4 -what box tickers do

Page 45-47: 4. what box tickers do

I am using the term "box tickers" to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. The following testimony is from a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home:

Betsy: Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences. The form was then logged on a computer and promptly forgotten about forever. The paper form was also kept in a binder, for some reason. Completion of the forms was by far the most important part of my job in the eyes of my boss, and I would catch a hell if I got behind on them. A lot of the time, I would complete a form for a short-term resident, and they would check out the next day. The interviews mostly just annoyed the residents, as they knew it was just bullshit paper work, and no one was going to care about their individual preferences.

…

We're all familiar with box ticking as a form of ovrnment. If government employees are caught doing something very bad—taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops—the first reaction is invariably a "fact-finding commision" to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it's a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second of all, it's a way of implying that once the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it (This is usually not true, either). A fact-finding commision is a ay of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not. But large corporations will behave in exactly the same way if, say, they are revealed to be employing slaves or child laborers in their garment factories or dumping toxic waste. All of this is bullshit, but the true bullshit job category applies to those who are not just there to starve off the public (this at least could be said to serve some kind of useful purpose for the company) but to those who do so within the organization itself.

The corporate compliance industy might be considered an intermediary form. It is explicitely created by (US) government regulation:

Layla: I work in a growing industry born out of the federal regulation the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Basically US companies have to do due diligence to make sure they aren't doing business with corrupt, overseas firms.. Clients are big companies—tech, auto companies, etc.—who might have myriad smallish businesses they supply or work with in China (my region).

Our company creates due diligence reports for our clients: basically one to two hours of internet research that is then edited into a report. There is a lot of jargon and training that goes into making sure every report is consistent.

Sometimes the internet reveals something that's an easy red flag—like a company's boss had a criminal case—but I would say the redness/bullshit factor is 20/80. unless someone has been criminally charged, I have no way of knowing from my apartment in Brooklyn if they've been handed an envelope full of cash in Guangzhou.