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.
