In one tear-jerker conclusion to a Season 3 episode, Johanna, an exemplary employee of Checkers, is promoted and given $ 20, 000 to buy a new car. Even the slightest increase in wages, or a glimpse of a bit of a nest egg, can make a worker light up. It purports to show a CEO helping workers overcome limitations but instead shows how readily these limitations are accepted. Unwittingly, the show reflects the narrow lens through which American capitalism considers labor. While the CEO of Fatburger is willing to see what life is like on the grill, how about life picking the tomatoes that garnish his patties? While Modell is floored by Angel’s struggle, does he explore the source of the sneakers she slings on the sales floor? To do so would be to find working conditions too squalid for network television. Most of the companies are retail-based rarely do we get a look deeper down the supply chain. The undercover act only goes so far - CEOs may go to the ground floor, but they, and the Undercover Boss producers, have no desire to expose what goes on in the basement. The pretext of this reality show, the need for the boss to go undercover, reveals an important truth, though not the one the producers think: In our largely non-unionized workforce, employees have no means to air grievances to the heads of their companies no power to improve their collective wages or working conditions. Guller, not without a heart, rewards a sunnier, more pliant server with the one thing she said would help her improve at her job: breast implants. When Guller comes out as CEO, he fires her.Īngry at being deceived, Jessica protests, “Is everyone happy with the job they have? It doesn’t make me a horrible person just because I’m not satisfied with where I’m at.” He is, after all, the man who trademarked “breastaurant.” Jessica, a former account executive, confides in him that she hopes to find something better. This upsets Guller, who cannot abide the sin against his brand. Things get off to a rocky start when she admits she isn’t wearing her regulation bikini - knowing Guller is being filmed for a reality show (just not which), she decides she would rather not be scantily clad on television. In Season 6, Jessica, a server at Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill (a Texas chain of “breastaurants”) unknowingly trains CEO Doug Guller to work behind the bar. As such, the show acts as a safety valve for the frustrations of an indebted, underpaid, exhausted work force, one that acknowledges suffering and offers a fantasy of relief - as long as you don’t dissent. Undercover Boss is the latest in a long line of individual-reward narratives, from the Christian concept of Heaven to American Idol, that have helped prop up capitalism. Today, nearly four years later, a sales associate at Modell’s makes a little over $ 8 an hour. Hearing this news, Angel falls to her knees, weeping.īut at no time does Modell express concern about how other workers in Angel’s position may be similarly struggling. Reduced to tears, he gives her a promotion and buys her a house. Mitch Modell, head of Modell’s Sporting Goods, learns that Angel - alongside whom he’s worked the till, stocked the shelves and waited on customers all day - is living with her children in a shelter because she can’t afford housing on her sales associate salary. Seven seasons in, Undercover Boss seamlessly exposes the everyday suffering of workers under late capitalism and at the same time reassures viewers that the system is self-correcting. Here, Undercover Boss reveals itself as precisely what it believes it is not: a show built on the profound inequality of the American enterprise, one that glorifies how adept America’s CEOs are at papering over the cracks in the system.
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