Cold Shower 8: Corporate Greed & Unemployed Workers (Part One)

Cold Shower Corporate Greed & Unemployed Workers
(Part One of Two Parts) Vol. I, Article VIII

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I have worked all my life as an assembler for a major manufacturer. My father and my father’s father also worked in this same plant. I am 38 years old with nearly 20 years on the line, but I haven’t worked in nearly a year as a nonunion shop has out sourced my specialty. I have gone back to school (junior college) to develop new skills, but I want to understand what is happening and why. Otherwise, I think I will go crazy. My note may not sound angry, but I am. I feel executives and corporations live on greed, and at my expense. Am I wrong?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Your concern is real. You are not wrong. Greed has become the new apology for corporate enterprise. It justifies work force reductions to ensure the competitive edge instead of focusing on growth of the business. It is also the central rationale for protecting the investments of stockholders. It is not called greed, but “increasing market share,” or “improving the price-earnings ratio,” on in the case of executive compensation, “the price of competent leadership.” No matter how well a company is doing, “it wants more.” No matter how well executives are compensated “they want more.” “More” is the lexicon of a society, which operates on an instinctual philosophy of “health, wealth, happiness, progeny and achievement.” With all the wonders of technology, society is mired in a mechanistic frame of reference.

Such a society is driven by its animal nature. It clings to life by the disparate forces of desire and fear, to attachments by begetting as much as it can, and to always fighting to win. A mechanistic society operates at the level of its basic instincts. Its psychology is behaviorism. Its motivation is eroticism. Its religion is authoritarianism. Power and domination are expressed in the “will to power.” The symbology of this culture is expressed in the currency of money. The powerful are separated from the powerless by this index. Aggression, reactionism and pathos dominate. It is a leaderless society, a society that goes forward with its blinders on and its foot to the metal burning up rubber and going nowhere, in other words, forward inertia.

Were your concerns to stop here, which they don’t, you would be none the wiser of why things are as they are. Your generation has unwittingly played a role in this scenario by your passivity; by your preoccupation with what society told you was your social duty. I sense you went to work conscientiously, were punctual, obedient, disciplined and obsequious. Duty is a social construct. It depends on a predilection to hang on to life with no zeal for life, no need for positive action. Duty, alone, does not help one find one’s way in life. Life is a secondhand experience, and someone else’s agenda.

The first point is to recognize your unconscious contribution to your situation. The second is to realize you have been programmed from birth to see the world in disparate terms – subject/object, cause/effect, rich/poor, good/bad, happy/sad, black/white, desire/fear, and smart/stupid, Christian/Infidel. These terms are simply the obverse side of the same coin. You cannot separate them. But you have been programmed to see them in conflict when they are complementary, to see yourself in terms of relationship to others, not in relationship to yourself. You look for answers outside, not inside.

Given such conditioning, the tendency is to look for scapegoats. Corporations are greedy, executives are greedy, and therefore you are a victim of their greed, right? Wrong! You have simply been awakened from sleepwalking. Pain and struggle have got your attention. The survival alarm has sounded. These unfortunate conditions transpired while you were asleep. Now is not the time to get angry, but to discover the joy of participating in the sorrows of the world as an active, not a reactive person. Now is the time to turn your energies inward to produce insight through sublimation. If you do, you will see your attachment (dependence on the company) has dictated your life, has put you in a cage, and has left you miserable and unfulfilled. Now it is up to you to discover the joy of doing something about it.

It is not right what corporations are doing. Nor is it right for executive income to soar while worker income declines. I will look at this more closely in the next segment. For now, take hold of your conflicting thoughts, allow them to surface and be discussed in full amplitude and range.

Take three pieces of paper. At the top of the first, put Feelings possibly followed by “betrayed,” “humiliated,” “ashamed,” “going to hell in a basket,” and so on. On the second sheet, Change possibly followed by “outsourcing,” “becoming nonunion shop,” “increased competition,” “exploding technology.” On the third sheet, Meaning possibly followed by “plant downsizing,” “executives out for themselves,” “can’t support my family,” “old skills don’t count.” You get the idea. Let it all hang out (on paper), and I mean all.

Once the mind is depleted of its venom, the mind puts itself back together. Hell is where people are stuck. To get unstuck, all the poison causing the inertia must be brought to the surface to see what it is. Opening up this way introduces the person to himself. The mind will come together in a clear frame of reference when self demands (the way a person thinks he ought to be treated) and role demands (the job and responsibilities) are balanced with the ideal self (the way a person thinks he should be) and the real self (the way the person actually is, warts and all).

Copyright (1996) See The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996), available at $12 (shipping & handling included).