What? You're sick? I don't want to hear about it. We buy you tissue from the
supply catalog. Use it!
-Kevin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Erika L Walker-Arnold" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "CF-Community" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 10:21 AM
Subject: Interesting Read - WORKPLACE ABUSE
> >From this website:
> http://home.netcom.com/~workfam1/
>
> I was researching something for somebody and came across this website.
> Lots of stuff people go through these days and it's a shame sometimes.
> Glad I work from home. :/
>
>
>
>
> AS WORKPLACE ABUSE ESCALATES WHY DON'T WE WORKING PEOPLE CONFRONT IT
> COLLECTIVELY?
>
>
> by Judith L. Wyatt. This recent paper is an extension of Judy Wyatt's
> earlier groundbreaking article, Understanding Work Abuse written in
> 1988.
>
>
>
> I am writing this paper because I am scared by what's now happening to
> work in the USA. I am especially frightened because, although we as
> working people are all affected, we are not addressing the work issue
> collectively as we should or could. I want to talk with you about what I
> believe stops us from acting in a collective, collaborative way to stop
> emotionally abusive work.
>
> We are moving into an era where the term "work abuse," that I first
> wrote about in 1988, is almost redundant. My clients in therapy come to
> me more and more desperate about work; even the ones who are not
> personally scapegoated can't find ways to be successful -- or in many
> instances, even survive -- in the impossible situations that they face.
> Whole departments are scapegoated; bosses tell outright lies in job
> interviews in order to trap people into signing on to jobs that are
> abusive.
>
> Yesterday I heard on the news that the Supreme Court made a ruling that
> overturned many of the rights of workers with disabilities. George Bush
> is removing the ergonomic rules from Osha's purview. This is a blatant
> policy trend that mirrors the general deterioration of daily work
> processes. Workplaces in the 21st century are more and more driven by
> irrational top managers scrambling for control, not only of the market,
> but of their own organizations. Driven by profits, they rush from one
> unforeseen emergency to another making demands on employees that are so
> unreasonable and contradictory that the employees find it impossible to
> successfully complete a task--certainly not by deadline.
>
> As corporate behavior becomes more erratic and less predictable, it is
> harder to avoid becoming a target for the irrationality of bosses and
> coworkers who are struggling not to go down themselves. Blaming,
> bullying and scapegoating become the norm for passing the buck of
> failure and saving one's own skin at someone else's expense. Integrity
> is a thing of the past, replaced by open idealization of ruthlessness as
> necessary to make it in the "real" world.
>
> In this grim and heartbreaking environment, who among us can even
> imagine a non-abusive workplace? Who has experienced one?
>
> What's happening here in the U.S. says we have to look beyond our
> individual work systems to the trans-organizational system to understand
> the escalation of work abuse. Looking at the big systems picture, we
> have the trappings of democratic institutions and Constitutional rights,
> yet our so-called free elections are run by two party machines, rapidly
> merging into one political conglomerate that represents a small ruling
> elite. This elite is becoming increasingly overt in manipulating the
> marketplace and the law to serve the interests of one percent of the
> people at the expense of the rest of us. If you doubt the truth of this,
> witness the steady loss of wages, job security, and health care for
> workers in the U.S. since 1970. A specific example: the U.S. is first in
> the world in health care spending but 37th in delivery of services (WHO
> 1998). Top insurance execs are raking off funds that should go to care
> of workers' families. 40 Million Americans go without any health
> insurance whatsoever.
>
> Please read along with me while I address the question, "Why is it so
> hard for each of us to wake up to the reality of this danger---even to
> see it, let alone act to stop it?"
>
> We Feel The Lack of "Community," but Can We See It?
>
> The contradictions we experience at work are a microcosm of a larger
> problem. We can't imagine a non-abusive workplace because we don't live
> in, and can't imagine, a truly supportive community. The isolation we
> feel at work is reenforced by the isolation and fear we feel on the
> streets, on freeways or buses, and in our neighborhoods when we get
> home.
>
> For many of my clients this is true of their family lives as well. We're
> lucky if we have a partner to live with who is more than a task
> companion, more than someone else (outside work) to engage in power
> struggles with. We're lucky to have or make the time to have quality
> interactions with our kids instead of just managing their lives and
> keeping them in line. So many people are on the treadmill of two incomes
> with forced overtime and the trauma of jobs that drain, humiliate and
> infuriate them, they barely have energy to keep a household running, let
> alone relate to partner and kids in ways that are not perfunctory,
> superficial, or frustrated. Everyday I hear of this happening to my
> clients.
