on the job application asking for a minimum of 500 words asking you why you are ‘excited’ about working as a sales associate for their company (this is a specific personal experience). All of these are examples of companies asking the same basic question ‘how much of your free time, emotional labour and excitement are you willing to give for a minimum wage?’ These are all examples of the seemingly unnecessary emotional parameter introduced into what is for many a begrudging necessity. The ‘family’ question stands out as the most jarring example of this mindset because we come into the interview with a host of preconceived notions about ‘family’ — what it means, our relationship to it, our own personal experiences of family and family life. But the word family carries a whole host of ramifications beyond our personal experience, and many of them shine a light on why the ‘workplace as family’ model is such a consistent trend.
The ‘workplace as family’ illusion is the next worrying step in the ever propulsive march of consumer capitalism. In the mid-20th Century, Marxists revealed the idea that the whole world was built on the delineation of labour, and by extension the exploitation of the body as a natural resource. Second Wave Feminism pointed out that the world of labour was divided into two distinct spheres — the domestic and the labour market or workplace, and that women and men were sequestered into each of these categories respectively. Simultaneously, the Gay Liberation Movement suggested that the specific roles of men and women within the labour market necessitated the exclusion of queer people from the family unit. It was this latter viewpoint that so greatly informs our reflexive unease when we hear the word ‘family’ in a job interview. Once upon a time, our bodies and minds were bled by a consumer capital state that marked a clear divide between the home and the outside world. Now, living in a neoliberal 21st Century market, that divide no longer exists. The workplace has become the home — not only a place of physical labour, but ever increasingly a place of emotional labour as well. The family in Marxist thought is, after all, the place where emotional labour is undertook, a breeding ground for socialisation and a purported sanctuary where the man’s alienation can be released. In a neoliberal market that welcomes bodies of all sorts to be exploited, the family home does not fulfil the criteria it once did, at a time where it was only the domain of the heterosexual, cisgender woman and ruled by a heterosexual, cisgender man. Necessarily, our idea of the family as a place of exploitation has had to evolve: enter the ‘workplace as family’ model. Once upon a time, unpaid overtime was perhaps an expected manifestation of exploitation weaponised by the threat of severance without pay. Now, even more insidiously, it is framed as necessary emotional labour, for the good of the company and your colleagues — if you felt forced to proclaim your emotional investment in the company at interview, how are you supposed to turn your back when the equilibrium of the company is in jeopardy?
The company is framed not as some overarching, omnipotent force. It is framed in such a way that is deemed to be a person — letting down the company is suggested to be as egregious an offence as letting down a family member. The company is positioned as some warm, supportive parental figure, one who may step in and admonish you from time to time but who is generally supportive, both emotionally and financially. Your ‘transgressions’ are therefore seen as an ungrateful rebuttal of the support you have received. But companies are not people. Emotional support from a company is lacking and conditional, and a company is well within its rights to include and exclude persons and bodies based on what they can do for it, not the other way round . Family members are not, at least commonly, prone to exclusion because of consistent yet comparatively minor transgressions such as bad time keeping or inefficiency. A person’s contribution to a family is less often about an economic additive approach and more the emotional energy they bring. But a company’s ethos is always about financial gain, no matter what they proclaim. By combining the old tropes of enforced productivity and the newer flavour of emotional investment, the labour market is having its cake and eating it too. Workers are still being exploited for their physical labour, but now there is a new added emotional contingent that enforces loyalty and sacrifice in the pursuit of ever more financial gain. When a company operates on this dualistic oppressive regime, a Christmas-do on company expense seems less and less like a worthwhile reparation.
The insidious nature of the ‘workplace as family’ model has been unmasked by the inherent unfairness of capitalism’s unstoppable march during a global pandemic. Truly, for many tuning into radical Marxist thought for the first time, the exploitative nature of the labour market has similarly been unmasked in the last few months. For many, financial concerns have never been more pressing, and the possible physical toll exerted upon our bodies by labour — with many of us now making the choice between exposing ourselves to a possibly lethal virus, or staying home and starving — has never been more clear. The emotional manipulation present in the ‘live to work’ culture has thus been ever more exploited — now we must pretend to love working somewhere we are tied to by force, and these two distinct types of exploitation work seamlessly in tandem. This has been the case for a long while, on the sly — but now that the public at large is even more desperate for work, companies can be far more brazen. To give an anecdotal example, a job application on a Facebook page of which I was a part read as follows:
Role: Cocktail Bartender
Hours: 0 hour contract
Requirements: Must have minimum 2 years cocktail making experience. Must be passionate about the brand and ensure a faultless customer experience
Pay: NMW
This was posted just as the economy began to wheeze back into action during the Summer months, when the UK lockdown was being prematurely eased. As a poster for the physical and emotional exploitation of the labour market, it could hardly be more apt. Work culture at the moment is a fertile breeding ground for exploitation — with so many of us desperate for work, and the most economically disadvantaged of us pushed into minimum wage jobs that can now be as exploitative as possible. And yet the ‘workplace as family’ model, or at least other such emotionally exploitative verbiage, persists. Not only is it brazen, it is simply predatory — preying on our desperation, but also on our growing need for connection and stability, needs the family is purported to provide.
If we are to fully expose the dangerous nature of the ‘workplace as family’ model, we would do well to start with the idea that families — including domestic ones — have never consistently been sites of support for everyone. Queer people especially have long recognised, and unfortunately experienced, that the emotional support of the family is contingent upon repression and conditional love. For queer people, family love has long been conditional — behave this way, hide that part of yourself, don’t do this or that round your Grandma, she won’t like it. When Marcuse suggested that workers in the labour market work in a state of emotional detachment from their labours (what he called ‘alienation’) , we can see that queer people have done this for centuries, engaging in acts or situations where they must emotionally detach from what they are doing at the risk of crumbling under the weight of their own repression. In a rebuttal of this, queer people created their own families — aptly titled ‘chosen families’, communities that reference the emotional labour of a regular family but by new political and social ideals. It is this notion of the family — supportive, unconditional and, above all, fully democratic — that the workplace should replicate, if it is to ape any family model at all. Obviously, this could never happen in the labour market as it exists now — financial gain and an imbalance of financial power means that labour will always be unequally distributed and conditional. Therefore, the very utterance of the word ‘family’ at a job interview will almost always ring hollow. It is time for us to challenge not only the verbiage used, but the intention expressed every time these words are uttered by corporations and companies that simultaneously promise a minimum wage, 0 hours contracts and half-cooked diversity strategies. Until these issues are rectified, the ‘workplace as family’ model can only ever stand for exploitation not only of our bodies and minds — but also our souls.
