Rick's September Tirade
More Work
Note: I can't seem to get enough of work -- at least
when it comes to writing about it. My last tirade apparently
provoked a minor uproar at my former workplace, along with a
hearty chorus of Amens from more sympathetic sectors of the
audience. One friend even suggested that I didn't go nearly
far enough in my assault on the current state of work. While
I don't claim to be writing a definitive opus on the
subject, I agree that much valuable ore remains to be
extracted from this particular mine. Welcome, then, to my
first-ever sequel. This month I rail against the intrusion
of work into what used to be called private life. Before I
begin, let me reassure my old colleagues that I bear them no
malice and that I haven't singled them out as butts of my
cynic's scorn. The symptoms I observe are endemic throughout
the business world; they've spread like athlete's foot in a
vast communal locker room.
About halfway through the film version of "Dr.
Zhivago," the arrogant young revolutionary chieftain
known as Strelnikov warns Zhivago that "the personal
life is dead." That remark sent a chill through my
teenage bones when I first heard it, and it still chills me
today. The personal life is currently under siege in our
venerable republic. It doesn't seem possible, but the Land
of the Free appears to be evolving into a workers' state.
I don't mean that our public squares will be displaying
giant Marxist banners with snappy slogans like "The
anarcho-syndicalist serpents must be expunged!" -- or
that hydroelectric dams and bauxite mines will rank high on
our nation's official list of must-see tourist attractions.
No, the U.S.A. is most emphatically a CAPITALIST workers'
state, still fond of lusty consumerism and gaudy
entertainment. I doubt if we'll ever don olive-green
workers' uniforms the way they did in Mao's China. We'll
never entirely overcome our need to peek into a tabloid and
read about the latest Elvis sighting in Baton Rouge or
Tuscaloosa. But we've developed a national business culture
that expects its citizens to live for work, to become
efficient units of productivity within that dirtless
communal farm known as the Corporation.
If you think about it, the irony is enough to make you
wince. Our capitalist system, the very fount of our liberty,
has produced a collectivist institution in which we're led
by unelected dictators (we call them "CEOs") who
expect us to conform to the will of the state (we call it
"the corporate culture") and surrender our
individual interests for the greater interests of our
comrades (we call them "colleagues"). All we need
is a bust of Lenin in the parking lot and we'll be set for
the next May Day parade.
Come with me now to the land of corporate toil, where
money and stress hormones flow like spring rivulets bouncing
over the rocks. Behold fifty million men and women gazing at
their computer screens, their keyboards clacking quietly,
their once-supple minds stripped down and streamlined for
the task at hand. Their brain cells still flicker brightly
but the thoughts aren't theirs -- not really. Here, watch
this young product manager craft a memo: "To leverage
the strength of our brand in the targeted markets, our
product design team must optimize our packaging so that we
can impact upscale consumers positively at the point of
sale." It's as if pods from space have been secretly
producing replicants under their desks. Who would believe
that, just seven or eight years ago, this same manager was
merrily quaffing brew with his fraternity brothers while
wearing a makeshift toga? Here, watch this veteran
advertising manager sift through the 247 e-mails that await
her after a balmy week at the shore. By the time she opens
e-mail number 50, she's already haggard again; the sand and
sun have faded along with the sound of the surf in her ears.
Only 197 e-mails to go and she'll be caught up -- at least
until she checks her voice mail.
As you might already have noticed, the technological
conveniences that were supposed to reduce our workloads have
actually EXPANDED them. One Japanese corporate manager
recently was quoted as saying that he typically spends two
hours a day on e-mail. You can play an entire nine-inning
baseball game in two hours, even allowing for foul balls,
spitting and periodic crotch adjustments. The Japanese
manager didn't reveal how much time he also spends on voice
mail (both leaving and retrieving it), not to mention faxing
documents, using his cell phone, responding to his beeper
and entering a dozen obligations into his electronic
handheld organizer. At some point, you can assume, he has to
perform ACTUAL WORK -- and therefore you can also assume he
won't be leaving his office promptly at five o'clock, in the
charmingly archaic manner of 1950s dads like Ozzie Nelson.
In a sense he won't be leaving the office at all.
This last fact disturbs me, even if it doesn't disturb
him. Before the economic boom of the last two decades a
boundary existed between work and personal life, like a
firewall between adjoining buildings. You toiled diligently
for a prescribed number of hours and you earned the right to
go home. The remainder of the day was yours to take a long
walk, tell your children a bedtime tale or build a replica
of the Woolworth Building out of balsa wood. Now the
boundary has nearly vanished; work has been seeping across
the divide into what used to be inviolable personal
territory. The laptop computer has made it all too easy to
convert downtime into worktime -- in a parking lot, aboard a
cramped jetliner or waiting for a funeral to begin. The
now-ubiquitous cell phone has effectively extended the
office onto the streets and highways, imperiling innocent
motorists and pedestrians who cross the path of a corporate
phonehead at the wheel. Internet-ready handheld devices
allow you to stay "connected" (i.e., obligated to
work) in the privacy of your bathroom or during your
wildlife safari in Botswana. Sneaking out for a cozy dinner
at your favorite bistro? Don't forget to take your beeper.
