Showing posts with label workplace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label workplace. Show all posts
Sunday 19 September 2021
Saturday 16 May 2020
Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work
Our health and lives cannot be ruled by market forces alone. Now thousands of scholars are calling for a way out of the crisis. Nancy Fraser, Susan Neiman , Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen, Jan-Werner Müller, Dani Rodrik, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, Ha-Joon Chang, and many others write in The Guardian
Healthcare workers protest against the handling of the coronavirus crisis in Liège, Belgium, May 2020. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
Working humans are so much more than “resources”. This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the Covid-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.
How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratising firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.
Every morning, men and women, especially members of racialised communities, migrants and informal economy workers, rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than that eloquently simple term “essential worker”. That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, “human resource”. Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all.
Every morning, quarantined men and women rise in their homes to fulfil from afar the missions of the organisations for which they work. They work into the night. To those who believe that employees cannot be trusted to do their jobs without supervision, that workers require surveillance and external discipline, these men and women are proving the contrary. They are demonstrating, day and night, that workers are not one type of stakeholder among many: they hold the keys to their employers’ success. They are the core constituency of the firm, but are, nonetheless, mostly excluded from participating in the government of their workplaces – a right monopolised by capital investors.
To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognise the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. After the two world wars, women’s undeniable contribution to society helped win them the right to vote. By the same token, it is time to enfranchise workers.
Representation of labour investors in the workplace has existed in Europe since the close of the second world war, through institutions known as works councils. Yet these representative bodies have a weak voice at best in the government of firms, and are subordinate to the choices of the executive management teams appointed by shareholders. They have been unable to stop or even slow the relentless momentum of self-serving capital accumulation, ever more powerful in its destruction of our environment. These bodies should now be granted similar rights to those exercised by boards. To do so, firm governments (that is, top management) could be required to obtain double majority approval, from chambers representing workers as well as shareholders.
In Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, different forms of codetermination (Mitbestimmung) put in place progressively after the second world war were a crucial step toward giving a voice to workers – but they are still insufficient to create actual citizenship in firms. Even in the United States, where worker organising and union rights have been considerably suppressed, there is now a growing call to give labour investors the right to elect representatives with a supermajority within boards. Issues such as the choice of a CEO, setting major strategies and profit distribution are too important to be left to shareholders alone. A personal investment of labour; that is, of one’s mind and body, one’s health – one’s very life – ought to come with the collective right to validate or veto these decisions.
This crisis also shows that work must not be treated as a commodity, that market mechanisms alone cannot be left in charge of the choices that affect our communities most deeply. For years now, jobs and supplies in the health sector have been subject to the guiding principle of profitability; today, the pandemic is revealing the extent to which this principle has led us astray. Certain strategic and collective needs must simply be made immune to such considerations. The rising body count across the globe is a terrible reminder that some things must never be treated as commodities. Those who continue arguing to the contrary are imperilling us with their dangerous ideology. Profitability is an intolerable yardstick when it comes to our health and our life on this planet.
Decommodifying work means preserving certain sectors from the laws of the so-called free market; it also means ensuring that all people have access to work and the dignity it brings. One way to do this is with the creation of a job guarantee. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us that everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. A job guarantee would not only offer each person access to work that allows them to live with dignity, it would also provide a crucial boost to our collective capability to meet the many pressing social and environmental challenges we currently face. Guaranteed employment would allow governments, working through local communities, to provide dignified work while contributing to the immense effort of fighting environmental collapse. Across the globe, as unemployment skyrockets, job guarantee programs can play a crucial role in assuring the social, economic, and environmental stability of our democratic societies.
The European Union must include such a project in its green deal. A review of the mission of the European Central Bank so that it could finance this program, which is necessary to our survival, would give it a legitimate place in the life of each and every citizen of the EU. A countercyclical solution to the explosive unemployment on the way, this program will prove a key contribution to the EU’s prosperity.
We should not react now with the same innocence as in 2008, when we responded to the economic crisis with an unconditional bailout that swelled public debt while demanding nothing in return. If our governments step in to save businesses in the current crisis, then businesses must step in as well, and meet the general basic conditions of democracy. In the name of the democratic societies they serve, and which constitute them, in the name of their responsibility to ensure our survival on this planet, our governments must make their aid to firms conditional on certain changes to their behaviours. In addition to hewing to strict environmental standards, firms must be required to fulfil certain conditions of democratic internal government. A successful transition from environmental destruction to environmental recovery and regeneration will be best led by democratically governed firms, in which the voices of those who invest their labor carry the same weight as those who invest their capital when it comes to strategic decisions.
