From one enquiry to five inspections: the complaint that becomes plural in «En grupo mienten explotan siempre»

Some songs open with a shout. This one opens by asking permission.

«¿Señor inspector de trabajo? Le quería preguntar una cuestión» (“Labour inspector, sir? I wanted to ask you something”). Just like that, with the formal usted, with a very polite conditional, with the shyness of someone ringing a public office and not quite sure whether they’re being a nuisance. It’s how people talk when they’re not used to complaining. When they’ve been putting up with things for a long time and have finally plucked up the courage to dial a number.

What interests me about «En grupo mienten explotan siempre» (roughly “At Lying Group They Always Exploit”) is the distance that timid opening travels between the first line and the last. Because by the end of the song nobody asks permission any more. By the end there are shouts, vowels stretched to infinity and four inspectors approaching in the distance, like the cavalry in a western.

The song’s page on the blog already tells the story and the characters. In this piece I want to dwell on something else: how a complaint goes from belonging to one person to belonging to many. On the fear you have to overcome to ask the first question. And on why that transformation, which takes three minutes in the song, is so hard in real life.

The formal “you”

Let me go back for a second to the first line, because there’s a grammatical detail that says it all: usted, the formal “you”.

In Spain, usted is used less and less. We say tú to the waiter, the shop assistant, the young doctor, the boss in many companies. Usted has been left for older people, official paperwork and the moments when you feel small in front of someone.

The worker in the song addresses the inspector as usted. And that, more than good manners, is a sign of distance. He’s speaking to authority. To someone who can answer his question, but who is also intimidating. It’s the usted of someone walking into an office with a folder clutched to his chest.

And the lovely thing is that, by the end of the song, that usted is gone. There’s no one left to treat with fearful respect. There are colleagues shouting together. The shift from usted to a collective roar is, in miniature, the shift from fear to confidence.

They give me looks

The worker’s question is very specific. The company has told him to do a training course. They won’t pay him for it. And if he doesn’t do it in his free time, they look at him funny.

That “they give me looks” is, for me, the key to the whole song. Because it doesn’t talk about a disciplinary action, or a dismissal, or a written threat. It talks about something far vaguer and far more effective: the look. The boss’s face when you say no. The silence in the meeting. The comment in the corridor. The feeling that you’ve become the troublemaker, the one who won’t pull his weight, the one who isn’t committed.

Plenty of people who have worked in certain places know that look. Nobody needs to say anything. It’s enough for them to look at you in a particular way for you to understand that, if you want a quiet life there, you’ll be doing the training on Saturday morning. Unpaid. With a smile.

The song doesn’t explain how that pressure works, because it doesn’t need to. Anyone who hears it recognises it in a single sentence. And that’s one of the things I most enjoy about writing about work: some experiences are so widely shared that naming them is enough for the listener to say “that happened to me”.

Free time

There’s another phrase in that first verse that deserves attention: free time.

He has to do the training in his free time. Put like that, it sounds trivial. A few hours. An online course. A couple of evenings. But free time isn’t leftover time. It’s the time of your life. Your friends’, your partner’s, your family’s, your rest, your hobbies. The time for doing nothing, which is also necessary.

When a company takes it for granted that it can fill that time, it’s saying something very serious without saying it: that your life outside work belongs to it a little too. That your evenings are negotiable. That your Sunday is an extension of the working day.

I run a one-person label, and I’ve written about how AI doesn’t save me work, it moves it somewhere else. But choosing where your hours go is one thing; having them taken from you is quite another. The worker in this song hasn’t chosen anything. He’s simply been told his evenings are no longer his.

Training nobody chooses

I’m also interested in the kind of task in the song. It isn’t just any overtime. It’s training.

Training has an excellent reputation. Training is good, learning is good, improving is good. Which is exactly why it’s so easy to use as an excuse. How can you refuse to learn? Don’t you want to grow in the company? Aren’t you interested in your professional development? Any complaint sounds like laziness.

But there’s an enormous difference between training you choose, that interests you and that you do when you like, and training imposed on you, that mainly serves the company and that you have to do on a Sunday. The first is a gift to yourself. The second is work disguised as opportunity.

The song doesn’t go into those nuances, but it lets you sense them. The worker isn’t complaining about having to learn. He’s complaining that he isn’t paid for it and gets looks if he doesn’t do it in his spare time. It’s a very precise complaint, and that’s what makes it so hard to argue with.

Is that legal?

The question at the end of the first verse is disarmingly simple. Inspector, is that legal?

