The Mirage of the Great American Workplace
We Want Something Else
The pandemic has been blamed for many things, good and bad and just plain crazy. But for many of us, the pandemic has revealed the harsh reality of the American workplace: Most of us are miserable at work. (Sidebar: most articles, even academic articles, are aimed at improving employee “productivity” and little more.) The reasons for the misery vary depending on the individual. And of course, we are all about our individualism.
The juxtaposition of the individual and the collective workplace creates a dissonance that rings in the American ears, a sort of social tinnitus that seems to drive us mad. We love to assert our individualism with our harking back to 1776 and our “don’t tread on me” and “give me liberty or give me death,” but as soon as we cross the threshold into the workplace, we have to check that rugged individualism at the door. Once we are inside someone else’s “house” and trade our labor for money, we voluntarily give up certain rights. We allow ourselves to become walking commodities, with our bodies and minds assessed for cost and risk to the “owner.”
The very language of the laws that govern the employer-employee relationship derives from the earliest examples of laws governing slaveholding. One of the seldom-discussed aspects of 1776 is that the colonists were not so much concerned about the tea tax as they were about the changes in British common laws governing the holding of slaves. Those changes were an affront to the very base of the wealth built up by the plantation system. Tea tax was not the nut of the discontent.
Libertarians, especially the hardcore no-government-at-all types, will argue that any law telling an employer what to do is an infringement on that employer’s liberty. Within their framework, the employer, the “business,” is an individual and thus the rights of the business are paramount. If some poor sap happens to work for a bad “employer,” it’s just that poor sap’s bad luck. After all, the sap has an option: leave.
During the pandemic, many poor saps did just that, leaving the workplace in droves. While we were putting masks on our faces, we were simultaneously pulling masks off the real face of the American workplace. Departments of Human Resources have been scrambling to find ways to entice people back into workplaces that offered little but a low-grade fever of misery. Americans discovered that “liberty” includes freedom from being bullied and mistreated by employers and by customers. But we still want to go out to eat and we expect the restaurant to be fully staffed by pleasant people who wait on us hand and foot in an effort to get us to leave a good tip. We sometimes work out our frustrations on these service staff, turning them into scratching posts as we express our pent up anger and disappointment.
The whole notion of Human Resources reflects how little we actually value the individual. For all our talk of liberty and freedom, HR reflects how we actually feel about the value of the individual. HR is there to protect the employer from the individual roaming around the employer’s “house.” HR is there to ensure that we don’t steal time, money, or objects. HR is there to ensure that during the workday every ounce of our essence is there to benefit the employer, that is, the “owner.” HR is there to run interference when the “owner” skirts a law. If things get bad, the “owner” hires a lawyer and a Public Relations firm to whitewash the “owner’s” dirty face.
There should be no HR department. There should be a “legal department” and a “personnel” department, the role of the latter being strictly administrative (filling out forms) and for intracompany communication (open enrollment, paid time off, e.g.). The employee should be interviewed and hired by lawyers so that they know without any doubt that once they cross that threshold into the “owner’s house,” the vast majority of their civil rights are suspended. They should know that, even if they live in a state with statutes that attempt to protect them, that they will be outmaneuvered by the “owner’s” counsel. They need to know the costs, in both money and reputation, of seeking legal remedy for grievances. They need to understand how little their individual personhood really matters to the “owner.” Afterall, there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of humans willing to work for less, even it if means abuse.
In the same way that “owners” have the right to conduct background checks on potential employees, the employees should have a right to the same: credit checks, criminal background checks, work history, health status, family status, driving record, social media accounts, pending lawsuits. But, alas, no. “Owners” are protected from revealing their solvency, their previous legal settlements, employee complaints, liens against them, accidents in their “house,” complaints from consumers, and legal entanglements. Nope. If former “employees” reveal what a workplace is really like, they are often sued for defamation or violation of a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
Yes, the good ole NDA, the binding document that continues to protect the next Weinsteins, Trumps, Epsteins and the thousands of imitators, thus allowing them to carry on, rules the American workplace. Breaking a law is no big deal, especially if an “owner” is considered a “genius” or a “job creator” or an “innovator.” So what if he feels up his staff, sleeps with his receptionist, slaps an employee in the face, calls an employee names, skirts the tax laws, ignores federal legislation like the Endangered Species or Clean Water Acts, bribes building inspectors, or traffics humans for cheap labor? With a crack legal team, an NDA, and a PR firm, the “owner” can continue on. After all, he is a “job creator” and therefore in the ordo condescendi he ranks higher than the rest of us. The “owners” stand to lose little, while the “employees” stand to lose everything.
We need to change this paradigm.