We have had more than enough time to see what happens when labor, the planet, and capital gains are placed in the balance under the current system: labor and the planet always lose. Thanks to research from the University of Cambridge, we know that “achievable design changes” could reduce global energy consumption by 73%. But those changes are labor intensive, and require choices that are often costlier over the short term. So long as firms are run in ways that seek to maximise profit for their capital investors alone, and in a world where energy is cheap, why make these changes? Despite the challenges of this transition, certain socially minded or co-operatively run businesses – pursuing hybrid goals that take financial, social and environmental considerations into account, and developing democratic internal governments – have already shown the potential of such positive impact.
Let us fool ourselves no longer: left to their own devices, most capital investors will not care for the dignity of labour investors, nor will they lead the fight against environmental catastrophe. Another option is available. Democratise firms; decommodify work; stop treating human beings as resources so that we can focus together on sustaining life on this planet.
Working humans are so much more than “resources”. This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the Covid-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.
How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratising firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.
Every morning, men and women, especially members of racialised communities, migrants and informal economy workers, rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than that eloquently simple term “essential worker”. That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, “human resource”. Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all.
Every morning, quarantined men and women rise in their homes to fulfil from afar the missions of the organisations for which they work. They work into the night. To those who believe that employees cannot be trusted to do their jobs without supervision, that workers require surveillance and external discipline, these men and women are proving the contrary. They are demonstrating, day and night, that workers are not one type of stakeholder among many: they hold the keys to their employers’ success. They are the core constituency of the firm, but are, nonetheless, mostly excluded from participating in the government of their workplaces – a right monopolised by capital investors.
To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognise the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. After the two world wars, women’s undeniable contribution to society helped win them the right to vote. By the same token, it is time to enfranchise workers.
Representation of labour investors in the workplace has existed in Europe since the close of the second world war, through institutions known as works councils. Yet these representative bodies have a weak voice at best in the government of firms, and are subordinate to the choices of the executive management teams appointed by shareholders. They have been unable to stop or even slow the relentless momentum of self-serving capital accumulation, ever more powerful in its destruction of our environment. These bodies should now be granted similar rights to those exercised by boards. To do so, firm governments (that is, top management) could be required to obtain double majority approval, from chambers representing workers as well as shareholders.
In Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, different forms of codetermination (Mitbestimmung) put in place progressively after the second world war were a crucial step toward giving a voice to workers – but they are still insufficient to create actual citizenship in firms. Even in the United States, where worker organising and union rights have been considerably suppressed, there is now a growing call to give labour investors the right to elect representatives with a supermajority within boards. Issues such as the choice of a CEO, setting major strategies and profit distribution are too important to be left to shareholders alone. A personal investment of labour; that is, of one’s mind and body, one’s health – one’s very life – ought to come with the collective right to validate or veto these decisions.
This crisis also shows that work must not be treated as a commodity, that market mechanisms alone cannot be left in charge of the choices that affect our communities most deeply. For years now, jobs and supplies in the health sector have been subject to the guiding principle of profitability; today, the pandemic is revealing the extent to which this principle has led us astray. Certain strategic and collective needs must simply be made immune to such considerations. The rising body count across the globe is a terrible reminder that some things must never be treated as commodities. Those who continue arguing to the contrary are imperilling us with their dangerous ideology. Profitability is an intolerable yardstick when it comes to our health and our life on this planet.
Decommodifying work means preserving certain sectors from the laws of the so-called free market; it also means ensuring that all people have access to work and the dignity it brings. One way to do this is with the creation of a job guarantee. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us that everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. A job guarantee would not only offer each person access to work that allows them to live with dignity, it would also provide a crucial boost to our collective capability to meet the many pressing social and environmental challenges we currently face. Guaranteed employment would allow governments, working through local communities, to provide dignified work while contributing to the immense effort of fighting environmental collapse. Across the globe, as unemployment skyrockets, job guarantee programs can play a crucial role in assuring the social, economic, and environmental stability of our democratic societies.
The European Union must include such a project in its green deal. A review of the mission of the European Central Bank so that it could finance this program, which is necessary to our survival, would give it a legitimate place in the life of each and every citizen of the EU. A countercyclical solution to the explosive unemployment on the way, this program will prove a key contribution to the EU’s prosperity.
