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Thursday, October 28, 2021

Ruminations-People Just Don’t Want to Work

In one of my text group chats with some friends, the conversation on remote and live work evolved into a discussion on people not wanting to work, how it impacts our economy, and our society. I thought that trope had died when the unemployment benefits that was enacted as a response to the  COVID pandemic ended, and yet the job market remained wide open. The inference there is that people are willing to not work in order to find better work because the crutch that some have assumed is propping them up had gone away.

Indeed, the media has started to call the phenomenon: “The Great Resignation”. By the reports, and many anecdotal stories that I had pieced together, workers, especially in the service industries had time off, initially without any unemployment aid. In that time off they had reflected upon the state of the labor-management relationship. It surprised me to learn just how many people are living hand to mouth, without health insurance, benefits, a steady work schedule and by that implication: without a steady week-to-week income. It made many of them rethink and reconfigure their expectations of the future. It took the involuntary time off from the grind to realize that they were in a grind. Many took advantage of the unemployment to restructure their goals and started to look for more permanent and secure jobs. Jobs that can turn into careers. I would not call that not wanting to work or by implication, laziness that permeates throughout the work force. I would call that working to make the American dream come true, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, to use a well-worn cliché of the haves of the world.

Turning the lens towards the reason that people would question the intent of the workers who had decided to change their lives, I thought about why would anyone think in this manner? It does not come from a place of empathy for our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is also lacking the inherent thought of: there but for the grace of God go I. I then thought about the framework that created this thought. The thinker of the thought framed it as a matter of us against them. In the context of the initial discussion, it was comparing and setting an adversarial frame of  the low age, not highly educated, blue-collar workers versus the higher wage, highly educated, white-collar worker. The disconnect is that despite the initial assumptions, both sets of workers are workers, some may have a say in the management at their workplace, but in the end, we are all workers working for the company. So, the disconnect is evidence of an interesting prism by which some workers view others. In a away it reaffirms the suspicion that the upper management manipulates the middle management to antagonize the workers in order to maintain control of the hierarchy, while the middle management and the workers are happily warring against each other unconscious of the intent. Indeed, that is quite  bit of conspiracy theory, but the scenario is not so out of the realm of possibilities to contemplate.

In a bit of irony, if not outright hypocrisy on the part of society, is that these very service workers were lauded if not worshipped as heroes and essential workers when the rest of society needed them to stay at their work in the middle of the pandemic to serve our essential needs. We, being  in the uncomfortable but safe quarantine at our homes, while they are exposed in the open to the unknowns and dealing with a much higher probability of infections. For all our laudatory rhetoric, many of the essential workers received temporary boosts in pay and media exposure, but as soon as it was deemed expedient, those boosts in pay stopped and the wages went back to pre-pandemic levels. How would one process this whiplash change in attitude? Once they were celebrated, and just as suddenly, they returned to being anonymous, disposable, and made out to be an example of what not to do. I would say that a great resignation is a logical step if they wished to advance themselves in this society.

During all this time, the inviolable assumption, the bedrock of our belief, is that the business model that has existed is the only one that makes economic sense; that the only way for the service industries to make enough profit is the status quo. As the recent employment market and its attendant effect on our economy has shown, the key to giving service to the customer is through the workers, and yet people hang on to the old paradigm because that is all they know, and no one has thought about creating a new business model which would give the service workers a living wage. I remember when the talk of a $15 an hour minimum wage was scandalous, and yet today we have corporations who own fast food franchise raise their pay to $17 and $19 an hour just to attract workers. Maybe the old business model was erroneous or driven by greed? Or the employers were disingenuous? It would be interesting to see if the employers would have the greed to drop the wages if and when the employment needs ease, or would they keep the adjustments they made to their business model which enabled them to make profit despite the rise in wages in place.

One of my friends on the chat brought out the fact that his industry is paying excellent wages and still they were having difficulties attracting workers. I wouldn’t hazard to guess at the reason. I don’t know the skillsets they require of their workers, and I don’t know the micro-economics of that particular industry. Perhaps those workers are also having a revelatory moment in their lives, perhaps they are restructuring their plans for the future, I don’t know. I do know that the Great Resignation is happening across the board. Many of my highly skilled, highly educated, and highly compensated friends are changing jobs recently. Maybe they are taking advantage of the reversal in the relationship between employers and employees. The advantage is with the employees now, who knows when that would reverse itself again, so it is better to strike while the iron is hot rather than wait. The truth is that history has shown that the employers have no compunction about going back to depressing wages in their efforts to maximize profits. No empathy wanted or needed.

Another initial assumption by employers is that money is the sole motivator for the employee, that everything can be resolved if more money is offered. I am not going to be ridiculous and say that money does not matter, it does. But it does not matter when compared to other things. In our society we value human dignity, or we say we do. We are not as good at showing what we value as we are at talking about it. Talking about valuing human dignity does not translate to showing. Remember the whiplashing of wages that I spoke about for the essential workers? How demeaning is that? We will pay you more because you are putting yourself in the line of fire, and when you are not in the line of fire, we won’t pay you. Is it any wonder that they are not going back to that particular industry?

How about security, stability, means to plan for a future. It is impossible within the existing economic system for the service workers to  live and build for a future, any future. If they are lucky, they can tread water; by lucky I mean work multiple jobs and not become ill.  Is it any wonder that they want to leave this grind?

Another irony I wish to point out is that those who are in business ceaselessly admonish that we need to let the free market work its magic, that the invisible hand would inevitably restore the balance, yet when the free market is working against their interests, they balk and complain about those people who are the foundations of their companies and our economies, the front-line workers. Maybe it isn’t the people that is the problem, maybe it is the economic system.

The pandemic has shown that the present system is fragile to a fault. While the system may be able to withstand minimal perturbations, something as large as the pandemic and the resulting unintended aftereffects have effectively sidelined what we believed to be indestructible.

So now what? We can wait for the wave of uncertainty and its lingering effects to subside, if it subsides. Or we can reinvent our business models and processes, taking care to design in anti-fragile features and learn to adjust as the situation warrants. The former is the hold on to what has always worked model even though the reality has evolved away from historical precedent, the latter is the make stuff up as we go along model even though we don’t know what will and will not work in the long term.

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