I asked for the meeting. I wanted to know a bit more about the company, the department I worked in, what the future might hold for the department, and while I was at it I thought I’d throw a few ideological questions up and see if they got volleyed. After all, this was an intelligent, decent person who is completely sold on corporate life.
The most telling part of the discussion related to work hours – and at one point it got into Abbott and Costello’s Who’s-on-first territory. But it did bear fruit.
The dichotomy at the heart of the issue is the divide between what are fair and reasonable working hours (and compensation) on the one hand, and what many companies have come to expect on the other. At this point, it’s useful to mention one of the handy tools that corporations use to prevent debate about these opposing forces: the notion of hourly or wage employment versus salaried employment.
I am not certain why we even need two ways of paying people (although the corporations obviously have their reasons) but the way it boils down is this: hourly people are generally severely underpaid but, big wow, can claim compensation for overtime; salaried employees get a fixed annual level of pay that is generally significantly higher than wage employees, but they may be called on to work any number of hours in a given week.
So, frankly, whichever rubric you fall under, you’re probably being screwed. (I’m only talking within the context of a pseudo-capitalist economy here. If we were to consider competing systems of wealth distribution then we would see that capitalism hinges on screwing the vast majority of the population.) If you’re hourly, your budget is likely very tight. If you’re salaried, your budget may or may not still be tight but there’s every chance you’re being worked to borderline exhaustion – at the very least the potential for that exists.
So, the executive and I bounced all this around for a while and we agreed that the implicit flexibility of the salaried life – work back when work needs to be done, go early when things are slow – was a preferable way to live. Good for getting to doctor’s appointments, your kid’s school play, or just taking it easy when you need to. In other words, having some kind of a life.
But that’s as close as we got to agreement. For as I listened to the executive, I realized that her math was skewed. She was all for people having flexibility, but she clearly thought that, all up, they should be working more than 40 hours per week. (e.g. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone taking 1 ½ hours for lunch twice a week to go to the gym, as long as they spend the other three lunches at their desk.”)
I don’t know what they call that in the world of corporate doublespeak but it sounds like exploitation to me.
Many people fought very hard and very long for things like the 40 hour week and the right to unionize. The right to have a safe work environment and the opportunity to have a life outside of work. But we’re going backwards.
Approximately 12 percent of Americans are in a union. Now, unions have their problems too, and certainly a different global economic structure based on egalitarianism is the ideal. But let’s work with what we have right now. What we’ve got is 88 percent of the American workforce basically going it alone. Going it alone against the might of a corporation, or any organization for that matter, is pretty daunting. So most people, myself included, end up working longer hours, feeling unfulfilled, and choking on the voodoo math of career executives.
And the working person’s mantra in this time of depression (nobody can convince me this is merely a recession) is “At least I have a job.” And there you have it. The hook the private sector has through our collars. This is called “negative motivation.” It works okay on certain levels but it’s hell on morale, marriages, physical and mental health and a bunch of other things that most of us little people think are, well, kind of important.
This thing is getting too long and I worked til almost 9:30 tonight (yeah, case in point). Let me get back to this tomorrow.
Take care,
Adrian Zupp
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