LISTEN PEOPLE! YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! CONTRACT WORKERS ANONYMOUS!

LISTEN PEOPLE!

YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!

CONTRACT WORKERS ANONYMOUS!

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

Copyright March 11, 2014

 

There is something about investing four to six years in post high school education at some college or university, leaving formal matriculation with sheepskin in hand, and student loans that will haunt you for many years to come to put the mind in a safe place where no thinking is allowed, at least thinking that disturbs the tranquility of your spirit, at least for the moment.

People!  It isn’t like it was five years ago, ten years ago, or beyond.  Nothing is as it was; nothing is as it seems, or how we would like it to be.  Millennials get it, but I doubt most professionals do.

The ugly head of capitalism no longer simply causes high school dropouts to cower.  It moves well up the food chain to do the same to those who think, degree in hand, that they are ordained to experience that richer diet; that they belong; that they are exceptional; that the warm sun of good fortune was meant to shine on them no matter how stormy the weather forecasts.  Optimism is such a fatal disease.

These college graduates with the ink barely dry on their diplomas have been too busy to pay attention to what has happened to their blue collar fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, and family friends; too busy to see Shylock taking a pound of flesh from them, and of course the pound taken controls their hearts and therefore their passions and livelihood.

Something is wrong with this picture, and it has been wrong for a long, long time.  Ordinary people, what Kierkegaard called “common man,” have been asleep at the switch praying things would get better of their own accord; that they had to do nothing but believe, be patient, trust the system, and the economic "Ship of State" would get back on an even keel, and everything would be milk and honey again.  The audacity of hope became surrogate for bread on the table. 

People escaped into virtual reality games, as if words and pictures and pixels could provide biological nutrition.  Entertainments became substitutes for life, for love, for experience, for living for the future.

Few have noted what has been happening, fewer still have taken action. 

Yesterday, a star NFL football player, 26, quit the game, saying the game he learned to play and love since a little boy had changed into a sideshow, a soap opera, where athletes had to be on all the time as if on stage, had to satisfy the voracious appetite of fans for interviews, comments, and cavalier invasion into their private lives, as if the fans owned them, and they were slaves to fans’ demands. 

Indeed, fans could tweet and tweet and tweet some more to criticize these NFL players’ every act and excoriate them at well, and they were expected to take it with a smile.  Fans wanted them to behave, this young man believes, as if they were pixels in those virtual reality football games and therefore could be manipulated at will.  In fact, the virtual reality of the NFL is now more popular than cleats on the turf.

This is the affluent end of the chain of enslavement where players of the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and NASCAR have to pay in humiliation and personal invasion for earning the big dollars, as these fans believe they share ownership of them with the team owners, which to my mind is the newest form of slavery.

The irony is that we have made billionaires of some of the millennials who have had the foresight to take advantage of this inclination.  We see this in the billions of Facebook aficionados, and other social networking configurations. 

Those proclaiming the humanity of this new technology have somehow misplaced the idea that the happiest people are not available for public consumption. 

There is no reason to fault Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk.  People like him study trends and appetites and exploit them.  Seventy years ago Hugh Hefner did that with his psychosexual Playboy fantasy, and left his indelible scar on society ever since.

It is our weaknesses, not our strengths that lead to these colossal successes, successes that ultimately define generations.

This brings me back to my original premise, the surreal nature of employment today, the reality of which is not too far different in its impact than that experienced by working stiffs in factories of fifty, sixty or seventy years ago, when ordinary working men and women were part of a prideful and proud working middle class, a force so energetic, nimble and perspicacious that it won World War Two, when the nation was sound asleep as Pearl Harbor was being bombed by the Imperial Navy and Air Force of Japan on December 7, 1941, a date that I doubt many under the age of fifty have any idea of its significance.  

They tell me that as many as 50 percent of our college graduates since 2000 are working in jobs below their skill level, working part time, working as contractors, not working in their fields if working at all. 

The world of full-time employment, lifetime employment, generous benefit packages, including opportunities for additional educational training at the company’s expense are becoming increasingly rare and disappearing fast.

This has become the fate of a work force programmed in comfort and complacency.  Quietly and unobtrusively, comfort and complacency have become an industrial and commercial norms, justifying companies to outsource work to well-trained people, people desperate to work, people who have been looking for work for months if not years, people who will accept a paycheck without benefits or guarantees because they believe they have no choice.

Years ago, I wrote in one of my books (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991) about the 20, 40, 60 unwritten rule for this one company. 

Human resources was to examine closely the employment records of people who had been twenty years with the company, were over forty-years-of-age and were making $60,000 or more, for possible furloughing, made redundant or fired based upon suspect work records.  Human resources was then to look for replacements with people who were young, qualified to do the same work, and could be paid at the entry level, or ideally, outsourced as contract workers without insurance, vacation, or other benefits. 

Exposure of this practice got the CEO fired, resulted in a sharp decline in business with the company no longer an industrial leader.  These many years later the company is still in business, but has never regained its former status.

Who would have thought that such a policy would become common as it has today, only the salary level for HR review has usually been bumped up to $120,000? 

The “New Millennials,” people in their early twenties, people with at least some college to one college degree, professionals, as I call them, are cynical as a group, distrustful of the system, distrustful of capitalism, and flying with a whole new set of values that I suspect doesn’t jive too well with their grandparents. 

Millennials are not religious, not patriotic, and not optimistic that things are going to get much better.  They are not even too concerned about climate change or global warming, or whatever is the current attack theme of environmentalists.  The only thing they seem positive about as a group is gay rights.

It would be encouraging to me if they were equally passionate about worker rights, and worker authority, and workers as stirrers of the economic drink.  But alas, it appears that millennials are willing to take it on the chin the same as blue-collar workers were, and professionals are in the persons of their parents and older brothers and sisters.  This is not encouraging.

Millennials are cynical about the whole idea of work, something that has made America what it is.  Over my long lifetime, coming from the working class, work has been the symphony that we all shared together, orchestrated as farmers, laborers, craftsmen, teachers, coaches or knowledge workers.  

We assumed things would continue as they were.  That is our fault as it has become our fault line.  We didn’t pay attention to the collapse of the economic infrastructure (re: 2008 Wall Street "meltdown"), or do anything about it when it occurred if it didn't touch us directly. 

We ignored the skyrocketing incomes of CEOs.  We didn’t take seriously that management, a class that was invented in the twentieth century as if it had always existed took most of the coin and credit for what we did. 

To be fair, management took the blame for what we didn’t do because managers had the mistaken idea that they were owners and not employees like the rest of us.  They took that hubris to the bank, and we allowed it to be so.  We also allowed management to play these 20-40-60 games with our lives, as if they had the right. 

We have seen management’s obsession with keeping the peace with stakeholders and stockholders, putting the best face on its watch, many times forgetting the company’s mission, which too often found such managed companies vulnerable to hostile takeovers, where arbitrageurs and merger and acquisition high flyers made billions playing funny with our jobs and our money, while we in the trenches lost our jobs, and watched our communities dry up, sometimes resembling ghost towns in the aftermath.

Millennials don’t use the concept of the “personhood” as opposed to the common good to explain themselves.  Indeed, they are not interested in explaining themselves at all.  These are just words to them.  They know they are on their own, which is wise in one sense, but at the expense of their spiritual counterbalancing good will.  They are not angry.  They don’t even plan to get even. 

Millennials simply know they are likely to be contract workers all their lives if they don’t create their own little village.  They are our future and they don’t plan to look back or apologize for only looking ahead.  Older professionals would do well to study them.  Older professionals have been coasting, and now coasting is nothing but staying in place, or falling into a sinkhole.