Is ‘Severance’ a Show about Unions?

Lessons on workplace organizing from tech hell dystopia.

Season 1, Episode 1: “Good News about Hell”

Helly R wakes up sprawled on a conference table in a windowless room. It’s the cold open of Severance, and she is about to learn that she is an Innie: a person with no memories who exists only inside the physical boundaries of the workplace. Helly is trapped in the underground offices of Lumen Industries until she steps into the elevator at 5:00 PM, when her Outie will emerge and head home with no recollection of the work day.

Severance takes an extreme, sci-fi angle on a basic reality of the workplace: that when we clock in, we are not fully ourselves. This can be as subtle as a barista performing false emotions—a happy smile—at the register, or as jarring as a software engineer leaving his children at home to work on drones aimed at other families. Whatever the expectations, we transform ourselves to meet them.

Helly R does not adjust well to her new reality. While she makes frantic, escalating attempts to escape, the other workers in her department are eerily nonchalant. Mark, Dylan, and Irving walk their new colleague through life at Lumen Industries, ripe with tongue-in-cheek riffs on the corporate world. Their environment and routines feel dated, down to the pencil skirts and drab cubicles, like this future work dystopia is still anchored to the 80s. From 9 to 5 they perform a strange and nonsensical task of sorting numbers by emotion, which none of them fully understand.

Season 1, Episode 7: “Defiant Jazz”

The corporation’s godlike, unseen “Board” believes Helly can be domesticated into compliance, but as the show unfolds, we see an opposite effect take hold: Helly’s constant criticism of Lumen’s working conditions begins to agitate her coworkers.

This is the show’s first inkling of union organizing: Helly is beating apathy. In the world of Severance, workers don’t just learn to feel apathetic about their job; it’s the only life they know. With no memories outside of work, the Innies have no context for joy or freedom, so they can’t help but accept the abuse they endure.

After a few days with Helly, each of the severed workers grows restless and starts to challenge their environment in small ways. Just like when real-life workers start talking about issues like pay, scheduling, and respect on the job, there’s an internal shift that happens for each individual, as they move from resigned apathy toward a belief that they can change their circumstances.

Like real employers, Lumen Industries divides its staff by department and allows for little cross-pollination between groups. In a watershed moment, Lumen’s Innies find a former colleague’s hand-drawn map of every department. Mark, the highest on the chain of command, initially destroys the map, but the spark of curiosity grows. The Innies have discovered another essential step in organizing a union: mapping out the workplace.

Season 1, Episode 3: “In Perpetuity”

Workers are most powerful when they build connections across all divisions and groups that exist in the workplace, physically and figuratively. A good union organizer gets to know and trust workers on different shifts, work responsibilities, and locations.

Even after physically mapping out the workplace, Helly and her coworkers in “Macro-Data Refinement” are wary of the other departments. Lumen Industries sows intentional mistrust between its workplace groups using violent rumors and stereotypes—workers could be killed for crossing the lines. Real workplaces do this more subtly, leveraging social groups as they form along lines of race, language, gender, and religion, and counting on distrust to keep workers sequestered accordingly.

Still, Lumen’s MDR workers find the courage to explore the Optics and Design department, and to their surprise, they have a lot in common with the O&D workers. As new relationships bloom across departments, trust in Lumen’s Board degrades: what else is the company willing to lie to workers about?

Throughout Season 1 we meet the Outies for each worker. Leaving the office, they go home to dramatically divergent lives, with different families, backgrounds, and personal histories.

In an early episode, Helly defiantly tells her coworkers: "I could not, with a razor to my throat, be less interested in being your family."

But the second they transition to Innies, Helly and her colleagues become homogenous. When they’re stripped of identity and defined only by their labor, they also become ripe for organizing: there are no divisions left between them. They might as well be flesh and blood.

Season 1, Episode 8: “What’s For Dinner?”

I don’t want to fully spoil the show’s Season 1 cliffhanger, so I’ll be vague in sharing the last detail I find interesting about Helly: she’s a class traitor.

In all her attempts to escape the office, Helly is subjugated by her Outie, who never expresses any sympathy for her situation. Unlike her coworkers, whose Outies led working-class lives before joining Lumen, Helly’s Outie is part of the ruling class. In a chiding video, the externally-named Helena addresses her Innie matter-of-factly: “I am a person. You are not.”

But Helena didn’t anticipate that when her Innie went to work at Lumen, she would be severed from her old identity as part of the ruling class. The person who emerged from the elevator was a worker, and Helly was transformed by her experience of exploitation. She could see herself and her coworkers as people.

We have yet to see if Season 2 will continue exploring a union-organizing theme. I don’t expect most TV shows to capture the subject accurately or with nuance, but I like Severance’s world of work. Lumen Industries is a fascinating place to think about alienation, exploitation, and the way we give up a piece of our authentic self when it’s time to clock in.