My experience working at a certain reactionary supermarket

free discussion Work Diary
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Regarding my experience working at a certain reactionary supermarket
Currently, I am working in the bakery section of a large supermarket, but this won’t last long because I will return to school soon. However, my experience working at this reactionary supermarket is worth writing about. In this mall, many female employees have been long-term victims of sexual harassment by perverted male employees, and they dare not resist. During these days of my work, I hope to do my best to change this situation. On one hand, I want to confront these lecherous scoundrels; on the other hand, “It is better to teach a man to fish than to give him fish.” I also hope to inspire the female employees’ fighting spirit against the hooligans.

On my first day at the supermarket, I worked the day shift, from nine to five. The older sister who took me was the one in charge of baking cakes. She was quite kind to me, repeatedly reminding me to be careful of burns and other hazards, and even shared some cake rolls with me. She also pointed out the blind spots of the surveillance cameras so I could hide there while eating. I felt that she was a very good person, so I wanted to communicate more with her, especially since the only person I could talk to in this position was her. Baking cakes is a job with a strong production nature. Every day, she needs to beat the cake batter with a machine in the morning, then put it into containers and bake it in the oven, repeating this process until the afternoon. In the afternoon, she wraps the finished cake rolls sent by the manufacturer into the supermarket’s special packaging. These two seemingly simple but actually repetitive and exhausting tasks end with her finishing her shift. Of course, sometimes she would voluntarily work overtime if the bakery was too busy. I am not sure if she gets overtime pay or subsidies, nor do I know whether she works overtime out of mutual help or out of servitude, because I don’t know her well enough. She has red hair and wears eyeliner, but the eyeliner has faded to a bluish-black. In the past, I generally didn’t like to associate with older women who wore makeup and had tattoos, as many of the fiery-tempered, petty old women in my hometown are like that. But on the first day of work, I found that she was quite nice.

However, she is not an ordinary person. Although she lives a苦劳的雇佣奴隶生活 (hard and exhausting life of an indentured servant), she is still influenced by bourgeois ideas. For example, she would tell me to earn more money and find a handsome guy to date in the future. But despite her words, she says her daily life is just “XX supermarket - home, two points one line”. After work, she is just busy with household chores and pleasures at home, and there’s no way she can find a handsome guy to date. So, her advice to find a handsome guy actually shows that she is influenced by bourgeois ideas but cannot live a bourgeois life herself, which weakens her struggle and makes her compromise with capitalism!

She has been working in this supermarket for ten years.
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You can see that the older sister is deeply poisoned by bourgeois art and literature; the so-called idea that women can have a good life by finding a man who looks like XX is essentially just the bourgeois viewing women as tools and slaves dependent on men. I believe that to achieve such a goal

First, we should criticize their bourgeois viewpoints and establish correct concepts. If one recognizes oneself as a slave, how can there be talk of struggle and resistance?

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What form does this routine molestation take, and are the perverted male employees leaders or ordinary staff?

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He is just an ordinary male employee, casually molesting women when he has the chance to contact female employees, taking the opportunity to groping them a few times. If he can have long-term contact with female employees in the same position, he becomes even more arrogant! He directly hugs female employees from behind or beats their buttocks with a bamboo stick, which is outrageous. I am working now, and I will continue to update with more details after work.

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You’re right, but I haven’t even established contact with them now, and sometimes they are unhappy with me because they need to take time to teach me how to do chores. What I need to solve now is this. Additionally, the only times I can interact with them are tonight’s evening shift and tomorrow’s afternoon shift. The day after tomorrow, after my morning shift, I will go to the station and then return to school.

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Just now, slicing toast with a toast knife caused a water blister. Here, I always get some minor but somewhat troublesome small injuries, like being cut by packaging boxes into many cuts that may or may not bleed. Although it doesn’t make me dislike work, I still feel uncomfortable.

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!!! Seeing this text, I feel like my eyes and brain have been indirectly molested… According to the current legal system, this would be punishable by law. You can gather more evidence during the observation period, at least get him fired, and ideally make a bigger impact. Anyway, you won’t be doing this for long, invite a few friends to come and give a speech when there are many people, print out photos and texts. (While protecting the victim and your safety). If the supermarket tolerates such behavior for a long time, the negative impact it causes is already deserved. Also, take some time to understand why some women have such deep slave mentality, do targeted dissemination, even if they can’t accept it quickly, they should roughly understand what is correct.

