Thread by @vl_darling

I wanna bounce off this for a bit, because I see a phrase being thrown around in a lot of smaller industries and companies about 'family' and I think it intersects here a bit with this thread by @Delafina777

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by @Delafina777 view original on Twitter

For one: if your company is like a family you need to know if it is something like a functional one or a dysfunctional and sick system.

Hint: they can fire your ass, so like any family that actively wields disowning as a tool of control, they're dysfunctional

Right off the bat the function of a corporate 'family' is one founded in a dysfunctional and highly damaging tool of abusive families.

Note: i am mostly talking about Western and nuclear families here, bits may overlap with other structures but that's what I'm using here.

So, even with this, families and corporations can be functional. Disowning/disengaging from family members is much like shunning in bigger communities - a tool that should be the last resort for massive and intractable issues and harm to the community if you stay.

That rejection wielded as a tool to get you to conform is one that deliberately makes you complicit through silencing your expression of your values. There is a difference between managing reputation/external views, and silencing your family/workers.

"don't talk about internal hiring decisions" is a very different beast to "I will not work with avowed abusive misogynists" and it is a different decision when an employer demands both as a function of continuing employment.

I cannot express how much damage this will do to your soul, your heart, to be made complicit in that against your own values. Or how abusive it is within a family situation to demand fealty in order to belong.

When you talk about 'work family' this is what they are demanding

It may come with perqs! It almost always does! That's the cost of it. That's the lovebombing aspect of the abuse cycle. Because they are demanding you abase yourself to their commercial values in place of your own ethics.

and most damagingly, requiring you to be grateful and happy about it. A job is a job, even when it is your calling, even moreso I think because a calling engages every part of you and a job that uses those entanglements to reduce your capacity toward empathy is abusive.

See: crunch time
See: 'service' in academia
See: community management as an addon to admin
See: low pay
See: healthcare is extra
See: family friendly as long as it's heteronormative and photogenic
See: NDAs
See: unpaid overtime
See: the economist's definition of emotional labour