MAD AS HELL! A PROFESSIONAL REACTS, OR HOW THE ELECTRONIC SWEATSHOP IS TRANSFORMING THE WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE INTO THE FACTORY OF THE PAST

MAD AS HELL!  A PROFESSIONAL REACTS

OR

HOW THE ELECTRONIC SWEATSHOP IS TRANSFORMING THE WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE INTO THE FACTORY OF THE PAST

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 17, 2014

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher, in your experience has the world always been this messed up?  I am beside myself with anxiety, frustrated to the point I don’t know who to trust.  Do people who lie get ahead, and those that don’t stay behind?

Have resumes always read like science fiction?  I say that because I feel I am competing with Superman like characters who conceive convincing fiction when they submit their credentials.  Has recruiting always been so impersonal.  I say that because human resources recruiters feel no necessity to meet you.  They prefer you send on line your fiction and the best creative writers get follow up on-line interviews. 

It feels as if your resume or curriculum vitae, whatever you want to call it, falls into a Stephen Hawkins black hole with 100,000 others never to be seen again.  Sure, some get hired.  By accident or design, by cunning or knowing the game, they create the key word or words that activates the science fiction reading filtering machine, and “Voila!”  They are given an interview. 

It doesn’t stop there.  They have the temerity to be imposters to the end, walking in for the interview with their Magna Carter made-up credentials, careful to highlight what could be easily confirmed, and to bury the rest in the nebulous beyond the interviewer’s interest in verifying.  I know.  I have seen this film in action. 

Do I have to play the game, betray my values in order to be successful in this life?  Should I join the cue of dissembling with made up achievements?  I worked in Europe, and speak Spanish and Italian fluently, and some French, and could offer a confection of European achievements, but they’d be totally bogus.  I could also inflate my salary history – including my European experience – but what’s the point? 

I have a solid work experience, some college, but experience that many MBAs don’t have.  I’m in my thirties, and should be in the best working years of my life, and I’m treated like an interchangeable part that could be discarded without as much as a fairly well. 

If I sound jaded, it is because no one hiring seems to give too hoots about what you can do.  All the interviewer wants is to read your fiction on paper and hear the right words coming out of your mouth that resonate, regardless how phony. 

What kind of an illusion are we living in?  Has it been reduced to “catch me if you can” type of world, where nothing is authentic and everyone successful feels no shame in sustaining the fiction?

I know, Dr. Fisher, I am ranting, but I needed to talk to someone, and writing this has helped if you can believe that.  I am normally a happy guy, and people enjoy my company, but I’ve gotten sour of late, and they don’t like it and neither do I. 

You seem to understand people like me.  I find your books and missives consoling, but to be candid, they don’t solve my problem. 

This may sound self-serving, but I feel the world rewards the wrong people, and it has resulted in a dumbing down of all of us.  The reason I say this is because I have been used as a reference by people I know for things they have not done, listing companies they have worked for that do not exist.  When they do state real experience, it is exaggerated just enough to be a lie, but not enough to be detected, so they move ahead, and it really ticks me off.

What is my status you might wonder?  I was made redundant when my employer had to pay a multi-billion dollar penalty for fraudulent practices.  The company didn’t lose a beat, but it put me on the street, writing this.  Any suggestions?

 

 

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It will be no consolation to you but our national workforce of nearly 160 million finds some 80 million underemployed, unemployed, or like you suffering suffocating frustration looking to be reemployed.

While the Information Age industry celebrates its achievements, the stark reality is that 2014 resembles the sweatshops or factories of the past.

The 1930s was the era of the union movement when ordinary working men and women were treated by American industry as interchangeable parts.  It was interesting that you see yourself in such terms.

Nor do I expect it will help to point out that our capitalistic society has always been more interested in what is legal as opposed to what is ethical.  Profits have always come before people, and this is not likely to change anytime soon. 

As to when people attempt to finesse the system by cheating, and believe they are getting away with something, they end up cheating themselves.  When they play “quick and dirty” with the system, it is obvious that they forget the system is “us,” collectively, and is not an inanimate construct, but quite real in its consequences.  We, as a society, rise or fall by the level of our authenticity.

That said we are on the precipice of another iteration of the automated culture, the culture workers feared 80 years ago and flocked to unions.  Computers are transforming the workplace, be it an office or production facility, a MacDonald’s or a Wal-Mart, a real estate office or financial or brokerage house, an amazon compound or a google complex into a factorum that resembles in all the essential ways the factory of the past. 

Barbara Garson writes in “The Electronic Sweatshop” (1988) that the MacDonald’s system turns inexperienced teenagers into short-order cooks; new college graduates on Wall Street with access to expert systems into financial whizzes, whizzes who can be instantly replaced by newer college graduates.  After two, four, six or more years of college, professionals are being turned into clerks.  We have even automated social workers, and as you have found out, a machine puts you on hold or says it will see you now. 

What I have alluded to in my writing, as you know, is that we are automating the idea of the boss.  Work, the quality and efficacy of it can be tracked electronically with no need for a supervisor much less a manager.  It has made management anachronistic and bosses atavistic.  Garson, in 1988, saw the future of monogamy in the office.  Well, the future is here!  Moreover, electronic surveillance, which was just gearing up thirty years ago is ubiquitous today, and has become accepted as normalcy as evasive as it is.

Professionals have watched this happen, and without protest, without the courage and sacrifice that the poorly educated and exploited workers of the 1930s endured, taking on the Robber Barons and captains of industry for a living wage, reasonable working conditions, job security and benefits including a retirement plan consistent with their contribution to the enterprise.

That has all been essentially scuttled in 2014 with a whole new lexicon to describe work such as outsourcing, hiring temps, contracting professionals for specific periods without benefits or any guarantees, resulting in such workers being unemployed or underemployed more than employed.  My sense is that this has been your plight. 

You are a brain worker and caught in the web of the sweatshop as if it is 1930 and not the 21^st century.  You are mad as hell, but so were three metadata leakers, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning who upset the secret world of spying.  To various degrees they rose out of the trenches in modest careers to shock the system.  Working in the electronic trenches, they became David exposing and downing Goliath of this factory world.  They are called “traitors,” but as professor David Cole of Georgetown University puts it,

While we members of the public have learned from each of these men about what our government has done behind closed doors in our name, they have taken it upon themselves to reveal hundreds of thousands of secret documents, only some of which may have been justifiably disclosed.  No one elected them to act as our conscience.  But if they didn’t so act, who would?

What am I advocating you do?  Certainly not as these young men have done.  But as I suggest in “The Worker, Alone” (2014), this is reality:

You must consider yourself an independent contractor.

To get ahead of the game, you must enhance your value added skills to represent yourself as brains for hire.

You have no choice but to accept that you are your own company, which means being first and foremost loyal to yourself and your self-interest.  That means treating whatever job you have as that of a sales person dealing with a customer, a customer who can summarily fire you without cause because he can.

The inflated value of formal education is deflating rapidly, whereas the honing of experience in a specific endeavor only increases value exponentially.  In our pragmatic society, when someone has what we need and want to complete our own success, we are willing to pay for it.  That means pricing yourself fairly on the job, but never underpricing or undervaluing your worth.

We are a sweatshop society because we have been overwhelmed with the rush of technology and underwhelmed with value of people as persons.  With all the wonders of this Information Age, our universities and all other institutions, including government, operate with a factory mentality. 

We have not escaped our past, or found a way to deal with what we don’t know.   You cannot change society, but you can change yourself. 

You were a happy person, be the happy person that you are.  That is part of your bankable worth.

Don’t apologize for being “mad as hell,” simply use it to breakthrough your angst.

I wish you well in that regard,

Dr. Fisher