Of course, we don't need electronic appliances to ensure
our subjugation to the gentle tyranny of work. We simply
need the work itself in all its fruitful, frightful
abundance -- hefty cartloads of work brought on by
downsizing, planned attrition, budget cutbacks or whatever
else the company has been doing to boost profitability and
woo fickle investors. Let's not even call them investors;
the new breed of stock player cares nothing for the virtues
of a company or the people who make it thrive. Half-crazed
traders can send a stock plummeting because it earned only
$1.27 a share when Wall Street expected $1.28. Spoiled
mindless by the latest bull market, these itchy speculators
will ditch a company because it produces only a 20 percent
annual return instead of tripling in two months like the
dotcom stocks of yore.
Meanwhile, real workers shoulder impossible burdens to
pacify the moneyed geeks who gamble with their company.
Their bosses demand extra output because THEIR bosses demand
it, all the way up the chain of command. And the ultimate
boss is the shareholder. As a result, more workers are
arriving early and staying late -- and later, and later
still, finding themselves sadly deskbound during the magical
twilight of the day, squandering all the romantic
possibilities of that purple hour.
For many in the business world, even the traditional
lunch hour has been reduced to a bag of Cheez-Its and a diet
cola hastily gulped in front of the computer. What's
especially alarming is that this self-deprivation is
voluntary; nobody's forcing workers to snarf down their
lunches in the presence of a glowing monitor. But an
overloaded employee generally has two choices: work longer
hours, or work harder in the same amount of time. Neither
option makes for a pleasant day, so the Cheez-It eaters
reason that they can step out the door an hour earlier if
they toil through lunch. In reality, they simply open up
time for new projects to fall into their laps at the end of
the day. The supply of work is continuous and, like
Strelnikov in "Dr. Zhivago," it shows scant
respect for "the personal life."
Under the unwritten rules of the system, work is allowed
to encroach upon private time, but personal activities are
banned from polluting the sanctity of company time. This
calculated imbalance strikes me as a whopping and
insupportable injustice, a corporate Catch-22. It also
displays a sniffy arrogance on the part of the company: the
blithe assumption that its own interests automatically take
precedence over those of its employees.
Corporate hirelings are expected to labor into the dark
hours, even to be on call when they finally head for the
parking lot or the commuter train -- yet they face
disciplinary action if they're caught checking out "The
Dilbert Zone" on company time. Shouldn't it be a
two-way street? A company should either respect the division
between work and private life or let the juices swap around,
to borrow Huck Finn's memorable phrase. Employees who are
required to give their lives to their work are entitled to
do a little LIVING at work. But it won't happen as long as
companies need to put on a ripping good show for their
shareholders. For now, the juices flow in one direction
only.
What is to be done? Will work conditions and nervous
systems deteriorate until a white-collar revolt is
inevitable? Will some latter-day George Washington in tassel
loafers lead middle management to fire its figurative
muskets in the name of liberty? Not likely -- if only
because so many professionals need their salaries to eat and
buy sport utility vehicles. These days you won't find many
reckless souls who, like the Founding Fathers back in 1776,
would pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred
honor to a prickly and potentially dangerous cause.
I used to wonder if a white-collar union might be the
answer. In a perfect world, a union would add a big stick to
the soft voice that represents the rights of private life.
It could help mandate overtime pay for salaried workers or
even set a limit to office hours. Most important, it would
turn the one-way street into a two-way street. The problem
is that unions, brave and burly as they are, tend to get
intoxicated with their own power. If road crews are any
example, I could imagine a white-collar union requiring one
computer programmer to stand idle for every three who are
crunching code. I could imagine the strikes and picket
lines, the "scab" accountants and advertising
copywriters being pelted with calculators and cheese steaks
as they duck into the building. Unions tend to be
congenitally confrontational; they reduce the act of work,
which should spring from skill and enthusiasm, to something
like a prenuptial agreement: everything's predicated on the
assumption that the two sides are destined to become
snarling foes.
But something has to be done, and it has to be done soon
-- or eventually corporate workers will be staying overnight
at the office, as their cybergeek comrades already do in
Silicon Valley. Will companies equip their cubicles with
bunk beds? Will they have the audacity to charge room and
board, the way some orange growers do in the South? Will
corporate offices boast their own Starbucks and Hard Rock
Cafes to encourage late-night attendance from their
overworked workers? Whatever happened to evenings on the
front porch in the company of family and friends? Will they
become distant folk-memories, like taffy-pulls and mammoth
hunts?
You have a choice: if you don't want it to happen, don't
let it happen. Unless you honestly look forward to spending
every weeknight with your boss, simply refuse to surrender
any more personal territory. That means engaging in a little
low-key rebellion. It means learning to say "I would
prefer not to" when you're already overloaded. It means
doing your best work, leaving at a reasonable hour,
disconnecting yourself from your connective gadgets and
making your own kind of music in the cool dusk of your
private hours. You have a right to reclaim your time and
savor it without guilt. Take a stroll in the waning light,
frolic with your dog, read a tale from the Arabian Nights,
build that balsa-wood replica of the Woolworth Building. And
if you find yourself falling behind the next day, and the
day after that... maybe it's time to find work that also
allows you to live. Strelnikov be damned: the personal life
isn't dead until you let it die.
