Work. But not mine. I don't think.

[pmb]

So, a while back, a friend said that she was having a tough time at work, and I responded:

I'm pretty sure that most people's relationship to work is an abusive one. Things like "work doesn't like it if I go out, so I can't be friends with you any more" and "work was bad for a long time, but yesterday it was good, so I think it's changed and we've made progress in our relationship" and "it's not work, it's me" and "if I just loved work more and was better then it wouldn't be so mean to me" etc.

I have since then gotten more people than I am comfortable with privately telling me that my analogy is exactly accurate.

Yowza. This sucks, and is indicative of an epidemic. But why is it true? Is it because we are all working for someone other than ourselves, and that the feedback loops are screwed up? As John Allen Paulos notes, regression to the mean implies that after being praised for a good job we will probably do worse, and after being punished for a bad job we will do better. Does this mean that every innumerate organization that tries to manage people will tend to punish but not praise, because punishment is proven to work, while praise merely allows people to fail?

Or is it something deeper? Is it because, among most of the people I know, the whole food/shelter/survival thing is taken care of, and so we've moved to a higher level in the hierarchy of needs, but the tools we used to just blow right past level 2 actively work against us getting through 3 and 4 up to 5? Work doesn't seem to inspire community, love, or self-esteem among its participants, as a matter of fact, it seems to do just the opposite. In many workplaces you will find people who harbor tiny petty grudges and nurse them throughout the day as they semi-diligently work at a job they hate and then their boss tells them that their most recent work was crap.

It doesn't have to be that way. It seems like modern "scientific management" techniques that MBAs are taught generally stem from a need to raise the floor and make sure everyone is doing a part. If we let people be self-motivated and let them do their own thing (which they nominally do as members of modern society, but this whole abusive relationship thing gets in the way) then I'm pretty sure the slackers will completely slack, but the motivated people will produce more than you previously imagined. I wonder if the area under the curve will go up or down? In computer stuff, the area under the curve seems to go up - see Google, etc.. In tax-form processing, it might go down. Because who the hell gives a damn about tax-form processing?

I like to hope that the human psyche is such that, if people are free, they will do better. Then all that is required to turn this situation around is for organizations to give their employees maximum freedom, not turn into fascists internally, and watch their competitors lose. Whole Foods seems to have adopted this approach, and Visa apparently used to be this way as well. I do wonder, however. Is the problem that people who are in a screwed up situation still do okay work, because they are still striving for self-esteem even though they are in an environment working against that? In my copious spare time, perhaps I should check out D.L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” pp. 205-213 in Ronald Weitzer, ed., Deviance and Social Control.. I looked on the web for what I thought was a craig_r_meyer quote that went something like "there's nothing okay with being sane in a fucked up environment", but I only found that article referenced again and again.

Is your work abusive? How? Why are you still there? Can you even imagine a non-abusive work situation? All these questions are serious. When so many intelligent people I respect tell that my analogy is right, it seems like something has gone deeply wrong. What is it, and how can it be fixed? Your thoughts, please.

--UPDATE, after reading "On Being Sane in Insane Places"--
The link is unfortunately not particularly relevant to this whole screed. The only possible thing of interest is the fact that all the inmates could tell when people were actually sane. And I do recall meeting people whose attitude towards works was one of pride about their work, but a detachment WRT their environment and they seemed to have exactly found the Zen of caring and not caring that would allow them to leave a sinking ship. I recall being almost shocked at their attitudes, in part because the sort of fealty and loyalty I had always associated with being a "good worker" was completely not present. They were proud of their work, friendly to their colleagues, but their well-being was NOT inextricably linked to the organization's. And I could pick out who these people were VERY quickly. Perhaps those people truly were sane in an insane place.

Comments

tax form processing

[scarla.livejournal.com]

maybe tax form processing would go up as well, if instead of feeling pressured by superiors and suffocated by beaurocracy, from somewhere in the mass of generally useless feeling tax form processors somebody suddenly feels inspired, not to mention free and confident enough, to speak up and say there is a better way to do this. they could make it less complicated, without compromising the material.

because probably those people are the only ones who do care at all about tax forms, but not in the way that they really want to process more of them.

Re: tax form processing

[pmb.livejournal.com]

That could very well be true. So are there any jobs that you think are so onerous that allowing people to be free and not making them feel trapped and small will mean that those jobs simply would not get done? My gut says there might be - perhaps migrant farm worker day labor type stuff. But what about jobs that aren't probably illegal? Are there any jobs in which it is profitable to employ people legally (at least min. wage, OSHA compliant workplace, etc.) which are so brainsucking by their very nature that nobody would do them if they weren't beaten into it?

Re: tax form processing

[cosyne.livejournal.com]

if there are such jobs, should they either be done away with, or automated? I can't begin to list the number of jobs that I wouldn't dream of doing as a profession, but would be interested in writing software to do. And if it's crap which isn't worth automating and still isn't worth it for a human to do, maybe there's a better way? Like not doing complicated tax forms? And as a tangent on that topic, I think beauracracy might work better if there was a form of metabeauracracy to keep it in check. The way I see it, beauracracy (and most rules/laws) are to make sure that things work, even when humans are involved. Because most people can handle things pretty well, but you eventually get the one random asshole who fucks things up by driving on the wrong side of the road or not paying a fair share of taxes, so you have to put in this huge system of rules to keep that asshole in check. But if you don't have an "inefficiency complaint form" or similar, then nothing keeps the beauracracy in check an we all loose. Luckily, I seldom find myself in a situation where I can't cheat the beauracracy in order to get things done, but it comes back to having sets of rules which people will actually follow, rather than trying to force them into unnatural behavior patterns and having them circumvent the rules.
anyways. i'm rambling.

Re: tax form processing

[scarla.livejournal.com]

cleaning up vomit at the state fair?

Re: tax form processing

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

I do know that a century ago a lot of people went into service (maids, butlers, etc, not army). And when most people who would have done that started going into factories instead, people basically had to suck it up and do without -- or pay massively better wages and treat people way better. So society does stop doing jobs sometimes.

Re: tax form processing

[litch.livejournal.com]

from my history of industry class some decade and a half ago I remeber that in the early industrial revolution that one of the big problems they had was people coming to a factory, working just long enough to get the money they needed for whatever and then bailing, and one of the problems they had was consistent enough production to be able to make the efficiencies of scale actually pay

this tendancy was particularly pronounced in times of relative abundance, unless you really needed money why the hell would you go to one of those miserable fucking factories that were loud, stinking, and unpleasent doing boring jobs when you could do well working on a farm in the pleasent country