182. MUCH TOO QUIET ON SET - Stepping on Eggshells as we All Work Under Capitalism
Whatever your opinions on it, it’s clear that the recent documentary, Quiet on Set, about ‘the dark side of kids TV’ caused a lot of people talking about the toxic work environments discovered on the sets of several hit children’s TV shows in the last ‘90s and early 2000s. As a longtime wrestling fan, when I heard about Dan Schneider’s fear-based approach to overseeing a TV show he created, I couldn’t help but think about Vince McMahon. The now-disgraced former owner, and tyrant ruler, of WWE. McMahon is currently ‘disgraced’ because of allegations about sex trafficking and sexual harassment in the company, but he should have been disgraced long before that. Like the allegations around Dan Schneider in Quiet on Set, it hasn’t even been an open secret, it has simply been open, that McMahon’s tenure as the boss of WWE was one of perpetual bullying and people walking on eggshells for fear of losing their jobs. The idea was even built into the character McMahon played on TV (as it was for Dan Schneider). McMahon’s ‘Mr McMahon’ character was famous for his catchphrase: you’re fired. The idea, a long-term trope now in all WWE programming, and finding its way (sadly) into rival company AEW’s storylines recently with Matthew and Nicholas Jackson, is that the authority figure who runs the wrestling company is an irrational and self-serving monster who threatens people’s livelihoods regularly to fulfil whatever passing whim they have.
That the idea has been built into the morality play of so much of television wrestling could be seen as a wonderful subversive critique of authority (after all, the good guy usually ends up besting the evil boss by the end). The problem is, in reality, the exact same thing is actually happening behind the scenes, with people fearing for their jobs weekly in WWE based on the whims of their billionaire boss. Until recently, that proudly seemed not to be the case in AEW. But a recent round of firings, and the whole CM Punk saga of last year (and recent use of that real-life abuse of power from the company’s Executive Vice Presidents in an ongoing storyline with Punk’s friends, FTR), suggest that billionaire fiefdoms are unstable work environments no matter what initials the wrestling company goes by.
The Quiet on Set documentary is perhaps an example of what philosopher, Miranda Fricker, has called hermeneutical epistemic injustice being undone. Workers who knew something felt wrong about their jobs in a misogynistic writer’s room or on an exploitative set for child actors have now developed the epistemic tools to name what was happening to them. To know it as abuse, or at least abuse-adjacent. The workers in WWE are not so lucky. McMahon is gone, but still the people groomed by his style of tyrannical leadership fail to come forward and publicly call him what he was. Instead they express shock and sadness that their ‘father figure’ has caused such a ‘mess’. New boss, McMahon’s son-in-law, Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, has promised a ‘new era’ in the company. But Levesque already ran the company’s developmental promotion, NXT, in ways similar to McMahon. Although his taste in wrestling was different, so what we saw on TV differed drastically, behind the scenes you can still smell the fear on wrestler’s working for Vince’s son-in-law. In her recent bestselling memoir, Becky Lynch discusses worrying that Triple H might penalise her for daring to change her look without his permission. And just a few weeks after the company’s biggest Wrestlemania event ever, Triple H made a round of cuts, firing several talents despite spending the week before bragging about the colossal earnings made by Wrestlemania.
The question of when power dynamics becomes abuse is also a theme in Becky Lynch’s former Wrestlemania opponent, and current book-sales rival, Ronda Rousey’s, new memoir too. Rousey openly asks about her former UFC trainer’s approach and whether it crossed a line from tough-teaching to physical and emotional abuse. But despite those questions being asked, she asks no similar questions when discussing how she agreed to put her physical health on the line too many times, in too quick succession, without time to properly rest and repair, simply because she had agreed to say yes to anything her UFC boss, Dana White, asked her to do. Rousey was trying to grow a fledgling female division in the sport of MMA and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise either her spot, or the perception of women in the sport. So she ended up concussed and losing her title after a match was brought forward to fill a pay-per-view slot vacated by an injured competitor.
The last few weeks, watching Wrestlemania, reading Lynch and Rousey’s books, and watching the Quiet on Set documentary, the anarchist in has been screaming at the screen, and at the pages in my hand, at how myopic the critique is. The idea of a bad apple, rather than something being systemically wrong. Vince McMahon, Dan Schneider, Rousey’s trainer… by putting the focus on these individual experiences and individual perpetrators we ignore the real problem here: hierarchical power structures and a precarious job market in a world where lack of income can have severe consequences.
The monsters which we end up hearing about, long after the fact, are merely extremes of what is going on every day, in every workplace, when a worker feels they cannot speak out or be their authentic selves because they worry about the impact doing so will have on their next payslip, if not their entire career. The tongues which have been bitten in fear of losing that crucial promotion. The evenings and weekends lost to jobs which could have waited except for in the eyes of the person setting the deadlines. The swallowed down objections to the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or any other kind of offensive comment because you don’t want to be seen as rocking the boat or not a team player. This is not just Hollywood stuff. This is not just the entertainment business. This is all work under capitalism.
Quiet on Set seemed so shocking to some because it happened to children, mostly. But more shocking should be that it was enabled by adults because most adults know no different when it comes to what the world of work is like. Work isn’t supposed to be fun. Work is often difficult. Work is about doing stuff you don’t like so you can pay the bills. These are the attitudes that are so normalised we teach them to children in school. But these are also the attitudes that create the conditions for abuse. Work under capitalism has long been identified since at least the time of Marx as exploitation. But we seem to have an ideology about work that lets us ignore that, and fail to recognise that exploitation goes hand in hand with abuse.
The capitalist workplace isolates individuals because it employs us as individuals, all in competition with each other, eroding solidarity even in situations where we work as a collective. Ultimately we accept that there is only so much to go around, and that if anyone has an excuse to be let go we do not want it to be us. So we run a quiet but constant risk analysis on the impact of our actions. Is this my fight to fight, or is it someone else’s? We turn blind eyes. We know there’s no such thing as a dream job and that it’s easier to keep the boss happy than try to fight an uphill struggle.
Imagine, instead, an alternative world. One without such hierarchy. One where no individual tyrant had the power to terminate someone’s employment, or to completely control a workplace. Where we did not need jobs in the same way we do now, because all the necessities of life were provided for us, perhaps through a universal basic income, and so the threat of losing one would not motivate our behaviours so much. A world where we all had a voice regarding what was and wasn’t acceptable in a workplace, and we never had to distort our authentic selves to conform to one person’s personal rulebook.
It’s great that we are talking about abuse in the workplace, and shining a light on things that have happened, and industry norms, with new understandings. But so long as it remains a cult of personality, where it’s about naming and shaming individuals, rather than dismantling the structures of power which allowed such individuals to flourish, all we are really doing is serving the abusers. The individual stories are a distraction, turned into entertainment to profit the very same industries that enabled the abuse in the first place. If we really care about creating safer workplaces, we need to reimagine what a workplace is, and undo the networks of power which inherently make such places sites of baked-in exploitation and abuse.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
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