Index

Work is a Human Endeavor

A great deal has been written in recent years about the way the employees of high-tech companies are treated by their employers.  Google is probably the most famous of these companies, but almost every high-tech company has to provide more perks than the usual paltry offerings available to the rest of us.  Even these lucky few employees are only rewarded because they work extreme hours and produce incredible amounts of creative work.  These companies are the exceptions that prove the rule - most companies treat their employees like interchangeable pieces of shit, and they are happy to make sure that we are aware of our status - the insecurity helps keep wages down.
  
 When the high-techs figured out that they had to really pay their people, they conspired in other ways to keep their salaries down. These same high-tech firms constantly lie to congress about how many more tech workers they need so they can get more H-1B visas, allowing them to import foreign tech workers at slave wages - the fact that many former H-1B workers come back to haunt them as new competitors just hasn’t gotten through their myopia, but offers at least some small justice to those whose wages get crushed this way.  Even in the stratosphere of employment, the corporate types refuse to treat workers as real human beings.
  
 Where does this leave the rest of us?  A viking ship comes to mind, with the manager calling the beat and cracking the whip, while the rest pull oars - a fairly universal image that captures the way most people feel about their jobs.  The assembly line mentality still rules corporate management, with “shut up and work” the standard treatment for all but the most exceptional, who get fired instead.  The better pay scales are reserved only for those who give up even the barest of human necessities - health, home and the other benefits of human existence have to be sacrificed at the altar of the corporation before employees are rewarded with anything like human working conditions.
  
 “Normal” people just have to do our best to get through the work day, learning when to duck and dodge to avoid the worst of the psychic whip cracks and keep the internal scarring to a minimum while keeping food on the table.  Widespread depression and all-too-frequent suicides are some of the most obvious results.  This is a complete waste of talent as well, since every human being is capable of some level of creativity.  Our current system does not encourage any creativity in most workers - it actively discourages
  it - but we have to do better.  Just because workers are treated like shit does not mean they have to be treated that way.  At some point (if we survive that long) workers will be treated well enough that working no longer leaches the life out of them - that is the direction that history inexorably points us, and I have no reason to doubt it.
  
 While it is still true that someone has to guide and lead - to “manage” - in the corporate world, the requirements have changed.  The process of producing products is now more about managing the information and technology needed than about managing the financial aspects.  It is more about figuring out what needs to be made and how to sell it than it is about actually making the product.  The process also requires more thought about and interaction with outside factors than it used to.  Longer term effects of decisions are having more effects in the business world than previously - just ask GM about their issues with <a title=“GM internal data on faulty switches”
 href=“http://consumerist.com/2014/03/13/gm-knew-of-faulty-ignition-switches-in-2001-nhtsa-says-data-was-inconclusive/” target=“_blank”>faulty ignition switches.  The rest of the world has more information available to them, so corporate malfeasance is harder than ever to hide.
  
 Among the business lessons that still need learning among the companies that are to survive is that humans need to be allowed to maintain their physical and mental health and their normal human relations, and refusal to allow for these things will sooner or later generate its own negative payback.  This is not karma, it is business logic - as human creativity increasingly becomes the sole productive asset of profitable companies (and not just a slogan), the workers’ importance in the chain will destroy the self-important managers in favor of those that know how to treat people as creative humans.  The business literature is full of information on how to allow workers to derive some satisfaction from their work and meet the most basic of human requirements; the fact that this is largely ignored is an indictment of corporate management and its refusal to deal with reality, but sooner or later it will have to work its way into the standard business lexicon.
  
 Ultimately, all work and business is a human endeavor.  It is all about human beings - their needs and wants - and in the long run that is where all of it will end up.  The corporations will, of necessity, follow, or die with few mourners.