Have you seen this “Compliance” movie yet? It’s based on a
true story about some creep who would call up various low-wage
workplaces, mostly fast-food, pretending to be a cop and got managers
(and in this case, the manager’s fiancé) to strip-search female
employees, starting off with a claim that a customer was accusing
said employee of theft (that she reached into the customer’s purse
on the counter and stole money out of it) then claiming that in
reality they were “under investigation” regarding “drug
crimes”, and that they were simply too busy at that particular
employee’s apartment searching for drugs to come and take her into
custody and search her themselves. It’s an interesting insight
into the mentality of the common person to bend to the commands of
authority, almost a live-in-the-wild confirmation of the findings of
the Milgram experiment.
I’ve heard people express surprise that anyone could fall for
such a ruse or that this could even be real. What surprises me,
though, is that this should surprise anyone at all. This is a major
flaw in human psychology, as evidenced by Milgram, but it’s also an
inevitable result of our failed Drug War and in particular an
inevitable result of drug testing culture.
Now be honest, we begin our employment relationship with an
employer insult to our integrity and an outright statement of
distrust—a direct accusation, in fact an a priori conviction, of
criminal activity, of committing a drug crime. Apropos of nothing,
with zero cause to suspect you of such behavior, they assume before
the fact that you are a drug user and they convict you without
evidence or a trial. The employer then insists that you must
exonerate yourself of these a priori criminal convictions before they
will hire you—not that it will afford you an ounce of trust or
respect, of course. And the biggest insult is that to exonerate
ourselves, they demand we submit to a highly unreliable and
incredibly privacy-invading search and seizure of highly intimate
bodily fluids and trust them—devoid of any legal recourse on our
part and devoid of any government oversight or regulation of the
testing company-- effectively expecting us to afford them a
gargantuan amount of trust in response to their overt declaration of
distrust toward us. Even as they distrust and disrespect us and tell
us so to our faces by asking for a drug test without suspicion, they
expect us to trust them to not use our specimen for anything other
than the stated purpose and not to, say, screen us for protected
conditions like diabetes, pregnancy, or heart problems they don't
want on their insurance. And remember, they expect us to trust them
absolutely to behave properly even as they receive zero oversight
from the law, have zero accountability for their actions regarding
drug testing, and can do as they please.
What I'm saying is that drug testing culture has created an
automatic master/slave relationship between employer and employee.
The employer begins the relationship by demanding a drug test without
cause—essentially telling the potential hire that the company is
worthy of utmost trust and respect and that the employee is worthy
only of distrust, disrespect, and abject contempt, and is little more
than a criminal by default until they “prove” themselves innocent
of any crime.
This becomes even worse when the company in question commits
random drug testing on their employees, because that takes the
initial pre-employment drug testing insult and extends it to the
entire duration of employment. In that case, you are now perpetually
a criminal in the eyes of your employer, deserving of neither trust
nor respect, and you must submit your intimate sample to them and
trust them with that sample infinitely more than they trust you. And
moreover, you will NEVER, as long as you work there, be able to
exonerate yourself on any level. No matter how many times you
submissively urinate for them, you will always continue to be a
convicted criminal subject to invasive search and seizure, you will
always be untrustworthy and beneath your company's contempt while
your company demands constant godlike trust and infinite surveillance
over your body and life as the sole method to ensure that you are
being “good”. You will never be exonerated, you will never be
worth of trust or respect, you will always be a filthy criminal in
the eyes of your employer as long as you work there. It's no wonder
that random drug testing causes lower productivity rates. Even
people who support drug testing or don't think about it one way or
another know subconsciously that these things are true, and it's hard
to want to work very hard for an employer who holds you in open
contempt and believes your flesh is company property and not your
own.
Which brings us to “Compliance” again. Finding a non-drug
testing company in Ohio (where the film was set and the original
incident occurred) has become like finding a needle in a haystack,
and even if you're just saying “do you want fries with that”
you're expected to piss on command for the “honor”. Even in
companies that don't drug test, the pro-drug testing mentality and
culture (and the witch-hunt mentality that goes hand-in-hand with
it), there is always knowledge that your employer has that idea that
you are probably a drug user, that your employer is being bombarded
with drug testing industry propaganda without any challenging points
of view to show what a load it is, that your employer is being told
the lie that not drug testing means that their entire workforce is
made entirely of drug users by definition, that your employer is
looking at you cockeyed every day suspecting you of criminal activity
because of that propaganda, that adversarial relationship with your
employer and the fact that at any moment your company might give in
to the evil and jump on the privacy-invading wagon.
So, given those facts, given the high likelihood that this girl
was forced by that manager to piss in a cup before being hired, why
is it surprising that that manager or any manager would force that
employee to strip when ordered to do so by a voice on the phone
claiming to have authority over them? And why is it surprising that
that employee submitted to that treatment, after having already
submitted to a practice that creates an undeniable subconscious
understanding that even what you have between your legs is not your
own but is corporate property to be searched at the corporation's
whim? Few people even know their rights anymore, either regarding
the government or their employer. Far from being surprising, the was
actually the inevitable result of the mentality of drug testing that
has gripped this benighted country throughout the drug war.
Don't believe me? Well, notice that when the manager begins to
doubt and ask some questions, what does the police impersonator say?
Well, he tells her the “real” reason he's having her strip-search
her employee isn't just some random claim of theft from an
unidentified customer, it's because she's involved in DRUGS. And at
that point, you see the manager's face harden and she no longer has
any questions, any doubt, or any mercy or sympathy for her now-naked
subordinate. This treatment no longer seems out-of-line or
unreasonable—because before she hired this girl, without a single
hint that this girl could be involved in drugs, she likely forced
this girl to pull down her pants and provide her with an intimate
sample from the inside of her body to “prove” she wasn't, so it
sounds reasonable to her unreasoning drug-testing culture brain that,
having a confirmed conviction by the word of an unverified police
officer on the phone, that she should be asked to strip-search this
“drug user”. The moment he brought up “we're investigating her
for drugs”, she was his pawn and this girl became the clear enemy,
deserving of neither dignity nor respect, and as for rights...well,
it was well-established in both manager's and employee's minds upon
the pre-employment drug test that the employee has no rights,
especially where drugs are concerned.
Now think about that. Really consider that.
ALL HE HAD TO DO TO QUELL HER DOUBTS AND SILENCE HER QUESTIONS AND
OBTAIN HER TOTAL OBEDIENCE IN EFFECTIVELY RAPING THIS GIRL WAS TO
INVOKE THE DRUG BOOGEY-MAN!
That should make your blood run cold. If it doesn't, you are too
far gone to see how far gone this country is, and you are part of the
problem.
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