I won’t answer it myself, because I’m neither a lawyer nor an inspector, and every case has its details. What does seem important to me is the act of asking. Because many people don’t ask. They assume that if the company requires it, it must be allowed. Or they don’t know whom to ask. Or they’re embarrassed. Or they fear the company will find out they asked.

The song turns that question into something everyday, almost a courtesy call. And in doing so it takes the drama out of it. Asking whether something is legal isn’t attacking anyone. It’s getting informed. It’s a right. And there are people whose job is precisely to answer those questions.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, the sensible thing is what the character does: ask someone who knows. The Labour Inspectorate, a union, an employment lawyer. Any of them will tell you better than a song what you can do in your case.

Grupo Mienten

The company in the song has an invented name, and I love what that name does. Grupo Mienten: “Lying Group”. Honest in a way the company itself is not.

It’s a very old satirical device: renaming the powerful with a name that portrays them. Golden Age Spanish comedies did it, the satirical press does it, comedy shows do it every week. And it works because the name does the insult’s job without having to insult. There’s no need to say the company cheats. Calling it that is enough.

The name also turns the company into a character rather than a specific entity. Grupo Mienten doesn’t exist, and because it doesn’t exist it can be any company. Yours, your cousin’s, your neighbour’s. Anyone who has worked somewhere that asked for things it didn’t pay for can give Grupo Mienten whatever logo they like.

And then there’s the verb in the chorus: explotan, they exploit. In the title it runs straight on without a comma, like a badly drafted advertising slogan. En grupo mienten explotan siempre. It’s almost an inverted corporate motto. What the company would never put on its website, the song puts in its title.

The “little money”

The chorus has a word that amuses me greatly: dinerito.

At Grupo Mienten they keep your dinerito. Not your money, dinero. Your little bit of money. And that diminutive changes the whole tone of the sentence. It gives it something of a children’s story, of a shopkeeper short-changing you, of a grandmother keeping her coins knotted in a handkerchief. But also, if you think about it, there’s some sadness in it: the diminutive belongs to people who earn little. Real money belongs to others. You’re left with the little bit.

And precisely because it’s little, it hurts more when it’s taken. An hour of unpaid training, for someone on a small wage, isn’t a detail. It’s part of the little there is.

The song makes no speech about it. It slips it into a diminutive and carries on with the catchy chorus. But anyone listening closely notices.

Gossip as a network

The middle of the song is a conversation between colleagues trying to place the characters in the chain of command. A coordinator, a director. The short dark one with the beard? Yes, him. The one with that thing? The very same.

The song’s page already mentions how cheeky that dialogue is, and I don’t want to repeat it. What interests me here is something else: gossip as a way of organising.

It may sound silly, but in many workplaces gossip is the first information network employees have. It’s where you find out who’s really in charge, who can be trusted, which boss gets on with whom, what’s said in the meetings you don’t attend. It’s the coffee-break conversation, the corridor chat, the group chat the company doesn’t know about.

And that network, however frivolous it seems, is the start of something. Before complaining together, colleagues have to talk to each other. They have to recognise one another. They have to realise the same thing is happening to all of them. The gossip in the song, with its sharp tongues and courtyard humour, is the moment that network is woven.

I’ve written another song about the nosy neighbour, and it has always seemed to me that gossip gets a slightly unfair press. It can do harm, of course. But it can also protect. Knowing who’s who is sometimes the only defence you have.

The chain of command

There’s a detail in that conversation I find very sharp, and it explains a lot about how certain companies work.

The coordinator says the orders come from above. From a director. And the director, we imagine, would say they come from higher still. Nobody is responsible. Everyone is following orders. And the unpaid training stays there, floating, without anyone having quite decided it.

That way of diluting responsibility is very common, and the song captures it in a single phrase. “Orders from above.” It’s the excuse of someone who knows what he’s doing isn’t right but prefers to think it isn’t his business.

This isn’t the first time a coordinator comes off badly in my lyrics. In «Asqueroso coordinador» the job title becomes an insult outright. Here the coordinator is another invented character, with his own bad name. It seems middle managers have little luck in my universe. And in «Que me coma el chumino la jefa de servicio» the female bosses don’t fare much better either.

Let’s all do the same

And then comes the twist. The worker thanks the inspector for answering his query and proposes something: that everyone do the same. That everyone call. That everyone ask.

That, for me, is the most important moment in the song. Because it’s the moment the complaint stops being individual. Up to there, there was one person with a question. From there on, there’s a group with a plan.

And the reason given is very simple: it frightens and upsets them. A company can cope with one employee who complains. It can isolate him, give him looks, turn him into the odd one out. What it can’t cope with so easily is everyone complaining at once. Because then there’s no one left to isolate.

