My good friend and ex colleague, Ron, emailed to wish me
“Happy Labor Day” even though we’re out in the pasture with the herd of the
retired. We proudly earned our branded
hides: workers.
As my older son Chris proclaims, life is work. We’re always trying to find a balance but
when your job is enjoyable, and you find it meaningful, life and work negotiate
a successful merger. During my career I
was tempted to bring it to the next level in a major publishing organization. It would have meant leaving the company I was
joyfully building and moving overseas to London, a city we love. But the thought of engaging in corporate
politics, vs. the hands-on experience of running a stand-alone publishing company
made me hesitate and I’m glad I did.
My favorite section of the Sunday New York Times is their Sunday
Review, mostly thoughtful, opinion pieces.
This past week’s had two relating to the above, “Friends at Work? Not So
Much” (by Adam Grant) and “Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work” (by Arthur
C. Brooks). The former cites factors
such as the disappearance of a job for life, flextime, and the rise of the “virtual
office” that has potentially impacted the loss of meaningful relationships for
life. I always considered colleagues
friends as well as fellow workers. There
is much to be said about the virtual office but it is a steep price to pay for
true collaboration and trust that develops through personal interaction.
The second article also speaks directly to my working
years. As the article asks, “Why don’t
people just keep the jobs they like?”
The answer is we are sort of hard-wired to achieve success by climbing
the next wrung in the ladder, and then next, etc. I climbed to the extent that I found a place
in the working world that made me happy.
Why go any further, indeed? Simply for more money? Bad reason I thought.
I always felt that I was responsible not only to my
employer, but to my employees, our vendors, authors, as well, everyone who
makes up a publishing company. As the
article concludes: “In our interconnected world and global economy, our work
transforms the lives of countless others.
Sometimes the impact is obvious: Managers and executives directly
inflect their employees’ happiness and career success. But everyone, in every industry, affects the
lives of co-workers, supervisors, customers, suppliers, donors or
investors.” If we all realize this in
our working lives, perhaps work would not be a dirty four letter word.
Speaking of the latter, the prior week’s Sunday Review (August 30) carried still
another meaningful article on work, “We Need to Rethink How We Work,”
accurately reflecting on what motivates people. As Barry Schwartz, the author of the article
points out, it was Adam Smith’s view that people just dislike work, writing in
his enormously influential The Wealth of
Nations, that “it is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease
as he can.” Schwartz thinks that his
notion has clouded the science of management ever since, viewing workers as
beasts of burden which a whipping stick, or at least a carrot and a stick might
be the best motivators. Hence, employees
are being constantly monitored, as the wickedly funny movie Office Space satires as the “TPS Reports.”
Employees thrive on a measure of independence and fair
compensation should be the natural result of people working at jobs they find
meaningful. “When money is made the
measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things….[We] should not
lose sight of the aspiration to make work the kind of activity people embrace,
rather than the kind they shun…..Work that is adequately compensated is an
important social good. But so is work
that is worth doing. Half of our waking
lives is a terrible thing to waste.”
I’m currently reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity (thus far, brilliant!). More on that book in a later entry, but early
on in the novel there is a techno-utopian view of work expressed by
participants in a Wiki-leaks-like cult movement:
Their theory was that the technology driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including
generous payments to most of
the population for doing
nothing, when Capital realized that it could
not afford
to pauperize
the consumers who bought its robot-made products.
Unemployed
consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the
people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition
of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel
social change.
At this point there is a discussion as to why a person
changing bedpans in a nursing home for a $40,000 salary wouldn’t want, instead,
to be a paid as a consumer at the same remuneration. One of the participants in the discussion
comes to the conclusion: "The way
you'd have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the
retirement age, so you'd always have full employment for everybody under
thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody
over that age."
Is that the future of work? Sounds more dystopian to me. Franzen’s unique
social observations have a clarion ring of future verity. Maybe that’s where we’re heading: let robots
do the work, and we’ll lay about consuming streaming video all day. Thankfully, that is not my future, but we
ought to be careful about what we wish for.
Nonetheless, getting back to Labor Day, I’m now many
years into retirement and my working life seems more like a dream some stranger
went through for those four decades. I
like the way my friend Ron put it: "I
have accepted the fact that we were merely hired ballplayers. While working we were respected, valued, and
even ostensibly loved as long as we could pitch, field, run, and hit. Once retired, we were just old ex
ballplayers. Now, there is hardly anyone
at our companies who remember us or would even recognize our names let alone
appreciate what we did. It is the way of
the world, and I have accepted it.” To
that analogy I added, in my response, “I like to think we played it well -- and
now don't even get invited to an old timer’s game. I still think I can reach home plate from the
pitcher’s mound though :-)."
OK, no more pitching for me, but we know what we did and
we know that our careers led to thousands of publications that might not have
seen the light of day, and those went out into an Internet-less world at the
time, and affected change and hopefully progress. And we were part of working communities,
dedicated as much to one another as we were to the work itself. As I said, it was a merger of sorts. My very first entry in this blog on the subject of work and my first job out of college still resonates.