>
> If we have little time for immediate family, of course we have none to
> spare on neighbors. Even when we do, how many of us are able to imagine
> forming deep bonds with those who live on our blocks? Can you imagine
> participating in major life decisions with the people next door,
> supporting each other when sick, sharing food, shelter, parenting, able
> to be honest about differences and conflicts, and skilled enough to
> resolve them, and to share from our hearts? Can you imagine that depth
> of trust in others, and in yourself, that you wouldn't hold back out of
> fear or shame? Can you imagine being able to receive this depth of
> caring without feeling inferior and ashamed: can you imagine being
> prepared to give support to others without feeling ripped off and
> burdened?
>
> We are trapped in our miserable isolation because we blame ourselves
> individually for being in the situation--blame ourselves for failing our
> children, for letting friendships go, for not being strong enough to
> work abusive jobs with grueling hours and still have high quality
> personal lives. The increasingly censored media tells us that the
> economy is booming, and bombards us with images of consumerist heaven
> that never pan out for most of us. We don't actually realize and know
> that the person down the street is as pressed and miserable as we are.
> We don't know that the apparently unflappable person in the next cubicle
> has the same nightmares about the boss and the deadlines that we do.
>
> If we insist on seeing fault as located in an individual -- either
> ourselves or the other person -- then hope is only in a better
> individual, us or the person we are with. So maybe we keep looking for
> that person who will solve it all. But then maybe the problem is that
> we're too flawed. Then we become preoccupied with making ourselves
> better -- whether that means more pay, status, changing our physical
> image, measuring up to some ideal. What we say to ourselves over and
> over, or to our partners is: gear up, try harder. Either way we are
> hooked, addicted, to the hype of one of the American media dream images
> just as surely as if it were heroin.
>
> What is wrong with this picture? One mistake is not to see that we're
> locked into a system that dictates these hardships for all of us and
> each of us. Another is not to see that we are individually innocent of
> fault or blame when what's happening to us is a social systems issue. A
> further mistake is being too ashamed to talk to each other, and not to
> break the "norm of silence."
>
> We Workers Are also Consumers Under Siege
>
> The institutions that serve us in place of community that we do not have
> are multi-national or non-profit corporations. They relate to us with
> the same usury and irrationality as when we work for them. The myth that
> "the customer is always right" has becomes a blatantly obvious lie.
>
> We have only to look at delivery of health care in the U.S., and the way
> managed care and insurance companies have turned hospitals into
> factories and doctors into assembly line workers. How much bureaucracy
> do you have to go through to ask your doctor a question? How much time
> does he or she give you during appointments? Have you been treated like
> a criminal by the workers comp system when you were disabled at work,
> and had your claim denied or drag on for months and years?
>
> Just as bosses lie outright to employees, producers of goods and
> services lie outright to customers, who are dupes and pawns at their
> disposal. Products, often made in China, fall apart too easily; promised
> services or conditions are not fulfilled, putting tremendous pressure on
> us as consumers as more and more obstacles are thrown in our paths.
>
> The accelerating irrationality of work systems translates into bank
> tellers, customer service reps and government workers who are less and
> less informed about their product. They make more mistakes with less
> knowledge about how to correct them ---and forced to cover up their
> ignorance and blame the customer.
>
> All of this reinforces us to distrust each other, to be vigilant and on
> the defensive even outside work. Where do we get relief? Unfortunately,
> the norms of most churches and community support organizations--even
> unions--are just as authoritarian and full of contradictions for the
> people who work there. Most of us do not yet have the skills and
> consciousness to risk creating intimate collaborative community cultures
> when we are surrounded by the opposite everywhere else.
>
> Daily we try not to see homeless people on the streets, not to hear
> stories of people treated poorly by the health care system, or assaulted
> by the police. We are too terrified of being in their shoes to look at
> what's happening. Instead, we draw in our resources and protect
> ourselves. We are driven, manipulated and controlled by fear -- which
> keeps us from thinking creatively, being open-hearted, or feeling we
> have much left to offer each other.
>
> Lack of Community Support Forces Us to Adopt an Image
>
> A friend of mine recently joined a group that formed community. The
> people in the group helped each person question their assumptions about
> themselves, about the power in the group, about their personal limits.
> My friend told me of the great relief she felt when she was able to come
> to trust the group to take on the responsibility of her life with her --
> that she no longer felt the burden of having to live up to her own ideal
> to feel good about herself. Her good feelings about herself came from
> the vitality of the group, of sharing problems and solutions, and from
> giving up worrying about her image (how she appeared to others in order
> to be accepted).
