Asshole CEO Thinks ‘Arrogant’ Workers Need To ‘Suffer’ So They’ll Love Bosses More

He’s a pleasant man.

Tim Gurner, founder and CEO of the Gurner Group, has a God complex. He specifically appears to have modeled himself after the Old Testament God who banished Adam and Eve because they ate some bad fruit, ordered Abraham to kill his son to prove his love, and flooded the Earth because he’d just had it with everyone. What I’m saying is God is a documented asshole and so is Tim Gurner.

The poor, put-upon billionaire recently complained at the Australian Review Property Summit that workers have let their egos run wild since the pandemic and practically think they’re human.

“People decided that they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity,” he said. “They have been paid a lot to not do too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”

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Nothing Makes Ben Shapiro Madder Than Capitalism Working For Poor People

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Callous jerks often struggle with basic facts, but the reality is that people worked damn hard during the pandemic. It’s why society didn’t crumble and everyone still had access to food and toilet paper. People even delivered cocktails to your door.

What people did take a pass on was dying painfully from COVID for minimum wage. While the world’s wealthiest prospered even more as COVID spread, essential workers did not share in this bounty.

It’s true that worker productivity has steadily decreased over the past few years and is currently the lowest it’s been since 1947. Actual experts aren’t sure why this is happening, although they have theories. However, far too many employers are quick to blame workers in general and specifically anything that has improved their quality of life, such as remote work.

Gurner not only blames shiftless workers for everything, but he also not-so modestly proposes “solutions”that makes you think he’s a Jonathan Swift essay.

GURNER: We need to see unemployment rise —unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 per cent, in my view.

We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change.

Gurner is from Australia, where the unemployment rate is currently 3.6 percent. Although doubling that figure might provide Gurner a deep pool of desperate job seekers, it would inflict real pain on real people. Of course, Gurner thinks the economy needs some “pain.” That will show people who’s boss — by which he means the bosses who can treat workers like disposable snot rags and still meet their productivity goals.

A corporate executive I once knew had what he called a “churn and burn” approach to operations staff. He didn’t consider it a worthwhile investment to offer benefits, pay raises, or much of a reason to live because when they (inevitably) quit, they are easily replaced. Of course, he later demanded heads roll when an employee’s single typo apparently jeopardized a client relationship. You’d think he would’ve realized that if an employee’s mistake could have such an impact, maybe their otherwise stellar work was worth health insurance. Unfortunately, he never had that Dickensian epiphany.

Gurner chillingly suggested that employers are deliberately conducting mass layoffs to instill fear in the labor force. He sounded like a plantation owner coldly explaining why it was sometimes necessary for his overseers to bring out the whip.

No matter how much Gurner denigrates workers, however, there is one truth that cannot remain hidden: The pandemic revealed to the world that Amazon warehouse employees and Instacart shoppers are more essential to our lives than any billionaire CEO. Gurner knows who wields the true power, and he can’t stand it.

[AFR]

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