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Me too, many objects that seem harmless can very likely cause injuries. The day before yesterday, I was wiping the edge of the table where there were crumpled cardboard pieces, not yet folded. When wiping, I didn’t press hard or light, and as I quickly ran my hand over, I felt a sharp pain on the side of my finger, with three or four parallel small cuts, and blood kept oozing out until I pressed for three minutes to stop it. Even in seemingly safe service industries, there are so many small dangers; other industries need to be even more cautious.

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In fact, the technical means are secondary. I can’t even preserve evidence because the incident was sudden, my phone wasn’t with me, so I couldn’t record audio or video. Additionally, the places they chose are either not monitored or are more discreet (like patting on the back). To deal with these subordinate men, it’s important to awaken the fighting consciousness of the girls who have been molested from a political perspective. Unfortunately, I only got to know them a little today at work, and the day after tomorrow I won’t be able to see them anymore (since I work early shifts and they work late shifts, so our schedules are offset). After that, I will be returning to school. The ideological struggle is a long-term and complex issue. Today, because one of the girls who was molested was cold to me, I put a lot of effort into getting to know her a bit. Maybe tomorrow I can talk to her about my views on those subordinate men.

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And these people have very complex thoughts; they not only compromise with the harassment of their subordinate men but also with the oppression of wage labor. The latter is reflected in a female worker who, while being harassed, also acts as a strikebreaker and reports me to the supervisor (even though I didn’t do anything, she falsely accused me of playing on my phone, which drew the supervisor’s attention); another girl who was harassed was also scolded by the supervisor and could only vent her dissatisfaction behind my back. Sometimes, she would even urge me to work faster or have her own little schemes, like pushing some tasks onto me. In fact, all these are interconnected because these behaviors are essentially acts of weakness and compromise in the face of capitalist oppression. Since they are close to bourgeois ideas, they cannot be reflected in just one aspect but are manifested in all aspects of life and labor.

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If one does not oppress others, it is difficult to rationalize the oppression one experiences. This is a very typical bourgeois selfish mindset. I’m afraid they often fantasize about how they would oppress others once they have power and influence, and their hatred towards oppressors also stems more from their frustration at not being oppressors themselves. Such thinking has very limited progressiveness and indeed cannot be changed in a day or two.

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I don’t understand your statement that “not oppressing others makes it difficult to justify one’s own oppression.” Please explain it in a simple and understandable way. Additionally, I interpret this passage as suggesting that the slaveholder mentality and the slave mentality are two sides of the same coin—like a coin, without slaveholders there are no slaves, and without slaves there are no slaveholders. This can also be reflected in their thoughts: when these people act as submissive, obedient servants, they consciously uphold the oppressive and exploitative system, and may even actively help the oppressors to suppress others.

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That is to say, justifying one’s own oppression (by exercising small power to trouble others) as a way to rationalize the oppression one suffers (relieving the pain of one’s own oppression) is actually recognizing the logic of bourgeois exploitation and oppression. Your explanation is very insightful.

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Keep going, do not do evil just because it is small, and do not neglect to do good just because it is small. Helping them gain more understanding and protecting themselves is also good.

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Update! Content: First day at work experience

On my first day at work, my hand was cut by a sharp plastic container. Although it looked like a small cut, it still bled a lot. When the older sister saw the blood on my hand, she looked worried and told me to find a bandage in the HR department. After I applied the bandage, she even took out nitrile gloves for me. This place originally only provides disposable plastic gloves that are loose-fitting.