We should not react now with the same innocence as in 2008, when we responded to the economic crisis with an unconditional bailout that swelled public debt while demanding nothing in return. If our governments step in to save businesses in the current crisis, then businesses must step in as well, and meet the general basic conditions of democracy. In the name of the democratic societies they serve, and which constitute them, in the name of their responsibility to ensure our survival on this planet, our governments must make their aid to firms conditional on certain changes to their behaviours. In addition to hewing to strict environmental standards, firms must be required to fulfil certain conditions of democratic internal government. A successful transition from environmental destruction to environmental recovery and regeneration will be best led by democratically governed firms, in which the voices of those who invest their labor carry the same weight as those who invest their capital when it comes to strategic decisions.
We have had more than enough time to see what happens when labor, the planet, and capital gains are placed in the balance under the current system: labor and the planet always lose. Thanks to research from the University of Cambridge, we know that “achievable design changes” could reduce global energy consumption by 73%. But those changes are labor intensive, and require choices that are often costlier over the short term. So long as firms are run in ways that seek to maximise profit for their capital investors alone, and in a world where energy is cheap, why make these changes? Despite the challenges of this transition, certain socially minded or co-operatively run businesses – pursuing hybrid goals that take financial, social and environmental considerations into account, and developing democratic internal governments – have already shown the potential of such positive impact.
Let us fool ourselves no longer: left to their own devices, most capital investors will not care for the dignity of labour investors, nor will they lead the fight against environmental catastrophe. Another option is available. Democratise firms; decommodify work; stop treating human beings as resources so that we can focus together on sustaining life on this planet.
Monday 21 October 2013
Do team-mates have to get along?
October 27, 2013
Cricket players or comrades in arms?
Jonathan Wilson's analysis, here on the Cordon, of cricket's workplace and the "unrealistic" expectations of player relationships it seems to generate among fans made for some very interesting reading.
Fans, of course, expect player relationships to be far more cordial and chummy than they actually are, or even could be, because - among other things - they view cricket through an imaginative and hopeful lens, one that refracts and distorts and magnifies and colours in all sorts of ways. We view cricket not as a series of prosaic encounters of bat and ball wielded by salaried men, but rather as the stage and setting for a variety of noble encounters that resolve archetypal conflicts. We populate this stage with a variety of stock characters: heroes (our side), villains (their side), damsels in distress (the nations the players represent, which need rescuing from all manner of insults), scapegoats (those on our side who fail us and must be blamed for the defeats that could not possibly be our just fate), traitors (see:scapegoat), village idiots (sometimes umpires, sometimes opponents, sometimes selectors, sometimes our own team), magicians, gnomes and wise men (the captains, and now increasingly the coaches, all capable of changing the fortunes of nations and groups of men with mysterious incantations and potions). And so on.
The vision of cricket afforded by these lenses is one that cricket writers, going back to the game's earliest days, and television producers and commentators in more recent times, have drawn on and embellished. It is one whose moral universe is relatively unambiguous, whose human relationships follow smooth, predictable trajectories; its decision-makers experience little cognitive dissonance, whether ethical, strategic or tactical; where rough edges are miraculously smoothed out by good intentions and ceaseless striving. The only reward our heroes expect is adulation and fame and the gratitude of adoring nations.
I do not mean to suggest that such is the fan's consciously distorted view of a game; rather it is that every fan's experience and interpretation of the game is not without its component of unconscious or subconscious fantasy imposed on its visible proceedings.
One set of prominent stock characters that populate this stage for the fan are drawn from stories of adventure and war, where "bands of brothers" or "comrades in arms" face adversity and the enemy as a united front and ultimately emerge triumphant. A magical brew of togetherness is stewed, one made more potent by mutual respect and affection and something called "team spirit"; it overcomes all opponents. Among this band of brothers, there is fraternity and camaraderie; there is much backslapping and shoulder-to-shoulder support; there are handshakes and there is mateship; everyone has someone's back. This a bunch of soldiers, united together, perhaps like the "pal battalions" of Kitchener's Army, going off to fight the good battle.
The modern team knows of this image and it draws on it in its public-relations exercises and its team-building manoeuvres; there is talk of visiting war memorials and cemeteries; "boot camps" are conducted, sometimes in jungles, sometimes in mountains; team members speak glowingly of the dressing-room "atmosphere", one made especially salubrious for some by long hours of drinking together; players speak glowingly of their trench buddies and their "partnerships".
In this understanding of the game, the workplace picture of men and their trades, engaged in work for wages, possibly drawn into all manners of conflict, on or off the field, with their co-workers or "management", is a jarring disruption. It is not one that sits comfortably with our imagined conceptions of what takes place on a cricket field. It is not how we "enjoy" the game. It is not how the game functions for us, or how we make sense of, and ascribe meaning to, the "hallowed 22 yards" far away, dimly glimpsed, out there in the middle.
Do team-mates have to get along?
There is often an assumption among fans that team-mates are all great friends. After all, whenever we see them, they are forever hugging each other or high-fiving, and most of them are incapable of getting through a post-match interview without talking collectively of "the lads" or "the boys", and insisting that "the spirit" has never been better.
Our own experience of sport, whether it's a frenetic five-a-side on a Thursday night or a leisurely 35-over game on a Sunday, tells us that the people you play with, while there might be the odd niggle - "Why will Mike not stop hitting it long?", "When did Tom last buy a round?", "Will Steve ever stop banging on about that trial he had with Leicestershire in 1972?" - are essentially people you quite enjoy having a drink with afterwards.
Ricky Ponting's comments in his autobiography on Michael Clarke come as a reminder that among professionals those niggles are often far more serious. "Away from cricket, he moved in a different world to the rest of us," Ponting wrote. "It never worried me if a bloke didn't want a drink in the dressing-room, but I did wonder about blokes who didn't see the value in sticking around for a chat and a laugh and a post-mortem on the day's play. This was the time when we could revel in our success, pick up the blokes who were struggling, and acknowledge the guys who were at the peak of their powers. Pup hardly bought into this tradition for a couple of years and the team noticed."
The tone is reasonably diplomatic, and Ponting goes out of his way to stress that Clarke wasn't ever "disruptive" and that there was no suggestion he was slacking or not putting in the effort in training, but the episodes with Simon Katich and Mike Hussey suggest just how deep that frustration ran. Clarke was not, for want of a better term, one of them, and reading between the lines, the more traditional players wondered whether he felt himself better than them.
Jarrod Kimber wrote in the first issue of the Nightwatchman about how Clarke is representative of a shift in Australian masculinity from hairy-chested beer-swilling to manicured cocktail-sipping, and that probably didn't help, but the truth is that in any team there's a player or two who has to shoot off immediately after play, whether because they are too busy or because they have promised their wife or just because they don't much like sitting around having a beer. When things are going well, that's not a problem; when things are going badly, you can guarantee they are the ones who'll be slagged off in the clubhouse afterwards.
The issue then is chicken-and-egg: do they not hang around because they are self-centred in how they approach the game, or do they become self-centred because the rest of the team regards them with suspicion?
Of course, in this regard the major difference between professionals and happy weekend amateurs is the stakes. We grumble about a team-mate who never passes or scores too slowly because it might cost us the game and because we want to be involved as much as possible. A Test cricketer fumes about it because he is playing for his nation in front of an audience of millions and because defeats can cost contracts.
Yet does it really matter if team-mates get on? The great Dutch football coach Rinus Michels, architect of Total Football, pioneers what he termed the Conflict Principle: he felt if his players became too comfortable they would lose their edge. Look at most workplaces. While you will get groups of friends, most people just rub along and wouldn't dream of socialising with their workmates once they had moved on to a different job.
Dressing rooms, it's easy for fans and amateurs to forget, are just workplaces. Everybody is fighting under one banner, and yet at the same time they are fighting for preferment with each other. If you do lose the game and the pressure comes for changes, you don't want to be the one whose match figures were 0 for 185, just as when cutbacks come in an office, you don't want to be the one whose sales figures dropped by 10% over the previous year. Football club dressing rooms are probably even worse, given the frequency with which players move on: why stick up for the idiot winger who never tracks back when the chances are you'll be playing for different teams next year anyway? It comes as no great surprise when the combative Roy Keane says he made no friends in football, but it's rather more startling when the genial Niall Quinn, seemingly the epitome of the tough but easy-going, hard-drinking Irishman, admits he didn't either.
So long as players aren't wilfully undermining each other - as the crowd favourite Len Shackleton did when Sunderland broke the world transfer record to sign Trevor Ford and, fearing for his status, began delivering crosses so loaded with spin they were impossible to control, before turning to the fans and shrugging - it doesn't seem much to matter. If you don't deliberately run them out or start texting details of technical flaws to the opposition, it doesn't much matter whether you'd go to their wedding - so long as things are going well. Under stress, fault lines will always be exposed.
So what is team spirit? Does it exist and is it important? It's clearly true that certain players for certain countries - and particularly nations that are in the process of rebuilding after revolution or war: Croatia in 1996 and 1998 or Bosnia today in football - do at times seem inspired by notions of patriotic duty, but for the most part team spirit seems something of a myth, a nebulous togetherness generated when things are going well. As the former Tottenham and Barcelona striker Steve Archibald once noted in a moment of unusual eloquence, perhaps aided by a wistful translation into Spanish and out again, "Team spirit is a chimera glimpsed in the moment of victory."
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