The Culture Of Lying

The recent story of the Indian tech company YesMadam firing all their workers who reported that they were stressed on the job in a company survey again brought forward the usual warnings to workers when responding to company surveys. Although it was not clear whether the YesMadam survey was supposedly confidential, it should generally be assumed that any company survey is not and, likewise, it should also probably be assumed that any interaction with HR will also not remain confidential. In this case, it appears to simply be a thinly veiled effort at finding a way to cut staff, but the company certainly added insult to injury by laughably claiming that the firings were designed to relieve the stress the workers felt.

While the story is about an Indian company, it has a more general relevance about how capitalism fosters a culture of lying that has infected American business, corrupting both management and workers, and spilling over into the political and personal sphere. In this case, the company, unsurprisingly, lied about the purpose of the survey, and the employees who survived the layoffs were probably the ones who were willing to lie and tell the company what they wanted to hear. Of course, testing which employees are willing to lie is one of the many, often duplicitous, proxies that firms use for testing their loyalty not so much to the company but to those who run it. And, as studies have shown, loyal workers are the ones that tend to be more often exploited and manipulated.