“Life isn’t nice, it’s contingent.” Kendal Roy
I was set an article to study for my French class that detailed the generational struggles with work and life. It was also accompanied by a short cartoon video exhorting the benefits of building mixed teams of energetic Gen Zers, professionally focused millennials and seasoned grizzly boomers. The cartoon boomer was me with less hair and more tummy. French businesses were being encouraged to put me on teams with the young ones to share my history of the company and my deep knowledge of the market. Meanwhile, I would be benefiting from the energy and new ideas from the newbies while we worked in shiny new ‘collaborative spaces’. The interesting thing was that in the more detailed article the new ideas the ‘petit jeunes’ are bringing seem to best summarized as “work sucks, there is more to life than a job and I get paid to do the job, I turn up on time and leave on time and do what I was asked to do so don’t talk to me about my commitment?”
It’s actually hard to argue with any of that. It’s not as if many of us are in our dream jobs, I have been in container logistics for 40 years, I never got the job doing A&R for Virgin Records or writing album reviews for NME, I’m not running my own winery, I don’t have my own restaurant. The social contract with work is and has been for however many years that one does one’s best and gets paid more or less accordingly to that effort. If your face fits you get paid more, if you are a handsome tall white guy you get paid more, if you kiss a little ass you get paid more. If you don’t kiss enough ass or even worse, are a woman or a minority, or if you demonstrate that you can actually see behind the curtain and see there is someone frantically pulling levers, you will get paid less or shit-canned. Yet ironically for most of my early working life, and more generally in the USA, there has been the ongoing pretense that companies are like some giant family, looking after you and in return for your slavish devotion, working long hours, traveling Sundays to be at work on the other side of the Atlantic first thing on Monday morning is just the baseline of personal commitment in return. The protective cloak of health care for you and your loved ones, that only comes with a job, reinforces the need to play the corporate game, the added cosseting of 401k contributions or stock options tie the restraints tighter. The bondage analogies pile up as most contracts of employment are metaphorical ballgags. In California they have the marvelous oxymoron of the ‘At Will Contract’, the device that flies in the face of any sense of mutual commitment. ‘At Will’ meaning I can fire you if I feel like it. You can then go off and rely upon whatever weak regulatory protection you can find after the event to come and complain, of course the employee is ‘at will’ to leave, as long as they work their notice, don’t go and work in the same industry for 2 years and don’t mind not having any healthcare.
One thing that does make me smile is the dance over remote working. The guy in the corner office who worked his way there by the old route of golf, kissing much butt, being a good company man and absently striving long hours while his kids were growing up is now unsettled to find that in his moment in the sun there is no-one in the office to appreciate how cool that corner spot really is. If the millennials and gen Z were already not buying into the corporate dance from a lack of credibility perspective, after all thanks to streaming they have watched every episode of The Office, the pandemic didn’t just stop the dance it blew up the dance hall.
So for 2 years everyone in office work worked from home, the world not only didn’t fall apart, but life improved on most measures. If you were fortunate to not be in healthcare or one of the working poor you worked remotely, doing the normal stuff, at times that suited you, wearing what the hell you felt like wearing, at least below the waist if you had to Zoom, not commuting. For women, not spending an hour and a half longer than most men to get hair washed, dried, make up applied, outfit put together was life changing. For those with small kids, the ability to actually achieve something like a work-life balance arrived. For everyone other than commercial real estate investors, the new way of working was so self-evidently better it continued, even when the pandemic reasons to work remotely melted away. Then we had the steady drip drip of articles, opinion pieces, straightforward shill pieces, news items and large announcements by the likes of Google that remote work would stop. That would be the same Google that fired 12,000 jobs, ‘pour encourager des autres”?
All the bullshit about the loss of culture, the loss of the networking at the water cooler, the lack of mentoring opportunities was written by people who had obviously not stepped in an office in the last 5 years. Rows of mindless cubes with no defensible space – except the BSDs in the four corners – the constant distractions of other people’s voices while you are trying to get some mundane task done. They have also not understood what headphones have done to the great office experience, go into any office and there is no smart banter, no chit-chat and certainly no informal mentoring. Everyone is working away in headphones in their own island.
The other sand in the Vaseline is the lack of people wanting to do terrible jobs. Due to largely demographic reasons reducing the intake of raw meat into the work machine and the uncomfortable fact that the boomers have lots of money in their houses and 401ks and decided en masse to stop while they could and leave the workforce, we have a situation in the US that for every 100 jobs there are only 70 jobseekers. So if you want to hire someone good, talented, experienced, do you think forcing them to come to an office under the old rules is going to help you recruit?
We also hardly need to remind ourselves how Corporate America rewards businesses who look after their employees vs those who evidently do not give a shit, of course they run screaming from the beneficent. They instead lavish high praise in terms of stock prices and glowing reviews on the studs who announce 125,000 layoffs at the FAANGs that already earned billions from the pandemic. The destructive and long term impact on complete communities when companies decided over the last half century to please the market by moving manufacturing production somewhere else is never accounted for, but it has been responsible for swathes of the North East and Mid West being reduced to random pools of despair and opioids. It should come as no surprise that the very pols whining about China having the temerity to want to look after their own people and take their turn at wielding some commercial and financial heft in their backyard are the same people who benefitted directly from the wholesale export of jobs to China to line their own pockets and allow them to endow yet another overly shiny building on an Ivy League campus in a town surrounded by rows of empty former factories.