Additionally, I must talk about the HR personnel. I found out from forums that some comrades are unclear about the class nature of store managers and supervisors, so I will talk about the HR person who recruited me. Initially, when I asked her over the phone if they were still hiring, she answered cheerfully and enthusiastically, with a smile in her voice, “Yes, yes,” and told me when the interview would be. Actually, they have recruitment quotas set by their HR department. When she saw a willing candidate, she was immediately delighted. But after I actually went there, finished the interview, and confirmed my employment, she immediately lost her enthusiasm and coldly arranged my trial work schedule. When I was preparing to start, I noticed she was chatting happily with my cake station supervisor, who even talked about developing new desserts. Due to the nature of HR work—which is reactionary (referring to constantly thinking about how to recruit the most qualified workers and how to deal with workers demanding wages to protect bourgeois interests)—they are always close to the bourgeoisie. Practical reactionism inevitably leads to ideological reactionism. So, when my finger was bleeding and I went to the HR department for a bandage, that HR person, who had pretended to be enthusiastic for a while, just glanced at me coldly, pointed out where the bandage was, and then ignored me. Even though she had known me for a few days longer than the sister at the cake station, her attitude was so different. I was injured at work, and although she had no obligation to care for me, these proletarians develop a more selfless character through labor, understanding how to care for others’ feelings, unlike HR and supervisors who are hypocritical and only polite on the surface, secretly deducting half an hour of work time for me just because I was four minutes late. These people are old-timers desperately trying to climb up; for personal gain, they can abandon dignity and serve the bourgeoisie, oppressing workers, standing against them for a bit of leftovers.

Additionally, I have some thoughts today. I realized that factory foremen often insult industrial workers, while service industry managers and store supervisors tend to put on a show. This is probably because workers have long-term social practice experience and have a rich emotional understanding of these foremen, who are on the bourgeoisie’s side. Therefore, trying to get along with them doesn’t work for industrial workers. Many service workers are small bourgeoisie who have just escaped parasitic life, and the service industry itself interacts more with the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. As a result, service workers tend to have a more serious petty-bourgeoisie ideology, and they don’t clearly understand the nature of their managers, so they are more easily fooled by gentleness, kindness, and joking.

But I think, as the movie “Spring Seedling” says, “Love whom? Hate whom? Who is responsible for our poor peasants, we know best.” Comrades on the forum should also use class analysis properly. When facing different people, right and wrong, love and hate, should be distinguished clearly.

I have to say, working here is really tiring, no wonder there is such a shortage of people. Although it’s my first day, and I should just observe how to do things at my post, I still did a lot of packaging work, and my hands never stopped. To reclaim some of my surplus value, I sneaked a piece of cake roll while packing and took three home for friends. The bourgeoisie always propagates that stealing is shameful because they are very hostile to workers. Workers produce every product with their own hands, and they sustain the luxurious lives of the bourgeoisie. Workers only take back a tiny, pitiful part of the surplus value through “theft,” which is called “stealing,” and they are heavily fined—like in this supermarket, where taking products home results in a 2000 yuan fine. The older sister also told me she was worried about me and told me not to bring food home, “You can steal and eat here.”

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Damn it! I seem to only be able to distinguish this kind of more direct malice; if someone is slightly nicer to me, I think that person isn’t that bad. It’s indeed because I don’t use class analysis methods, only shallow subjective feelings.

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Actually, it’s also due to a lack of social experience, because rational understanding is built on a rich accumulation of emotional understanding. After working more and seeing the true faces of such people, and combining class analysis, one can see through their false appearances.

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Capitalists are very ruthless. Now, after struggles, service workers generally accept that employees can steal and eat in the store as long as they are not too obvious and caught, but taking things home is a red line because doing so would prevent the capitalist’s goods from being sold.

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Update. Work Diary (3)
In summary, on the first day of work, I got along quite well with the big sister. She would help and consider me in all aspects. I think only the proletariat can be so enthusiastic to a newcomer they just met. I have a friend who used to work at a certain milk tea shop, where the part-time middle-class students not only would report to the manager when he was fooling around in the toilet but also left him alone to scramble with making milk tea when the shop was very busy so he could go see a new Russian supermarket in the mall.