>
> After I spoke with her, I had a major realization. I have long known and
> often heard that Americans live in a "narcissistic" culture, addicted to
> image, and that this addiction separates people from real connection to
> themselves and to each other. Now I see clearly that systemic lack of
> community and real connection forces people into an addiction to image.
> I see that people, all of us, are forced to inflate our sense of
> self-importance as a compensation for the lack of meaningful connection
> to others. We are obsessively self-involved with our image because we
> have no one to relate to in a real way, including ourselves.
>
> What is "narcissism" and what do I mean by image? In our book, Work
> Abuse, we talk about managers who create an ideal self, and they won't
> tolerate feedback that challenges that ideal. Their subordinates become
> good at lying to protect bosses from the pain they'd feel if they had to
> face facts that contradicted their self-image -- and the rage and blame
> they'd direct at us if we were the messengers of the real facts.
>
> Why is the manager so caught in this ideal image of himself? He is
> avoiding the emptiness he feels inside, which is the absence of
> self-worth that's not based on performance. He developed this empty
> worthless feeling as a child when he learned from his parents and/or at
> school that his real unique self, his own needs and feelings were
> useless and unacceptable. Only his performance mattered.
>
> We have all met such managers; we have all seen politicians and movie
> stars who fit the same description. They are in love with their image,
> because they have nothing but shame for what's inside. The key to their
> condition is the lack of genuine connection and relatedness when they
> were kids.
>
> Do we all live in a narcissistic culture because of our childhoods? The
> systemic answer is that we are forced into a narcissistic solution to
> the lack of relatedness we feel at every stage of our development
> socially. Even if our caretakers were able to connect with our feelings
> in a supportive way, we lost that support in school, where we were
> taught to perform, to buckle to authority, to learn to be helpless, to
> become acclimatized to the conditions of the workplace waiting for us.
> The lack of community support for us and our parents caused us all to
> feel competitive, isolated, struggling for worth growing up.
>
> Look at the ideology, propaganda, myth about American self-reliance and
> individualism that surrounds us. We are taught to place value on going
> it alone, to deprecate need and vulnerability, to idealize status and
> performance, to romanticize the tragic hero or anti-hero, to worship
> competition, and to denigrate group membership. Groups in the U.S. are
> seen as faceless masses, mobs and mediocrity. Most of my clients feel
> more worthless about being "ordinary" than about being "bad." Everything
> is about excelling and standing out from the group; nothing about
> belonging and sharing.
>
> To turn isolation into something heroic fits the "black is white"
> disinformation code of the currently censored media, to keep us
> believing in and hooked on a phony ideal which we can only succeed at by
> eradicating our hearts completely. Many in my profession of
> psychotherapy feed the myth by tacitly blaming the individual,
> especially the individual's childhood, for problems which are systemic
> and current -- and our social isolation is as much part of everyone's
> mental health problems as our abusive workplaces.
>
> We Have to Breakthrough A Fantasy of Psychotic Proportions
>
> Our current trans-organizational situation is deadly because the
> narcissistic denial of our leaders, top managers, and those of us who
> emulate them and want to be like them. Psychosis is the inability to
> differentiate fantasy from reality. American society now lives a fantasy
> so extreme that it threatens our very lives.
>
> Top managers are in psychotic denial when they allow their companies to
> go under because it is too threatening to their rigidly protected
> self-image of control and their dream of success to hear from
> subordinates what the problems are and address them in time to save the
> situation.
>
> We are all in psychotic denial when due to speed up on the treadmill of
> daily life we don't confront the assaults on our freedoms, and we don't
> admit how bad work abuse is getting. Presently, as things get worse, we
> hang on tighter to whatever we've been doing -- we do it harder, even
> though it isn't working, rather than to stop, look at the situation and
> take action to prevent what's inevitable.
>
> It will take great courage for each of us to come down from the dream
> image of status, power, and the consumerist escape of credit card debt
> to deal with the pain of real life losses and limits we live with. We
> have to face the fear of disintegration, the disappointment,
> disillusionment and emptiness that comes from giving up a drug -- even
> when the drug is the myth of the American dream. The more discrepant the
> dream fantasy becomes from harsh reality, the harder will be our fall.
> If we are willing to take this step together, if we are willing to break
> the silence, we have a chance of beginning the hard work of building
> community and bringing back into our lives a sanity that we have to
> become willing to fight for.
>
>
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