Reified workers have no sense of history. Further, they have no sense that they are reified. Their condition of being cogs in the capitalist machine obediently and voluntarily walking in to work every day to make profit for the boss seems natural. When you suggest that life could be different, the reified worker stares vacantly at you, incapable of comprehending what you are talking about. An interviewer in the movie asked Cristoff, who plays the part of the absolutely powerful and authoritarian director, why Truman had never come close to discovering the true nature of his world.
Workers are actors in a capitalist drama.
As long as they stick to the script that has been written for them since before they were born, the drama continues uninterrupted. The goal is the constant production of profit. Yet unlike other commodities, the commodity labor power is necessarily attached to a living human. The critical factor that allows this drama to continue is that the worker reduces herself to a thing and acts the role of a part in the capitalist machine. Even though she may be tired, bored or horny she continues to work.