"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy!
When work is a duty, life is slavery".
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), Russian novelist, author,
and playright
Airplanes, missiles, and space shuttles crash due to lack of
maintenance, absent-mindedness, and pure ignorance.
Software support personnel, aided and abetted by
Customer Relationship Management application suites,
are curt (when reachable) and unhelpful. Despite
expensive, state of the art supply chain management
systems, retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers habitually
run out of stocks of finished and semi-finished products
and raw materials. People from all walks of life and at all
levels of the corporate ladder skirt their responsibilities
and neglect their duties.
Whatever happened to the work ethic? Where is the pride
in the immaculate quality of one's labor and produce?
Both dead in the water. A series of earth-shattering social,
economic, and technological trends converged to render
their jobs loathsome to many - a tedious nuisance best
avoided.
1. Job security is a thing of the past. Itinerancy in various
McJobs reduces the incentive to invest time, effort, and
resources into a position that may not be yours next week.
Brutal layoffs and downsizing traumatized the workforce
and produced in the typical workplace a culture of
obsequiousness, blind obeisance, the suppression of
independent thought and speech, and avoidance of
initiative and innovation. Many offices and shop floors
now resemble prisons.
2. Outsourcing and offshoring of back office (and, more
recently, customer relations and research and
development) functions sharply and adversely effected the
quality of services from helpdesks to airline ticketing and
from insurance claims processing to remote maintenance.
Cultural mismatches between the (typically Western)
client base and the offshore service department (usually in
a developing country where labor is cheap and plenty)
only exacerbated the breakdown of trust between
customer and provider or supplier.
3. The populace in developed countries are addicted to
leisure time. Most people regard their jobs as a necessary
evil, best avoided whenever possible. Hence phenomena
like the permanent temp - employees who prefer a
succession of temporary assignments to holding a proper
job. The media and the arts contribute to this perception of
work as a drag - or a potentially dangerous addiction
(when they portray raging and abusive workaholics).
4. The other side of this dismal coin is workaholism - the
addiction to work. Far from valuing it, these addicts resent
their dependence. The job performance of the typical
workaholic leaves a lot to be desired. Workaholics are
fatigued, suffer from ancillary addictions, and short
attention spans. They frequently abuse substances, are
narcissistic and destructively competitive (being driven,
they are incapable of team work).
5. The depersonalization of manufacturing - the
intermediated divorce between the artisan/worker and his
client - contributed a lot to the indifference and alienation
of the common industrial worker, the veritable
"anonymous cog in the machine".
Not only was the link between worker and product broken
- but the bond between artisan and client was severed as
well. Few employees know their customers or patrons first
hand. It is hard to empathize with and care about a
statistic, a buyer whom you have never met and never
likely to encounter. It is easy in such circumstances to feel
immune to the consequences of one's negligence and
apathy at work. It is impossible to be proud of what you
do and to be committed to your work - if you never set
eyes on either the final product or the customer! Charlie
Chaplin's masterpiece, "Modern Times" captured this
estrangement brilliantly.
6. Many former employees of mega-corporations abandon
the rat race and establish their own businesses - small and
home enterprises. Undercapitalized, understaffed, and
outperformed by the competition, these fledging and
amateurish outfits usually spew out shoddy products and
lamentable services - only to expire within the first year of
business.
7. Despite decades of advanced notice, globalization
caught most firms the world over by utter surprise. Ill-
prepared and fearful of the onslaught of foreign
competition, companies big and small grapple with
logistical nightmares, supply chain calamities, culture
shocks and conflicts, and rapacious competitors. Mere
survival (and opportunistic managerial plunder) replaced
client satisfaction as the prime value.
8. The decline of the professional guilds on the one hand
and the trade unions on the other hand greatly reduced
worker self-discipline, pride, and peer-regulated quality
control. Quality is monitored by third parties or
compromised by being subjected to Procrustean financial
constraints and concerns.
The investigation of malpractice and its punishment are
now at the hand of vast and ill-informed bureaucracies,
either corporate or governmental. Once malpractice is
exposed and admitted to, the availability of malpractice
insurance renders most sanctions unnecessary or toothless.
Corporations prefer to bury mishaps and malfeasance
rather than cope with and rectify them.
9. The quality of one's work, and of services and products
one consumed, used to be guaranteed. One's personal
idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and problems were left at
home. Work was sacred and one's sense of self-worth
depended on the satisfaction of one's clients. You simply
didn't let your personal life affect the standards of your
output.
This strict and useful separation vanished with the rise of
the malignant-narcissistic variant of individualism. It led
to the emergence of idiosyncratic and fragmented
standards of quality. No one knows what to expect, when,
and from whom. Transacting business has become a form
of psychological warfare. The customer has to rely on the
goodwill of suppliers, manufacturers, and service
providers - and often finds himself at their whim and
mercy. "The client is always right" has gone the way of
the dodo. "It's my (the supplier's or provider's) way or the
highway" rules supreme.
This uncertainty is further exacerbated by the pandemic
eruption of mental health disorders - 15% of the
population are severely pathologized according to the
latest studies. Antisocial behaviors - from outright crime
to pernicious passive-aggressive sabotage - once rare in
the workplace, are now abundant.
The ethos of teamwork, tempered collectivism, and
collaboration for the greater good is now derided or
decried. Conflict on all levels has replaced negotiated
compromise and has become the prevailing narrative.
Litigiousness, vigilante justice, use of force, and "getting
away with it" are now extolled. Yet, conflicts lead to the
misallocation of economic resources. They are non-
productive and not conducive to sustaining good relations
between producer or provider and consumer.
10. Moral relativism is the mirror image of rampant
individualism. Social cohesion and discipline diminished,
ideologies and religions crumbled, and anomic states
substituted for societal order. The implicit contracts
between manufacturer or service provider and customer
and between employee and employer were shredded and
replaced with ad-hoc negotiated operational checklists.
Social decoherence is further enhanced by the
anonymization and depersonalization of the modern chain
of production (see point 5 above).
Nowadays, people facilely and callously abrogate their
responsibilities towards their families, communities, and
nations. The mushrooming rate of divorce, the decline in
personal thrift, the skyrocketing number of personal
bankruptcies, and the ubiquity of venality and corruption
both corporate and political are examples of such
dissipation. No one seems to care about anything. Why
should the client or employer expect a different treatment?
11. The disintegration of the educational systems of the
West made it difficult for employers to find qualified and
motivated personnel. Courtesy, competence, ambition,
personal responsibility, the ability to see the bigger picture
(synoptic view), interpersonal aptitude, analytic and
synthetic skills, not to mention numeracy, literacy, access
to technology, and the sense of belonging which they
foster - are all products of proper schooling.
12. Irrational beliefs, pseudo-sciences, and the occult
rushed in to profitably fill the vacuum left by the
crumbling education systems. These wasteful
preoccupations encourage in their followers an
overpowering sense of fatalistic determinism and hinder
their ability to exercise judgment and initiative. The
discourse of commerce and finance relies on unmitigated
rationality and is, in essence, contractual. Irrationality is
detrimental to the successful and happy exchange of
goods and services.