It’s one of the oldest and truest ideas I know, and I like finding it in a cheeky song rather than a pamphlet. One person alone is easy to ignore. Many people together are not.

Five inspections this week

The result of that collective call appears in a dialogue that, to me, is one of the funniest moments in the whole trilogy. What’s up with the boss, why is she so furious? There have been five inspections. Five this month? Are you deaf? Five this week.

I love how that misunderstanding works. The colleague who doesn’t catch on, the other repeating it impatiently, and the number becoming more scandalous the second time round. It’s pure farce. It could be in an old-fashioned comedy of errors, in a Madrid courtyard full of neighbours.

And behind the joke there’s something serious: five inspections in one week is what happens when many people decide to ask at once. No revolution needed. It’s enough for each person to make one call. The sum of many timid questions becomes an enormous problem for whoever was counting on nobody asking.

Joy as an answer

After the dialogue, the song erupts. There’s a whoop of joy with the vowel stretched as far as it will go. There’s the odd swear word. There’s a «lucha obrera siempre», workers’ struggle forever, with every vowel drawn out. And there’s an image that repeats: here they come, here they come, four inspectors visible in the distance.

I really like that the reaction is a party. Because labour struggle is often imagined as something grey, serious, all long meetings and dull statements. It can be that, of course. But it can also be joy. The joy of seeing the boss furious because, for once, she couldn’t get her way. The joy of knowing you’re not alone.

That celebration has a lot of the queer humour that interests me, which I discussed in a piece on laughing at others and laughing as ourselves. Laughing at the powerful. Turning the boss’s defeat into a cabaret number. Celebrating with feathers what others would celebrate with placards. Or with both at once.

Here they come

The final image, the inspectors approaching from afar, is almost cinematic. Here they come, here they come. Four of them in the distance. Let the company tremble.

There’s something of the western about it, the scene where the besieged town sees its rescuers appear on the horizon. And it’s very funny that the heroes of that scene are labour inspectors. Civil servants with folders. People who check contracts and timetables. Not superheroes or cowboys. People doing their job.

That contrast amuses me, and I think it’s also a small tribute. In songs, civil servants almost never appear as heroes. They appear as bureaucrats, as obstacles, as the counter that sends you to another counter. Here, for once, the counter is on your side.

Work is our business too

There’s a small phrase in the middle of the gossip I don’t want to skip: someone in the chain of command used to talk behind people’s backs with the lesbians from Seville. It’s a detail, one more bit of gossip. But it lets me say something I think matters.

Queer songs usually talk about love, sex, partying, identity. And that’s great. But LGBTQ+ people work too. We also have bosses who give us looks, coordinators who hide behind orders from above, training nobody pays us for. We get exploited too.

And sometimes, at work, there’s an extra layer: having to hide who you are, or put up with comments, or sensing you’re treated differently. This song isn’t exactly about that, but it doesn’t exclude it either. The world of the song is a workplace with queer people in it, with their gossip and their alliances. And I like a PLANETA GAYFOLK song talking about payslips as well as boyfriends.

A chorus to remember

The song introduces itself as a catchy chorus. It asks you to hold on to it. And I think that request has a clear purpose: that you remember it when you need it.

Because the next time someone at work asks you to do something in your free time without paying you, it may come back to you. En grupo mienten explotan siempre. And maybe, with the chorus in your head, you’ll dare to ask the question. Is that legal?

Songs are good for many things. For dancing, crying, falling in love. And also, now and then, for reminding you that you have rights. I’ve written about songs as a community’s diary, and this is a page of that diary about something very concrete: the extra hour nobody pays you for.

Where to find it

I write my lyrics without AI, and the music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools; I explain it all on my About page. «En grupo mienten explotan siempre» is on «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the first album of the trilogy. You’ll find it in the full discography, with its lyric in my lyrics and its page on the blog.

If one day you find yourself chanting it with your colleagues outside work, let it be with plenty of stretched vowels. And if it falls to you to make the first call, remember the song begins like that, with a small, quiet question. Every demonstration begins with someone daring to ask.

Frequently asked questions

What is «En grupo mienten explotan siempre» about?

About a worker whose company, renamed Grupo Mienten (“Lying Group”), asks him to do a training course in his free time without paying him. He calls the Labour Inspectorate, encourages his colleagues to do the same, and the song ends by celebrating five inspections in one week. The lyrics are at gayfolkplanet.com/letras/en-grupo-mienten-explotan-siempre.

Are the characters real?

No. The company and the names in the lyric are invented. They are satirical characters.

Which album is it on?

«Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the first album of Mike Sain't Louis’s GAYFOLK trilogy.

Who made the song?

The lyrics are by Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid, written without AI. The music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools.