I can't stress enough to get the book. If you can't afford to buy it, hit up your local library. I'm just providing the cliff's notes of what's an incredibly good book.
Here as always, is my meme to draw in the social media crowd:
The first chapter of the section discussing the nine major causes of depression is titled Disconnection from Meaningful Work. It starts out by telling the story of a recovering drug addict named Joe. He had a decent paying job at a paint store. Every day, he would clock in, mix paint, and clock out. He'd come in the next day and do the same thing. And again. And again. The monotony of the job wore on him. Not only that, but he felt that his job was pointless. His boss would only see him to chew him out when he was late, and he received no praise for doing his mundane job well. He also hated that his job had no room to grow. His job was just to follow instructions given to him by management and go home. If he had any ideas on how to better run the store, nobody listened or cared. So Joe turned to drugs to deal with his mundane job.
Now some people could try to tell Joe that his job is important. After all, people need paint, so he is providing a valuable service by making sure that people that need paint, have paint. And Joe said that he tried to psych himself up by telling himself that. Yet he couldn't help but feel a sense of dread over the idea that he might be doing that same job for thirty years.
Lost Connections cites a study Gallup did on millions of workers in 142 different countries. They found that only 13% of workers actually like their jobs. Another 63% just sleepwalk through their jobs (like Joe). Another 24% of people hate their jobs so much, that they actively try to sabotage their employer.
Just try to imagine how serious that is. If you work at a corporation that has just 5,000 employees, there are 1,200 coworkers that hate that job so much, they're actively trying to burn it to the ground! Another 3,150 coworkers are just sleepwalking through their job. There's only 650 coworkers that get up and punch in with a smile on their face. Only 650 of your fellow coworkers out of 5,000 enjoy their job, while 1,200 are trying to sabotage your workplace, and a little more than double that are just going through the motions until they clock out.
There's plenty of reasons why people hate their job. The pay sucks. The benefits suck. But this chapter doesn't address that (that's for another chapter, and another post). This is about control.
Joe felt controlled in his workplace, as many of us do. We have a boss that micromanages us, and when we present suggestions to make the company better, they're largely ignored. We're told what to do constantly, and we don't get to have a voice in how the company is run. That was why Joe found his job to be meaningless. That's why many of us find our jobs to be meaningless.
Now if you saw a story like Joe's, some would be tempted to give him some empty platitude like, "Find a job you like, that way, you'll never have to work a day in your life!" But we all know that's bullshit. Even if Joe found a different job, someone else would have to make the paint. Joe might find happiness at another line of work (he said he wanted to become a fishing tour guide in Florida, but didn't want to take the risk of moving and taking a job with less pay). But either way, someone has to make the goddamn paint!
I debate politics often online. One day, I saw in a leftist page a meme that talked about a world without money. I commented, "Then who would do the work?" I told them that if you're a leftist, you're probably in the proletariat (the working class), and if you're in the proletariat, you probably work a shit job. Yet that shit job you work is needed. Someone has to take out the trash, cook the burgers, run that retail gig, etc. And if it weren't for the money, none of us would do it. I didn't get any real answer on who would to those jobs if it weren't for the paycheck.
In chapter 18 of Lost Connections, Johann Hari addresses this. He was curious about the answer as well. He says:
The obstacle is that meaningless work has to be done. It’s not like some of the other causes of depression and anxiety I’ve been talking about, like childhood trauma, or extreme materialism, which are unnecessary malfunctions in the wider system.
After pondering all this, he found the solution in a bike shop in Baltimore, Maryland.Work is essential. I thought about the jobs all my relatives have done. My maternal grandmother cleaned toilets; my maternal grandfather worked on the docks; my paternal grandparents were farmers; my dad was a bus driver; my mother worked in a shelter for victims of domestic violence; my sister is a nurse; my brother orders stock for a supermarket. All of these jobs are necessary. If they stopped being done, then key parts of our society would cease to function.
Josh worked in a bike shop most of his life. He loved bikes. But working in a bike shop doesn't pay very well, so he and his fellow coworkers decided to start a union. A bunch of reasonable conditions under a union contract were sent to his boss, who they believed to be a decent man. The conditions were in fact, reasonable. Yearly negotiations over pay as well as permanent contracts for the workers. The boss did as you'd expect if you ever tried to organize a workplace (*cough* no experience there *cough*). He hired a legal firm that specialized in union busting and hired part time workers as scabs.
Josh and his coworkers didn't have the financial ability to take his boss to court over the illegal union busting tactics that his boss was participating in, and his boss knew that. So Josh started reading up on the concept of co-ops.
Democratic Cooperatives are businesses that are owned and controlled by the workers collectively. There's variations in the way they work, but basically, the workers make decisions on how to run the business collectively, there's no bosses (or if there are, they're elected by the workers), and everyone shares in the profits equally.
Josh and his co-workers decided to form a co-op bike shop. With that, Baltimore Bicycle Works was born. The business meets once a week to discuss work issues where everyone has a say in how things are run, and decisions are made democratically. The workers enjoy what they do because they know that they matter. Their ideas on how to run the bike shop are taken into consideration. They share in the profits collectively, instead of being employed on a low wage system. They take in new hires as apprentices, and if they do good work, they get brought on as full partners. Everyone has a voice. Everyone gets the full value of the profit they produce.
It's not a total fairy tale because as Josh's wife, Merideth says, they had to work ten hours a day, every day, for the first year. But even though they had to put in 70 hours a week, they felt that their work was meaningful. They had incentive to make sure their business succeeded.
As I stated above, more than 80% of us are unhappy at our job. Even if we're not working to actively sabotage it, we just see it as a job and nothing else. We know that something is seriously wrong with our system.
I could go on about pay and benefits and all that, but like I said, that's another chapter of the book, and another post, for another time. This is about control, and the lack of it, that we have as workers.
Imagine if we workers collectively owned and controlled the businesses we worked in, instead of having a boss that tells us what to do. How much more free would we feel? What a relief it would feel to know that we belonged to a workplace that was ours! How much more would we enjoy going into work if we knew that our voice had value and was recognized!
We wouldn't be a mass of workers going through the motions in our job, just counting the minutes until we could clock out. We wouldn't be actively trying to sabotage our company, because we own the fucking company!
The Nation published a study that showed that worker co-ops are even more productive than typical top-down businesses because it turns out that when everyone owns the company, everyone wants to make sure that company succeeds. We have the opportunity to become happier, more productive workers if we are able to own, control, and make democratic decisions in how the company is run.
In my personal life, I do like my job. I work security at a hospital. I don't feel micromanaged, because I work the night shift and part of the benefits of working that shift is that upper management is asleep while I'm working. And yet I also know that my voice really doesn't matter in how things are run.
A few weeks ago, many of us had a meeting with senior management and the topic of parking enforcement came up. Even though it doesn't seem like a big deal for those not working in my field, for those of us working security on the night shift, workers parking in places they shouldn't be (like places reserved for patients), this has become a thorn in our side.
I did have a suggestion to improve things, and I told the senior manager that I would email him my suggestion on how to fix things (I didn't want to bring it up in the meeting, because I didn't want to be "that guy" that drags on a meeting when we'd all rather be elsewhere).
I emailed my boss my proposal to fix the parking situation, and I got the response I was expecting. Nothing. No emails back saying anything. And that was exactly what I knew I'd get.
When I was in my twenties, if I proposed something about security issues, I'd be enthusiastic about it. "This is a really great idea, he's got to implement it!", I'd tell myself. And I'd get no response back.
At my age, I have more than a decade of private security experience under my belt. And yet, when I give a suggestion based on that experience, it's the same as always. Not a goddamn thing. And that was what I was expecting. I gave my proposal expecting no response, and that's exactly what I got.
I really don't think my job is making me depressed (I'm sure the real reason lies in what you'll see in a few more posts), but I know that my voice doesn't matter at my job. I'm not controlled much, but I sure as fuck don't have a voice in how to do things, either. Maybe I'm in that 63%.
My wife is a school teacher. She teaches middle school. I can tell that the lack of control in her job gets to her. Middle school students are the worst because they're at that 12-14 year old age where, well, they're just the worst. I don't need to tell you why. We were all there once.
And then there's the combination of both state and private management of her school that micromanages her job. If you work in a really poor district (as she has) there's a standardized test her students have to take every two weeks. Imagine trying to teach a class when every other Friday has to be dedicated to testing. You can't do it! Along with that, she gets an attitude from the kids and their parents, management keeps telling her how to do her job, and the state keeps giving standardized test after standardized test that both keeps her from being able to teach, and measures her abilities as a teacher. The amount of micromanagement she experiences is insane! As a husband, it's enough to make me want to find the few motherfuckers in charge of this shit and start slitting throats. No wonder she's depressed at her job! She has no freedom under it! Just imagine if you had to train dozen of people how to do your job, and you had testing on it every two weeks based on their ability to do that job. The mental strain would make it impossible.
My wife and her fellow teachers (some of which experience severe psychological distress) would be better off just running the school themselves. They're good teachers. They just need to be able to do their jobs without assholes micromanaging every part of their job.
A few posts ago, when I said I would be discussing Lost Connections, I said that the thing that separates this book from other books that talk about depression, is that self-help books that talk about depression are largely bullshit because they offer easy answers that don't really address the actual causes of depression. Lost Connections does us no such favors. This is one solution that none of us can do individually. We as the working class need to do this collectively. We need to rise up, organize, and demand a better system than the top-down management driven workplace that we work in. And that's going to be hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment