Tag Archives: employment

Fighting the Battle, Losing the War

Posted on by under Career, New Economy

The international bestselling Italian author Umberto Eco once addressed this question: why is it that Superman, the most powerful being on the planet, spent his time combating petty criminals?

His answer was that Superman exists not to change the structures of a society based on representative democracy and capitalism. Rather, he serves as a morality tale for the masses who must live their daily lives within those fixed structures. He is an example to be emulated but not a champion for changing the way our world is organized.

Thus, Superman uses his phenomenal superhero powers in what is essentially hand to hand combat in the trenches, rather than trying to stop the war.

In the same vein, it seems to me that a majority of employment law and labor management has been built from and centered around what could be characterized as petty disputes between employee and immediate supervisor. In other words, complaints and conflicts and lawsuits over workplace issues deal most of the time with the friction that occurs between a manager and the people being managed.

But isn’t the real villain bigger than that? Isn’t it the work that people are being asked to do, and the company employment policies, and the income disparity between managers and workers? Isn’t it capitalism itself?

In my career, I have been both a middle manager and a non-management employee. I’ve seen things from both sides and I can say that both sides are constrained by the systems within which they must operate. Sometimes the strain between an employee and their manager is just a manifestation of a manager having to implement poorly considered policies, or an employee acting out due to problems at home.

I can envision a way where the petty interpersonal frictions would be eased with the application of broad systemic reforms. Things like better access to mental health care. Or single payor health care that is independent of one’s employment. Or less systemic racism. Or universal basic income.

If successful, I would expect that the number of little bickering disputes would decline, along with a decline in the number of lost work hours, lost productivity, and people holding bitterness and grudges against each other. Instead of litigants duking it out in a court of law day after day, year after year, time and effort could be put toward making the world a better place for everyone.

For all our feelings of having made progress and living in an age of advanced development, we are still very much a reactionary species, where we fight the next skirmish and never seem to spend too much time wondering why the conflicts never end.

Just a Paycheck

Posted on by under Accepting, Career, Purpose

A comeback that is 25 years in the making can hardly be considered “snappy” but here it goes.

The first three years after I graduated from college, I spent in food service. And one day, on a day off, I was at a function with my now wife and some of her co-workers. I was sharing a conversation I’d recently had with one of the cooks at the restaurant I was working for at the time. I’d asked if he cooked much at home and he told me that most days he just makes a sandwich and has a beer.

One of my wife’s co-workers, who had some experience in running a restaurant, said something along the lines of “Well, he most not be a real cook, because the real cooks I’ve worked with continue to create in their kitchen at home.”

At the time, I didn’t know what to say. She was older, presumably more experienced, and I was not one to argue.

But in the intervening years, I have learned that, for many people, a job is…

Just.

A.

Paycheck.

It would be wonderful if we all could be gainfully employed in an occupation that we find ourselves uniquely suited for, that gives us companionship with colleagues and the satisfaction every day of a job well done.

But not every job is the perfect job, and not everyone has the privilege in their life of finding something that even resembles perfect. The laws of supply and demand remove many of our choices to somewhere beyond our grasp.

In the meantime, the bills have to be paid and there are mouths to feed. There is trash to be collected and sewers that need to be unclogged. There is vomit that needs to be cleaned up, roadkill that needs to be moved out of the road, asses that need wiping.

As I’ve said before, there are some people of a certain political point of view who say that everyone should be grateful simply to be employed. And I will allow that being employed has merits in an of itself. But the gratefulness is a stretch when the best you can say about your job is that it is just a paycheck.

So yes, there are certainly some “real cooks” out there who are passionate about preparing food. And then there are others (probably many others) for whom the work at the stove and the plating of the food is just a means to an end. When they clock out, they’d rather not think about it until the next shift.

And it would be best not to confuse one for the other.

There’s a fine line between “work[ing] like a soul inspired until the battle of the day is won” and “hanging on in quiet desperation.” Most of us take comfort believing that there are working heroes, who pour their soul into their occupation day in and day out (lots of TV shows about that). But if you peel back the curtain a bit, the reality is far more bland and nuanced, and we should neither think better of ourselves for it nor judge others (or ourselves) more harshly.

There. A not-so-snappy comeback.

Take This Job and Find a Better Way

Posted on by under Career, Connection, Purpose

About 15 years ago, I was in Reno on a business trip with a colleague. While we were waiting to meet with a client, we ate lunch in a hotel restaurant and had a brief conversation about the nature and value of work.

As we ate, a thin woman who may have been in her late 50s wandered through the dining area and repeatedly announced “Keno” in a high-pitched voice. She was wearing a uniform of some sort that identified her has an employee of the establishment. She gave off a vibe of tedium, which seems understandable if all she did for eight hours a day was solicit wagers on the Keno games inside a windowless hotel casino. (In case you’ve never been to Nevada, pretty much all hotels are casinos.)

Photo: John Sanphillippo

My colleague and I watched her come and go. After a while, my colleague looked at me and said, “Is that the kind of job that makes someone grateful to be employed?”

“No,” I said with a sad chuckle. “She actually seems rather pathetic.”

Employed, but pathetic.

Up until recently, our current president was very proud of the number of people employed in the United States. Whether these statistics portray an accurate picture or not, there was a lot of verve in the economy before the coronavirus brought things to a screeching halt.

Since March, a lot of people have lost their jobs. Some of those job losses will be temporary, but many will likely be permanent. And it is worth asking whether those were jobs really worth having to start with. Perhaps there is something more than the job/no job binary.

There are many in this country who have a point of view that goes something like this:

  • any employment is better than no employment
  • having no job is “bad,” as in “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”
  • all jobs are of equal quality when viewed in the employment/no employment dichotomy
  • any job will be a step up the ladder of progress.

This is a very simplistic perspective that ignores many realities of human interaction. Among them are the fact that employers take illegal (and sometimes immoral) advantage of their employees all the time, day in and day out. One has only to look at the number of lawsuits that employees or former employees have filed against companies to get a sense of the magnitude of the situation.

This also ignores the plight of the working poor, who are employed and yet still unable to afford basic necessities such as decent housing, food, and health care, and have no guarantee that things will improve. Also, freelancers, contract workers, and those stuck in the so-called gig economy have little reason to feel that they’re being paid fair compensation for their efforts.

The job vs. no job view of employment paints a flat picture. It disregards the idea that employment–serving a valued role in society–can be key to one’s sense of self-worth. Once, all employment, with the possible exception of royalty, served a purpose. Today, there are far too many “bullshit jobs.” Perhaps we will actually be better off if many of these just go away, to be replaced by truer, more worthwhile vocations.

This may sound unsympathetic, but I would question how much people really enjoy selling shit on Ebay day in and day out, or taking money from drivers while sitting all day in toll booths, or calling out the next round of Keno betting in a forgettable lunch cafe in Reno. I think there is a better way, and I think we can take some time during this moment in our history allow ourselves to consider the possibilities.

There is a perhaps unsolvable tension between the economic need of having the means to fulfill one’s basic needs and the psychological need for fulfillment and understanding. We’ve created a society where the two are often mutually exclusive. Perhaps we could do better.