In the afternoon, a young female worker who was working the night shift also started her shift. According to the big sister, this girl was even younger than me and was also from my hometown. The big sister had a good relationship with this young worker named Xiao Wu. They often joked and laughed together, and the big sister would also help Xiao Wu with some tasks. Seeing that I was a newcomer, the big sister actively introduced me to Xiao Wu and enthusiastically told her several times: “She is your fellow townswoman!” However, Xiao Wu, having just entered society and being a young petty bourgeoisie, wouldn’t immediately become familiar and warm with her coworkers like the big sister. She was still somewhat unfamiliar with me, so she only awkwardly responded a few words to the big sister. Due to my own ideological issues and indulgence in pleasures, I was not very willing to actively communicate with coworkers (in fact, if it weren’t for the big sister’s enthusiasm towards me, I might have just treated her with extreme silence and indifference), so I didn’t communicate with Xiao Wu immediately. So, on the first day of work, I behaved as if I was a parasitic student who had just shed a parasitic life, full of petty bourgeois habits—introverted and silent. Perhaps, in the eyes of the big sister and Xiao Wu, I might be a difficult person to get along with because of my silence.

But by the second day, the situation changed somewhat.

On the second day, I worked the night shift. In this place, different shifts do different work. When I worked the middle shift with the big sister, we made cakes and rolled cakes together. As for the night shift, the work involved packaging bread and pastries, and selling packaged cakes and bread in the store. After starting work, the chubby supervisor who liked to pretend to be kind and amiable directed me to package bread. But this supervisor was really cunning! She was busy looking at her phone and indulging in pleasures, not only failing to teach me how to cut and package toast but also letting the busy big sister, who hadn’t finished her own work, teach me. Initially, the big sister also helped me with the colorful and dazzling variety of bread out of mutual help, but objectively, this would interfere with her own work. This laid the groundwork for future conflicts between us. As for Xiao Wu, I didn’t know much about her and had little interaction, only some impressions of her appearance: she looked simple, with wheat-colored dark skin, unlike those wealthy petty bourgeois women or bourgeois women who are always into whitening, skincare, and medical beauty. She was somewhat short, didn’t do makeup or dress up, and didn’t wear jewelry. Overall, she was quite plain.

There was also another woman who looked very difficult to get along with because her eyes were very fierce and sinister, and her hat was hanging down almost covering her eyes, walking around in a careless manner. Sure enough, when I was cutting toast, she inexplicably caused trouble for me—after I saw her turn her head to look at me and the toast-cutting machine in the kitchen, I don’t know what she said to the supervisor, who then looked at me and came over to threaten me, warning that I couldn’t play with my phone here. In fact, I hadn’t touched my phone at all, but that worker betrayed me as if I was trying to curry favor with the supervisor, casually accusing me of playing with my phone. After figuring out what was going on, I immediately got angry, even forgetting about class analysis and the sixteen-character struggle strategy. At that moment, I just wanted personal revenge and to physically confront that worker. I was so angry that I lost my reason, and only after a while did I calm down and realize that I was too focused on personal interests, which led me to think about how to get back at her, rather than exposing and condemning her and the supervisor’s evil deeds to other workers. After realizing this, I stopped thinking about it and started to think about other things, like forum topics.

Meanwhile, I continued to observe the situation here. (At this time, I was still in a self-isolated state, not actively communicating with workers, just working and observing silently.) I found that this worker also had conflicts with the supervisor. She was loudly reprimanded by the supervisor for not wearing gloves when taking a tiger skin roll. Although she was dissatisfied, she didn’t dare to resist strongly and only complained. As for the big sister, because the supervisor pushed her to train the new worker, her dissatisfaction gradually grew. Sometimes, when I asked her about work issues, she would show some impatience, but this was only very mild and reflected in her behavior. This also indicates a trend. Actually, it’s not just because the supervisor pushed all the work onto the big sister; external factors act through internal factors. The big sister also had some wrong ideas, such as not understanding the class nature of the supervisor and not engaging in class struggle but only mutual help at work, which made her impatient with me as a newcomer. She didn’t think, “It’s a crime for the supervisor to push this work onto herself.”

The place where I work is not only female employees; there is also a lecherous male subordinate with the surname Zhang and a young man with little presence. The subordinate Zhang looks to be in his twenties, with a face full of pimples and a wide body. He is quite eloquent, unlike the silent young man, and gets along well with other female workers. However, his relationship with other workers is only for satisfying personal interests—one is to approach female workers through joking and teasing, implementing his lecherous schemes. On the other hand, maintaining such relationships with other female workers also makes work less boring, giving him someone to chat with and have fun.

