“Am I working for the bad guys?”

Coming to terms with the 9-5 in late capitalism

Let’s be honest here: the world really sucks right now. It’s not just the war in Gaza, the climate emergency and the rise of fascism. There’s hundreds of everyday miseries that we human beings are dragged through — the racism, the sexism, the poverty, the general unfairness and injustice we face whenever we step outside. Anyone with a job (and a beating heart/functioning sense of humanity) has at some point asked themselves what their role is in it all — if they’re somehow making the world a better place, or if they’re part of the problem.

You come across it all the time in sustainability spaces, which are filled with smart, principled people who are very aware of the fact that they’re working inside a broken system, often for some of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies. On the surface, everyone’s all about progress and change and a green utopian future, but in private, many feel conflicted about their role in, let’s say, running the sustainability team at a huge fashion brand, or working for a non-profit that’s funded by some of the world’s biggest polluters. People care, they want to make a difference, but they don’t always know how to make sense of it all.

Am I changing things from the inside, or am I part of the problem? 

Am I working for the bad guys? 

It’s complicated, because when we talk about our work there’s a lot more involved than just ethics. People have bills to pay and kids to feed. There’s only so many opportunities in life, and the further down the road you walk, the harder it is to imagine a different path. But we only have one life, and we should be using that one life to do good things, whether it’s making cool stuff or being awesome to other people or making the world 0.000001% better.

There are many toxic systems in the world. There’s fossil fuels boiling the planet, workers being ripped off and exploited, bombs being dropped on children, soaring inequality, lies and misinformation that mask the truth and tax havens where the world’s richest people hide their money. 

There’s plenty more of these awful systems, and the entire world is tangled up in them. Any company you could work for will have some sort of relationship with some of them. By making and selling their products, fashion brands can’t help but create carbon emissions and plastic waste. You can say the same for a bakery, a software company, a bookshop or a nightclub. Likewise for freelancers, who need to get their hands dirty just to pay the bills. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet.

The difference is that some businesses directly benefit from these systems, and in some cases hold them up. 

Fast fashion brands make money by selling very large amounts of very cheap clothes. They need poverty wages and sweatshops in their supply chains, because that’s how they keep the prices down. If workers were paid fairly, the clothes wouldn’t be cheap anymore, and the whole thing would fall apart.

It’s not just fast fashion that’s got skeletons in the closet, as we saw in the Loro Piana vicuna wool scandal, but the point is that for some companies, low wages are an essential part of the business model and must be protected. There’s a very big difference between this and a mid-priced brand who chooses to pay an extra dollar to make its jeans in a place that isn’t a sweatshop. The context is what’s important here — does this or that company choose exploitation in order to make more money? 

It’s the same deal with the fossil fuel industry, which literally makes money from the climate emergency. The oil, coal and gas guys make billions from the crisis threatening all life on earth, and while they talk all day about net zero and investing in renewables, behind the scenes they use political tools and PR tricks to sell even more fossil fuels. Yes, all companies have a carbon footprint, but that’s an inevitable part of doing business in a world run on fossil fuels — the difference is that some of them hold up and reinforce the destruction of the planet while the rest of us can’t help but get caught up in it. 

And then there’s the professional services — what Solitaire Townsend calls “the X industry” — which help to keep destructive systems in place. Are your workers organizing a union to fight for higher wages and better working conditions? Well, there’s lawyers and strategists and consultants who will help you fight them. Scared of a new law or regulation that would stop you from dumping sewage into rivers? Lobbyists can help you kill it. Need to convince the public that your highly polluting, destructive business model is actually good? That’s what the PR and ad guys are for.

Some jobs truly, undeniably make the world worse. The key is figuring out where this or that company stands in the many intersecting disasters we find ourselves in. Are they a direct participant, or an innocent bystander? Are they keeping systems of exploitation and destruction in place, or are they just caught up in them like the rest of us?

The companies that profit the most out of capitalism’s sins, whether it’s bombs or oil or plastic or fast food, are the ones who have the most interest in keeping them there. All the talk about corporate values is just talk — often for the public, often for lawmakers, but also for their own employees. Companies want to hire the best talent, and they want their teams to think they work for the good guys, or at least, not the bad guys. The idea of working for a company to “change them from the inside” is true in some cases, and an excuse in others. I once had a conversation with a marketing guy who said that his agency could work with oil companies to “change them from the inside”, which is a pretty embarrassing analysis of what marketing is really about. 

I am not here to tell you what kind of job you should or should not do, and we can’t get mad at the interns with a mountain of student debt or the freelancers hustling just to make ends meet. But people with power and influence and money are also the most able to take their skills somewhere else. If you are a skilled worker with many opportunities, and you have an epiphany that your job is making the world worse, then it’s probably time to quit. Maybe whatever temporary discomfort you will go through will be worth it, because you do not want to look back on yourself in ten years time and feel ashamed of your role in propping up the world’s miseries and injustices.

Maybe I’m being a little naive here, but I also feel that everyone has an innate understanding of what’s good — the vital, irreplaceable things in life that make us human. And I can’t help but feel like people get drawn into so much misery, the addictions and divorces and mid life crises because their jobs have destroyed their sense of what’s right. Working for the bad guys means selling your soul.

Here’s how Hamilton Nolan puts it (you absolutely must follow his newsletter, btw): 

“No one, especially no one with options, should spend their one wild and free life doing something that unambiguously makes the world worse. While we should not judge people for ending up in bad places doing bad things, we can and should judge people for remaining in bad places doing bad things after they themselves have had the realization that what they are engaged in is bad.” 

You can see this logic clearly functioning in the slow but steady stream of US officials who are resigning over their government’s support of the Israeli war machine. They’ve realized that no amount of mental gymnastics can change the fact that their employer is fully committed to enabling and supporting the massacre of civilians in Gaza. They’ve seen the truth and they no longer want to be a part of it. They were able to imagine a different life. So they quit.

Photo by Maksym Zakharyak / Unsplash