Yesterday I was hit by a friend telling me about what's
going on at their place of employment. The friend
works for a not-for-profit organization, in a field
where a graduate degree is a job requirement. I.e.,
I'm talking about "professionals" in an area of the
work world that is devoted to helping persons ("human
services", etc.).
This friend described how the working conditions are
becoming ever more callous, how the workers (these
people with the graduate degrees...) are having
benefits taken away from them, etc. Apparently
some of my friend's co-workers are thinking about
starting a union, which places my
friend in a difficult position, since: (1) my friend
is committed to building a long-term career in the
organization, along a possible "management"
(position of responsibility) track,
and (2) in this particular case, it looks like the
"unionizing" effort will fail, in part because it is
the naive emotional reaction of a few persons who
have little idea what these kinds of things really are.
As my friend says: the organization will simply lay off
the complainers, as part of the austerity measures
they need to implement to stay in business at all.
But still, my friend faces the personal anguish of
losing his/her friends by not joining the common cause
(I've heard the word "scab" even if my friend hasn't)....
This makes me very [helplessly] angry,
especially since management
apparently does not even have the hypocritical savvy
to be apologetic about how they are "clamping down"
on the workers. Of course, maybe that's part of why
the situation is so offensive to these "workers" who
are (mostly) the social peers of their management:
management doesn't even have to put up a front of
empathy in today's "global marketplace" come home.
I've never personally experienced such a situation. Although
I have always worked in small positions in big corporations,
(e.g.) as a "systems programmer", I usually had a job where my
role was unique, and, even though, in the long run
everybody is dispensible, in the day to day operations of the
enterprise, I was often a critical (in both senses!)
factor. Once I was even in a really marketing-critical role
in a really big corporation, and I worked the situation for
all it was worth to my employer (in exchange, of course,
for bringing in the required work ahead of schedule and
better than spec). Thus I could get
away with saying to the vice-president
of a large bank where I was working, when the bank bought
an IBM-clone computer back in the 70s, and the vice-president
was asking the clone salesman whether his computer could
run all the bank's work correctly:
"The question isn't whether their computer will run
correctly. They couldn't sell them if they didn't.
The question is whether our work will run correctly
on anything."
In my [largely lack of...] career advance, I've tried to
keep my debt load down, and my freedom of movement up. All
things considered, I've been pretty lucky (Galileo wasn't...).
So I think about my friend (whose friends' SES etc. would
be the envy of most "real" workers...), and I really feel
badly that here are persons who should, even by some of our
society's own criteria (formal education, etc.), be part of the
solution, instead being part of the (to quote from today's,
Sat 21 Mar 98) New York Times article about jobs in Germany:)
"growth without jobs", and management's endless whining
that "competition gives us no choice".
I don't know. It does indeed seem to me that we are
in an age of micro-economic contraction [devolution]
coupled with macro-economic
explosion (I use these technical economic terms for
what they sound like to one untrained in the "field").
My recommendation to my friend's organization (they
haven't asked, and I certainly won't volunteer...) would
be for the CEO to make a statement something like:
OK. If it's really true that money is so
tight that we need to make monetary cutabacks
(reduced vactation allowances, etc.), let's see
if we can still work out something that will be
humanly constructive for all of us. First,
we your management agree to be the first to take the
biggest pay cuts, even though that still leaves us earning
more than you. Second, we do sincerely apologize,
and beg your forgiveness for what we feel we have no
choice to do in the present inhuman economic regime.
Yes, things are worse than they were 20 years ago.
But we your management really are too weak to do
anything more than try to save as many of our and
your jobs as we can and to do the best we can for
our customers (we're having trouble doing that, too,
for the same economic reasons we can't pay you
as you deserve!).
What we have positively to offer you is to try
to make the non-monetary conditions of your
employment as good as we can (we'll try to minimize
red-tape, etc.), and also to establish an
ongoing process of staff participation in the
organizational process. We've going to
try to implement, small step by small step,
some of the ideas of the pre-Bolshevik "workers
Soviets" here in this business. You all are
educated persons. I hope you will be able
to find genuine satisfaction in our mutual
pursuit of these higher values, partly in
compensation for our not being able to be
more generous with the dollars, and also because,
even if we had more money, hopefully we have
reached a point in our lives where we can
devote ourselves to higher human values, both
for ourselves, and also, after addressing their
more basic needs (which is what we are here for),
for our clients.
Thank you.
Well, there's the speech, which I doubt will be
given, and I even doubt what, if given, its reception
would be.
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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