So against this cheery backdrop of what actually defines corporate responsibility, together with the emetic greenwashing of large companies, is it any wonder that people who have come into the labor pool in the last 10 years think my generation and our rules about work are, unsurprsingly, full of shit. Especially if they were raised by parents like me, who had enough success under the rules to give them the kind of upbringing where they were encouraged to follow their dreams. I studiously advised my kids not to do a degree to get a job but study what you find interesting. I studied the most beige of subjects possible by doing “Business Studies” and then off I went to work without really using much, if anything, of what I studied for 3 years. So it is not surprising that the current 20 somethings with a degree in esoteria and pocketful of student debt find much of mainstream business behavior an unpleasant experience, even tech or especially tech. Tech had the hoodie-wearing hacker for freedom aura, breaking stuff and building a brighter new future was the promise. What they delivered was ubiquitous free porn, screen addiction, the total destruction of female self-esteem for anyone under 16 and the concentration of wealth in a few hands not seen since the days of the Robber Barons. The new genie to be let out of the bottle AI is not really going to improve life much, there will be no ‘AI Spring’ like there was not really an Arab Spring and many young people probably get that more than Wall Street does. Tech is not breaching the barriers to a better world, its not solving the climate problems. In fact, it’s making the whole thing worse, as the damn servers need juice. And for what? Some more ads for some more stuff. The world has not been left by us Boomers in a great state for the succeeding generations, a world, as I read earlier today: “in which a tiny sliver of the world’s population is growing richer and richer while everyone else lives in millennial poverty or circumstances of heightened economic insecurity”.
I went to San Francisco a couple of times earlier this year and the Financial District looked like it had been cleared to film a post apocalyptic horror movie, trash everywhere, homeless like extras in costume as zombies, no cars, no-one in the offices, few places to eat and mostly grab and run back to the secure space of whatever office you are hiding out in. People used to put up with the sub-optimal BART transit system to brave the crush from the suburbs into the city. But post-pandemic it’s become the preserve of the homeless and the many sadly crazy folks who sit and ride it, in comfort, from one end of the system to the other, all day long. It is shunned now by working people and ridership has fallen off a cliff. It’s not helped by the fact it’s less of a pain to drive now as if people do go in, start times are flexible, parking is easier to find and has taken a bit of a market adjustment in price.
My own business has gone to hybrid with Tuesday and Thursday being preferred days for the office with core hours of 10-2, but its not enforced, at least not by me. As time has gone by it’s less rigidly observed, and it will remain more informal than formal. We have reduced our footprint from 2 offices to one, extended our lease for a 25% reduction in rent. On balance the office is a bust, there are millions of square feet of commercial real estate that is, or is about to be, without any future income. Its a shoe waiting to drop in every large city and ultimately in everyone’s pension funds.
If you cannot provide more than a general sense of camaraderie accruing from a sense of common purpose, in so far as what your business does is not fundamentally a ‘good thing’, then our expectations must change as to what the work compact is between the company and its people. Let’s not kid ourselves, most enterprises are not helping the environment, they do not improve people’s lives other than the shareholders. They are usually some smaller part of a larger business network, a link in a value chain. People like to do good work. I have never believed there is a need to second guess every employee, that unless I am on them they will naturally slack off. People like to complete the tasks assigned to them, to get a sense of self satisfaction from doing the task well. Confinement proved that in spades. We no longer make many widgets as a society, so paying someone for the number of widgets made, like paying for the number of hours worked making widgets, is arcane. Remote work allowed people to get their tasks done when it best suited the completion of the tasks, which is when the person responsible for the tasks most feels energized to do it, rather than an arbitrary allocation of 9am until 5pm.
I think the classic work pattern, again for the fortunate white collar legions, is now disintermediated, stuff gets done when you feel it best gets done.
Many people are just getting by, going to crappy jobs, getting paid less than they need. Poverty is easy to define, its when you have too much month at the end of your money. That is the situation that over the last few years more and more people have found themselves in. Meanwhile the data shows that since 2020, the richest 1% have hoovered up around two-thirds of the new wealth (about $42tn); which is almost twice as much as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. That is part of the reason the ‘craquers’ can smash stuff up in our ongoing protests here in France. People do not stop them because everyone is feeling we, they, everyone, is being taken advantage of by the faceless system. Macron to many people is just the same as Trump, Putin or Bezos.
In that atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the bright young things entering the work force do not care about the game that everyone has obediently played for over 100 years. They will pick jobs that allow them to work wherever they want to be. They will not spend 3 hours of every day commuting. And you can forget ‘live to work’ as a mantra, they work to live and all work is suspect.
It’s another long weekend in May and I have been listening to these lovely people: check it out here.
It’s You – LA Priest
Pul – Ya Tosiba
Lose You – Bully
Silver Velvet – The Courtneys
This is What I’m Here For – Ian Hunter ( yes Ian fucking Hunter still going)
Superficial Conversation – Madeline Kenney
Wild Geese – Amy May Ellis
Fits – Do Nothing
Its Just a Bit Of Blood – bdrmm
Doritos & Fritos – 100 gecs
Ava Adore – Smashing Pumpkins ( Rachel is filling in gaps in my musical knowledge)
Victoria – Brutus
Modern Business Hymns – Protomartyr ( Thanks Rut for encouraging me to persevere)
Bleach – Coach Party
Wet Tennis – Sofi Tukker
Don’t Be Another – Skinny Pelembe
Hot Penny Days (Charlotte Adigéry- Bolis Pupul remix) – Dry Cleaning
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 