A READER COMMENTS
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© October 16, 2014
A READER WRITES:
In your excerpt on “mature adult workers” you did not touch
on the fact that the current "deal" is to get rid of workers reaching
that terminal age of "62" when they root out more expensive workers
with threats, trying to herd them into agreeing to severance plans that only
serve the company.
This has been rampant in hospitals, drug companies, and many
more businesses and establishments...blindsiding them, then dispatching them.
I'll bet you can read between the lines. Why is this so important to the powers that be
to pull the plug on people when they are so close to retirement???
Is this much different than companies forcing employees out
due to reorganization or redundancy exercises?
I suppose companies implement such plans to start new hires
at lower wages. Who is there to
"trust"?
No longer is it a world where you put in your 25 or 30 years
and retire. Now you are just out on your
rear. This is common knowledge, but I
suspect there is some research and statistics on this.
Be well, and keep up the missives
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your interesting comments. T
This segment that generated your comments is from THE
WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN and relates to "mature adult
worker," a worker, I might add, who is practically nonexistent, mainly
because he is programmed to have other people (companies) solve his problems,
and that is not going to happen anymore.
The book is basically about workers, mainly professional
workers, imploring them "to take charge” of their work, and by doing so,
take charge of their lives.
Instead, due to their conditioning, they are more likely to
wail about unfairness issues against the company and its management, wondering
why these people aren’t doing “the right thing.” The reason is quite apparent, because they don’t
have to. It is not how the capitalistic
system is set up or how it works. Workers
are disposable when management through ignorance, incompetence or malfeasance
results in the company not making a profit and going belly up. Management protects its own quite
egregiously. So, it has been for more than one hundred
years.
What you allude to as going on in the healthcare and
pharmaceutical industry, "retiring" people before they reach
retirement age or the level of maximum social security benefits, has been going
on for years.
In one of my books (WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS) I write about the
CEO of K-Mart having a 20-40-60 plan.
This secret policy referred to employees with 20 years of service,
making $40,000 or more, and over 60-years-of-age calling for a review of their
status to see if they could quietly be removed from employment with K-Mart.
After many years of tolerating this policy Mercer David
Grayson, et al led a class action suit against K-Mart, which exposed the whole
practice. The court favored the
plaintiffs, but K-Mart counter suited and so this brouhaha has been going on
for nigh twenty years (see details on google).
Making $40,000 then was the equivalent of earning $60,000 or
more now due to inflation.
No, it is not right, but my book is not about what is right
or wrong, but rather an attempt to engage workers to assuming ownership of what
they do. But, alas, they seldom show
such inclination in my experience. When
they do, it can bring about monumental results.
Instead, they resort to homicide or sabotage, or as I say in other
books, resort to the six silent killers that cost corporations billions of
dollars (see Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, and Corporate
Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers).
That said once in a while we have breakthrough, which always
starts with an individual.
Take Curtis Charles “Curt” Flood, the outstanding St. Louis
Cardinal outfielder of Major League Baseball.
In 1969, he was part of a multiple player swap with another major league
team, and he refused to go.
Instead of honoring the player swap, he contacted his attorney,
then the Director of the Players Association, Marvin Miller, and sued baseball
for violating his collective bargaining rights, which incidentally, at the time
were non-existent.
A single baseball player took on the $multi-billion baseball
corporation, and won the right to negotiate his own contract, no longer was he to
be chattel of a major league owner. It
threw shock waves through professional sport.
What’s more, he won his case!
Suddenly, all professional athletes could negotiate competitive
contracts with baseball owners, indeed, with owners in any professional
sport. It spawn a new profession,
professional agents for athletes, and led to athletes becoming
mega-millionaires.
However, it doomed Curt Flood's career. He died at the age of 59, and had a hard life
for "going against the grain."
Forty-five years later, professional athletes have close to
parity while most corporate workers don't.
Corporate society controls the game. In a modest way, I have been fighting that reality
for forty plus years with many books (Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone,
Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, and Who Put You in the
Cage?}, along with nearly one thousand articles.
Nothing will change professional workers’ status until
workers like Curtis Charles Flood, say, "Hell, no, I won't go!" And with that action, change the calculus.
In THE WORKER, ALONE, I come down hard on professional workers
as well as managers, as these workers represent up to 90 percent of the
workforce.
At the turn of the last century (1900), when tool and die
makers built automobiles, and there was not yet a General Motors, workers did
everything: they planned the work, worked the plan, purchased supplies, set up
their own machines, and maintained them, and worked to produce a profitable
product. They had control! The owner of the shop worked right beside
them. It was similar to the
pre-industrial guild.
Corporations were established and gained momentum during
WWI, developing a new class of workers called "managers," who became
a force in WWII as industrial production of war machines won that war.
By then owners had retired from the workplace, concentrating
on selling stock to finance their enterprises with managers running the
day-to-day operation.
From 1945 through 1980, the corporation became top heavy
with managers with as many as twelve levels of management in a hierarchical
pyramid, that was, until Japan, Inc. started to eat the corporate lunch steel,
automobiles, appliances, glass, and rubber products.
This development show American industry going from
controlling 60 percent of the world manufacturing market after WWII to 30
percent or less today.
Once owners were no longer on the premises, managers became surrogates
owners, although only employees, themselves.
They secured their status by appointing CEO friendly Boards of Directors,
and came to act as if they were, indeed, the owners. The minute that mindset set in, it was
impossible to move management to engage in reality.
Workers, who during the guild days acted like owners, now
acted like renters. The adversary
relationship between labor and management became an undeclared war between
workers and managers during the 20th century, and has spilled over
into the 21st century. This
could have been avoided, but wasn’t.
At the end of WWII (1945), the American workforce was 90
percent blue-collar with labor unions primed to confront corporate management
with demands for wage and fringe benefit concessions for workers. Unfortunately, for these concessions came
with a terrible price. Workers surrendered
control of what they did.
Workers have been powerless ever since, despite the fact
that the organization has radically changed from 90 percent blue-collar to
nearly 90 percent white collar or professional with blue-collar only a little
north of 10 percent.
No longer in control, workers sued for more and more wage
and benefit concessions unable or unwilling to sue for more control of work
without making wage and benefit concessions.
The irony here is that labor unions kept suing for more and
more wage and benefit or entitlement programs suing themselves as an entity right
out of relevance, and suing workers right out of their jobs. Today, the automotive industry, which led
this charge, is practically on life support from the federal government.
This has led to a mass corporate exodus of many companies to
foreign countries for survival.
Or if workers still had a job, because they weren’t
respected or included in the decision-making, they became reactive to management’s
demands as if dependent 12-year-old children in 50-year-old bodies, and then they
gravitated from this status to becoming counter dependent on the company for
their total well being as if the company owed them a living.
I have written most
workers are suspended in terminal adolescence in learned helplessness whatever
the color of their collar, blue or white.
That dependent mentality survives to this day, although the
corporation as an entity is becoming anachronistic and managers increasingly atavistic.
I worked for three major corporations, consulted for several
others, but never bought into the corporate culture. Nor did I ever join the corporate club albeit
reaching executive status. The
corporation and its culture has been my laboratory, fodder for my books, and leading
to this writing career.
You didn't ask for this but this gives you a flavor of my
mind on the subject.
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