Cold Shower 29: The Worker, Alone & its Portentous Omens

Cold Shower The Worker, Alone & its Portentous Omens
Volume I, Article XXIX

Dr. Fisher, I am a high school drop out nearing my fortieth birthday. Six months ago I was laid off from my $20 per hour public utility job. I am now stocking groceries in a supermarket for $12 per hour. My former employer cut $50 million in costs, eliminating scores of jobs like mine, and management jobs, too. The company turned around and gave its four top managers in excess of $100,000 collectively in raises. I am very angry. But more than that I am terrified at my prospects for the future. With my present income, I cannot support my family. There is no chance for overtime, and the benefits are pathetic. Tell me, how can a company justify throwing its employees to the wolf, and then turn around and publish big raises for some in the newspaper. All our friends have seen this. I ask you, why do guys like me allow companies to insult us like this?

I would like to first compliment you on the measured words you present to obviously a most disturbing set of circumstances. You may have dropped out of school, but you didn’t stop learning. Moreover, your income at the utility suggests you had a responsible position.

That said you have to go back to the 1920s to approach the pervasive callousness of business, industry and government to employee practices. Such practices were a factor in the Great Depression of 1929, which was worldwide, and contributed as well to the rise of fascism and Adolf Hitler in Germany, and ultimately to World War II. The problem of inequity in employee practices is global, but it is always personal as well.

You are experiencing the retreat of government and private enterprise from its post-WWII social contract with workers throughout the Western world. In the United States, President Harry S. Truman passed the Fair Employment Act, which set as its main objective the full employment of Americans, and the G.I. Bill of Rights for veterans who fought in that war.

In every Western industrial nation, labor was not treated as a commodity but with rights ensured by Work Councils. Workers were not subjected to free market whims, but were full partners in the recovery process to regain national stability. Work Councils in Europe and the labor unions in the United States had the ear of their respective governments. As a result, the United States and Europe entered an economic boom.

This plan clearly faltered in the United States with the oil embargo crises of 1973 – 1974, and then again in the 1978 – 1979 period as the country could not sustain the higher level of growth to which it had become accustomed. Something was happening that was ignored.

Productivity dropped from the post-war vigorous 3.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 2 percent. To some experts this remains puzzling; to me it makes perfect sense.

What I refer to in the workplace as the Culture of Comfort (management dependent workers) and Culture of Complacency (codependency bond between employer and employee) took firm hold in the early 1980s as a consequence of exploding costs in raw materials, cradle-to-grave entitlement support for workers, and an increasingly passive working population.

I say “passive” because a workforce trained in submissive obedience was unable to demonstrate the initiative and display the leadership required in a much more competitive world than that enjoyed immediately after World War II. Work had changed from brawn to brains, from blue to white collar, from a mechanistic to an electronic model, with very different requirements of workers at the level of consequences. Decision-making shifted from ivory towers to the jobs at hand. Delays and wrong decisions could and did prove devastating. Meanwhile, for all intent and purposes, management’s approach to work was as if lock-stepped in 1945 nostalgia. Work became belaboring processes rather than results-oriented as corpocracy took hold and became known as “the American disease”:

(1) Management is insensitive to employees as persons.
(2) Company politics dominate at the expense of productivity.
(3) Secrecy is the measure of communication.
(4) Principle product is paperwork.
(5) Endless meetings are a way a way of life.
(6) An internal focus is maintained as potential markets are ignored.
(7) Short-term tactics are preferred to long-term strategies.
(8) Initiative is not encouraged.
(9) Ivory towers make a clear distinction between managers and workers.
(10)A covert hostility to innovation is maintained while an overt posture is assumed.

Increasingly, as market share disappeared and American leadership dwindled in the world, the focus was on monetary policy leaving workers outside the equation. A hostile environment was created, even a belligerent one. The government looked for enemies as scapegoats to fiscal malfeasance, while in the private sector employers attempted to retreat from their post-WWII worker entitlements.

Workers are not informed on either front of the problem or asked to participate in possible solutions. Already in a programmed passive posture, they retreat further into their shell by being 50 percent (at least) less effective on the job, generating less revenue, compromising the prowess of American companies in the competitive world economy, while being preoccupied with what they can get and how little they can give.

Paradoxically, workers are treated as if a non-factor in economic instability as the focus is on trade, technology and immigration. While solutions are directed at protectionism, workers remain outside the equation as if spectators in someone else’s sport.

It would seem that the most direct means for solving company financial problems would be to look at the compensation policies from the top to the bottom of the organization with workers and managers joint partners in the solution. The days for keeping workers outside the policy making process are over. If workers do not buy into the new policy, it will fail no matter how equitable it may be; if workers buy into the new policy, it will succeed no matter how flawed it might be.

Work has changed. Workers have changed. The workplace has not changed, except cosmetically. That is the problem.

Management has not found the key to making white-collar professional workers productive. The measuring methods of blue-collar workers do not fit either the work or the workers. Trust is the key on the part of management, and will is the key on the part of professionals. The charade of performance appraisal is not only futile but an insult as it is now constructed.

Management invariably focuses on financial indices, and then workers and productivity after the fact. This is placing the cart in front of the horse. The United States promoted individualism from its violent beginning. It sponsors individualism in its literature, history, and intellectual life. Creativity comes out of individualism. But to attempt to realize both conformity and creativity is to neutralize the latter with the former, generating the workforce that we have today.

Policies are necessary but not to impede individualism but to help workers cope with the climatic change of work, where they are needed to demonstrate more initiative, more innovation, and more passionate involvement in what they do. Otherwise, workers will continue to feel outside the equation and the victims of circumstances, justifying any passive behaviors that they can conceive of imagining.

Nothing happens in the world until workers do something. Drive workers out of the equation of work, strip them of their humanity, and they will resort to their survival instincts. The German Weimar government dismissed mounting dissatisfaction during the depression years of the 1930s. This opened the door to fringe political movements, giving birth to The Third Reich and the Nazi Regime. This led to WWII. When workers have nothing to lose, they are ready to lose everything for a cause, which will promise them anything.

So, my advice to you is to know your management and protest frequently and politely while doing the best job that you can. The organization is a human group and can be changed but only by one man at a time.

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Copyright (1996) See Dr. Fisher’s Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995), or Corporate Sin: Leaderless leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000).