Here, some poor woman had to <sue her employers> in order to be allowed to adjust her working hours slightly so that she could finish at 5pm to collect her children.
The managerialist mindset is obsessed with forcing you to travel miles to switch on your laptop in a noisy and unhealthy building which they needlessly maintain at vast expense; and they insist that you must adhere to the rigidity of factory / production line hours, even if you are a mere knowledge worker who can work at any time, from any location which is quiet and germ-free.
Thomas Klikauer, in his book, Managerialism – a Critique of an Ideology, sums up managerialism (emphasis added):
“Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systemically in organisations and society while depriving owners, employees (organisational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies.”
At some point, you realise that you’re not dealing with reason. It’s an autocratic ideology, and a particularly corrosive one, under which employees are viewed as untrustworthy idiots who need to be alternatively bribed and reprimanded. Just like the way our teachers (with good reason) kept a tight rein on us between e.g. the ages of 12-16 (because we were wired to the moon); but subsequently, when I was aged 17-18, doing A levels, and again at college, all reins were off, they just trusted you to do the work and not to be a waster.
Quite the shock then to be an adult and to be once again treated as if you were a waster.
Niels Pflaeging nails it in his wonderful presentation – note esp on p21 for a distillation of the prevailing management mindset – their very existence as a parasitic class depends on the persistent normalisation of the view that you are an untrustworthy idiot:
Disjecta 