In Severance, Office Perks Couldn't Be More Sinister
There's no such thing as a free (work) lunch.
When we first meet Dylan G (Zach Cherry) in Severance, Apple TV+’s Sci-Fi series now in the throes of its second season, he comes off as the most well-adjusted innie in his team. He stays motivated by working towards company “perks”, like finger traps and waffle parties, which he’s rewarded with in exchange for hitting the targets set by his enigmatic employer, Lumon.
All in all, Dylan G seems pretty content. But when a blip in the system means that he accidentally gets a glimpse of one of his outie’s sons, the perks begin to lose their sheen, with Dylan joining the rest of his team to rebel. This season, we see Dylan get access to “Outie Family Visitation Suite Experience” — basically a gussied up conjugal visit — as a means of turning Dylan’s alienation from his outie into another means of control.
Crucially, these family perks are only offered to Dylan G on the basis that he keeps it a secret from the other innies, disrupting the solidarity he built up with his team in Season 1. At least for now, the perk works: we see Dylan promptly fall back in line, going from taking a literal bite out of Lumon boss Milchick (Tramell Tillman) last season to again becoming a diligent cog in the machine.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the corporate perk is the false sense of agency that they offer, harking back to a quote from Lumon’s founder that “the surest way to tame a prisoner is to let him believe he’s free.” In Season 2, for example, our innies are presented with hall passes, a shiny new perk that allows them to roam around the building. But is it really about giving them more freedom, or putting limits around where and when they can go?
Elizabeth Spiers writes in the New York Times that Severance is being deliberate in its choice of perks. Dylan G is shown bagging Chinese finger traps in exchange for hitting his targets, a woven toy often made from bamboo that tightens up the more you try and pull out your fingers. The only way to release your fingers is to relax and stop fighting.
“These traps are used as a metaphor… conveying the idea that when you stop trying to fight a problem and simply accept it, its hold on you loosens,” Spiers says. “In Severance, where the finger traps are given out as rewards for the mysterious work of the Macrodata Refinement team, the meaning is clear: If you just stop questioning the corporation and struggling with your existential doubts, you will be free. In this sense, the finger traps are not just a toy; they’re a type of corporate indoctrination.”
The emergence of “wellness” perks have also increasingly made their way into modern offices. As we saw in Season 1, wellness counsellor Ms Casey (Dichen Lachman) initially appeared to offer restorative, spa-like sessions as rewards to good employees, but we later see the sessions being used to control and surveil. Having Ms Casey place items like candles from Mark S’s outie’s life in front of Mark’s innie, for example, was a means to test that his severed brain was working (or not working) as it should.
Unfortunately, the sinister nature of corporate perks isn’t limited to the world of Severance. Wellness perks can be and are used every day, particularly in the US, to control workers and harness their data. Labour historians have described these types of perks as one of the features of welfare capitalism, a term that came about in the 1920s when American companies began offering employees subsidised housing as part of their job package, along with health insurance and retirement plans, with the point being to make workers more productive and dissuade them from joining unions.
But researchers Tamara Knopper and Eve Zelickson argue that many company perks allow them to have access to a whole lot of personal data, which can lead to “further deterioration of worker rights, agency and power”. As an example, employees of Apple — irony intended! — offer their employees free DNA testing, meaning they could access information about employee health risks. And while the idea of being able to get ahead of health problems before they happen doesn’t sound terrible, there are obviously huge privacy issues that come with your employer having your literal DNA on file.
“While seemingly good for workers, welfare capitalism relied on the presumption that employee wellbeing is not intrinsically valuable, but valuable because of its relationship to a company’s success,” say Knopper and Zelickson. “For workers, personal data, including any information related to health, is of extreme importance. Not only is it a matter of personal privacy, but of power. Worker data can be harnessed for employment and wage discrimination, healthcare discrimination, and management control.”
The fact is that while something like a cholesterol check may be offered to staff under the pretense of healthcare, it only makes sense for companies to do so if they stand to have something to gain. That’s why companies might chuck a ‘wellness hour’ your way, where you get to avoid meetings for one hour, but then have to cram them in elsewhere in the day. I once worked for a company, for example, that provided 15-minute desk massages, loosening up our muscles for a brief moment before high-stress jobs had them clench right back up. But with massages on the house, how could anyone have possibly claimed to have been stressed?
Anyway, when it comes to what actually benefits workers, studies show that joining unions is what helps raise wages, decrease inequality and improve workers’ health. On the other hand, perks like wellness sessions and genetic testing tend to erode workers rights, making them easier to manipulate and more likely to overlook poor working conditions. So will “join your union” be included as a call to action in your next wellness package? Probably, probably not. Like in Severance, actually improving the lives of workers has never been the point.
Rachel Choy is a cat lover, journalist, and co-founder of The Offcut. You can see how cute her cats are on @thekiwicouple.
Great article!