A few weeks ago, a
friend of mine from a networking group that I attend, came up with some very
interesting observations about the differences between companies when he was getting
started in business, on the one hand, and companies today on the other.. When he first started working in business, he
worked for a large corporate entity that was paternalistic. The company had a five thousand person
factory that had no unions because it was offering benefits beyond those that a
union would normally be able to obtain in negotiations. Among other benefits, the company had a
self-funded insurance program and its own clinic. When necessary, it could bring in medical
specialists for the workers.
Anyway, the company
invested in my friend by paying for his M.B.A. education. By doing this, the company was giving my
friend the opportunity to grow and to qualify for higher-paying jobs within the
company, for jobs in middle and upper management. Benefits like these made a person loyal to a
company. The person would end up working
for the company for thirty to forty years.
The company had created an environment that engendered a sense of
family. The company did this, because it
saw a worker as an investment on a balance sheet, upon which it would expect to
see a return.
My friend sees company
attitudes today as being very different.
Today a worker is looked at as being an expense on a profit-loss
statement rather than an investment on a balance sheet. The key moment for this change, not only in
the United States but in many other countries around the world, came around the
time of the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The president adopted supply-side economics as his guiding strategy for
dealing with the American economy.
According to this theory, made famous by Arthur Laffer, the economy
could be best stimulated by lowering taxes, particularly on the wealthy members
of society, who had the means to invest in business. More money for investment meant more jobs and
paradoxically more tax revenue for the long run.
This theory went
against a theory previously in vogue, the demand-side economics of John Maynard
Keynes. There were many aspects to
Keynes theory, but the important point here is that Keynes thought that the
economy could be best stimulated by putting money into the hands of
working-class and middle-class consumers.
These were the people who needed to spend their money on everyday life
needs. Anyway, Keynes strategy could be
carried out by creating government work projects, by raising the minimum wage
and by lowering taxes on the working and middle classes.
There is a connection
between my friend’s observations about how workers have been perceived and
these two economic theories. When
employees are perceived as investments, it is because one gives them the
opportunity to work well and earn well and live well. Then they take what they earn and put it back
into the economy by spending it quickly and moving the money through the
economy. This is demand-side economics.
Employees are perceived
as costs, when the focus on stimulating the economy is on putting money into
the hands of company owners and investors, who are supposedly motivated to
generate economic activity when they are allowed to pay out as small a
percentage of revenues as possible in taxes.
So supposedly, the owners and investors should take the money they save
from taxes and invest it back in their companies and create more and
better-paying jobs. But that hasn’t been
what has happened in recent decades, when there have been major tax cuts. Investors and owners have held back a lot of
the money they have gained from tax cuts.
They have hoarded it for personal purposes. There hasn’t been increased business activity
leading to increased tax revenues though at lower rates. There hasn’t been much growth in jobs. And why should there be a growth in jobs,
when employees are viewed negatively as costs anyway.
This view of workers as
costs is, in my view, connected with a deeper attitude towards workers among
owners and investors today. Workers are
no longer really perceived as people.
They are viewed as robots. They
are hired with skills that are fixed, not evolving. They are worked as hard as possible for a
certain number of years with as few benefits as possible. And then they are let go, if possible,
without a pension. As robots they are
machines that depreciate with use. Why
pay them anything when they are no longer useful?
This is so different
from my friend’s experience when a company invested in his growth, because it
knew that what was good for my friend was good for the company. My friend was a growing person, not a
depreciating machine.
Let’s take this analysis one step further. The reason that business owners and investors
view workers consciously as costs today and unconsciously as robots is because
workers are beginning to blur together with the increasingly complex technology
that they operate. They are becoming
what they use. The complex entities of
these machines act as models for how people should behave and mirror back the
behavior that they, the people, then adopt.
And as people start acting more and more like robots, the company owners
and the investors who own the complex machinery merge the workers into the
machine system as components barely distinguishable from the actual machine
components. And if workers are merely robots, then they are incapable of
leaving organic imprints on the owners and investors for whom they work. The suffering they experience from wages on
which they can’t live, from minimal or no benefits, and from job insecurity
does not leave an impression on the owners and investors. If the workers are merely robots, their
suffering simply translates into mechanical dysfunction. Too many complaints and the robot can be
replaced with another one that is less troublesome. Taking it one step, further, a worker today
is a free-floating figure in a vacuum.
He has no economic grounding in his society. There is little formal protection of his job
from the government and little informal protection of his job from his
community and social groups. And because
he lacks any meaningful grounding within his own sense of self, he doesn’t
inspire any bonding emotions like compassion, concern or respect from the
owners and investors.
Returning to our original discussion, the
economic attitude of a worker being viewed as a cost is based on the experience
of the worker as something not-human, as a robot, as a machine, as a free
floating ungrounded figure. A question
arises as to how such an attitude can coexist with the concept of the dignity
of the individual human being that is fundamental to modern democratic
societies. A robot cannot be a citizen
of a democracy. So if a human worker is
actually a person, then he should have the opportunity to work in a situation
where he is truly treated like a human being and not like a robot. The transformation of more and more workers
into robots is not conducive to the maintenance of a democratic society. While it is still possible, modern democratic
societies will have to find the means to start protecting its working citizens
from gradually sinking into non-human economic status. If not, modern democratic societies will
cease being democratic. This is why it
is important that workers be seen as investments on a balance sheet and not
costs on a profit-loss statement.
© 2014 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment