Like a lot of people,
during the Internet boom of the late 1990s I started paying attention
to financial news for the first time in my life. Over the years,
thanks largely to NPR’s “Marketplace”, I gained
a rudimentary understanding of the significance of the Fed’s
interest rate moves, began looking forward to the monthly Consumer
Confidence Index and jobs numbers, and even came to appreciate the
positive side of some corporate boondoggles I’d previously
loathed, such as NAFTA. But there was one economic measure to which
I paid little heed until recently: productivity. I had a vague idea
that it had something to do with the amount of work each employee
could accomplish in a week, but I thought it was more a measure
of technological progress (e.g., word processors are more efficient
than quills) than anything else.
Lately, I’ve had occasion to bear witness to the true meaning
of that productivity number. As I have mentioned in previous articles,
I work at the headquarters for the local big-box books-and-music
retailer. This company is installing a large and very expensive
new software package for its buyers, and I have been involved in
the project along with three or four dozen of my colleagues. Somewhere
along the line (actually, at countless somewheres along the line),
the plan for the project went awry. As with other massively complex
projects I’ve ever been a part of, work that was supposed
to be done in January dragged on until March, and work due at the
end of April was still being completed in mid-August. Yet the date
for flipping the switch on the new system never changed over the
course of 18 months, even as the list of known bugs grew longer
and the amount of work yet to be done didn’t seem to be growing
any smaller.
All that time lost due to missed deadlines had to be regained somehow
in the last few months of the project. There were many ways the
company could have solved this problem, but the one it chose was
to ask the core members of the project team, some two dozen people,
to put in 7-day, 80-hour weeks, including many nights until 2 or
3 or 4:00 in the morning, from early June through the go-live date
and beyond. Now, that’s productivity: squeezing the work of
two full-time employees out of every single member of the team.
For various reasons, and to my good fortune, I wound up a bystander
during much of this period. Watching the inevitable deterioration
of individual team members over the past several weeks has been
like watching a horrible car accident I was lucky enough to escape
but powerless to stop.
This particular ordeal will come to an end for my colleagues at
some point in the next couple of months, and a few of them will
likely score big raises or promotions after the dust clears, but
what we all know for certain is that the bar has been raised for
similar projects in the future now that the executives of the company
have learned (as if they didn’t already know) they can squeeze
their people dry, meet their self-imposed deadlines, and not prompt
mass resignations. After all, it’s not like things are better
anywhere else. The fact is the 8 to 5 work day is all but gone in
this country for most salaried employees. I can think of no one
I know in a managerial position anywhere who works less than 50
hours a week. The concept of getting ahead by working evenings and
weekends may be a time-honored tradition. But even those who don’t
particularly want to become directors or vice-presidents, those
who are happy to sit in their cubicles and write code or design
marketing materials for the rest of their lives, are finding it
nearly impossible to keep up with their workloads without putting
in extra time for which, in most cases, they will never be recompensed
or recognized.
So why do so many of us willingly (albeit whiningly)
sacrifice our personal lives at the altar of the company for no
obvious reward? My pet theory—call it evolutionary psychology-lite—is
that the company has taken the place of the hunter-gatherer tribes
and small villages or towns all humans lived in until relatively
recently; for those of us who have left school, don’t go to
church and don’t live in co-housing, the workplace is the
closest we’ll ever get to something like the sort of social
environment we are predisposed to find appealing. Like the tribal
village, the workplace is an environment where we know just about
everyone and where our skills, our social connections and our capacity
for putting food on the table are deeply intertwined. Such a group
periodically demands high commitments of time in order to reinforce
the bonds between the individual and the “team.” Once
those bonds have been forged, most of us don’t have to be
asked to work long hours; we’ll do it voluntarily, not for
the abstract notion of the company, but to maintain respect and
status among our colleagues. When I think of the company I work
for, I think of people I’ve worked with for over a decade,
and whenever I’m in danger of letting those people down, my
productivity goes way up.
There was a time, in my younger, angrier days, when I thought that
the corporate social structure, with its demands of subservience
to the group and its insidious and deliberate debasement of the
language (people become “resources”, problems become
“challenges”), was essentially fascist—that we’d
traded black shirts for blue Oxfords. Now I’ve come to believe
that corporate culture and fascist culture simply spring from the
same root source: the need each of us has to play a meaningful role
in something bigger than ourselves, and the willingness on the part
of an organization, whether it be a corporation or a government,
to fulfill that need. But the notion that companies have simply
become increasingly effective at squeezing more “productivity”
out of us by tapping into our Paleolithic brains doesn’t make
what they do to us any more right. Over a century ago, industrial
workers began to form their own tribal organizations in an effort
to protect themselves from 12-hour days at a flat salary in sweatshop
conditions. If the corporations of America insist on driving their
productivity numbers ever higher, they may find themselves staring
down a labor movement for the salaried class. I can think of a couple
dozen people who might be willing to join right now.
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