The reason for this conclusion is that I often saw him joking around with female workers, even making ambiguous jokes typical of petty bourgeois heterosexual relationships, such as Xiao Wu saying “Love you” after his help at work to express gratitude. Or he would ask Xiao Wu “Miss me?” after work. Their relationship isn’t purely for fun because petty bourgeois heterosexual relationships rarely involve pure friendship; such personal relationships tend to develop into petty bourgeois romance (though I forget why exactly), so their playful interactions also contain some flirtatious elements, like teasing two people. It’s not really about getting together but enjoying this improper, unofficial relationship. As for my claim that he seeks to satisfy his lecherous and pornographic thoughts, this was also well demonstrated on the afternoon of my second day at work. When the worker thief didn’t know what joke they were making, the subordinate Zhang suddenly hugged the worker thief tightly from behind, and they were completely pressed together (just thinking of this makes me feel extremely disgusting). This is definitely not normal behavior; even men hugging men would be considered “gay,” right? After the subordinate Zhang restrained the worker thief in this way, she started shouting, “Pervert, let me go!” Hearing her shout, I and Xiao Wu looked over, trying to understand what was happening. We saw the scene described above. The subordinate Zhang, noticing our attention was drawn, immediately nervously loosened his hold on the worker thief. At that time, I hadn’t figured out what was going on because I had just recently seen him joking with these female workers, so I couldn’t immediately judge whether the worker thief was molested or if they were in some ambiguous relationship (of course, in capitalist society, the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the working class is just legal prostitution). To clarify the facts, I asked Xiao Wu, “Are they a couple?” Xiao Wu also saw everything that just happened but told me, “No, Zhang xx is crazy, shameless.” The situation was more complicated than I imagined. If even the relationship in capitalist society isn’t pure, isn’t this behavior completely lewd? But why did the worker thief only curse “Pervert” without any attack? Even this curse, in the eyes of that lecherous subordinate, is more like flirtation! So before others noticed, even if she was “cursed,” he had no intention of letting go. As for the aftermath, the worker thief didn’t dare to strongly point out that it was harassment and instead left silently, as if used to this kind of harassment?! This only encourages the subordinate Zhang’s arrogance and diminishes her and women’s dignity.

Moreover, this incident really makes one’s mood complicated. The worker thief dared to attack me, a newcomer, with heavy accusations and reporting, but was timid and submissive in the face of the disgusting subordinate who harassed her. This is a complete servant of capitalist society. On one hand, she is a slave to patriarchal oppression; on the other hand, she is a good servant of the bourgeoisie. I was angry about her previous actions against me, but also shocked by the subordinate’s blatant lewdness and her cowardice in surrender. Why is this? I really want to understand her psychological thoughts.

At night, the supermarket was even more outrageous. All employees were required to assemble and line up before leaving, then take a photo. It was said to be for counting people. Xiao Wu and I stood together. Suddenly, I felt someone pushed her, but I didn’t notice. After taking the photo, Xiao Wu said sarcastically, “That fish seller is so annoying!”

I asked, “Who? Man or woman?”

Xiao Wu replied, “Man, the one in the blue apron. He pushes me every time we take a photo.”

I didn’t continue to inquire and subjectively guessed: maybe he thought Xiao Wu’s position blocked him? Xiao Wu didn’t say anything after hearing that. I also didn’t think about it anymore.

Later, it was almost time to leave. The supermarket was extremely wasteful. Just in my cake station, a large trash bag of cakes and bread was discarded. I saw cakes and bread being unwrapped and thrown into the huge trash bag, which was filled with yellow, golden cakes, bread, and tarts. I felt a deep pain in my heart. Employees can steal food, but discarded items cannot be taken home because they must be officially disposed of at the supermarket’s waste disposal area—no one can steal them out. After work, watching the worker thief pull a small cart to the warehouse with discarded goods, I felt very regretful. The overproduction in capitalism is truly disgusting and hateful.

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