From Madoff to Murdoch: the demise of the work ethic

"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is  slavery." Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), Russian novelist, author, and playwright

The former head of the biggest stock exchange in the world swindles his  clients. The editors and journalists of Britain's largest paper hack the  phone of the victims of crime and terrorism. Greek workers paralyze the  country, refusing to give up early and costly pensions. American congressmen  say that defaulting on the country's debts wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Airplanes, missiles, and space shuttles crash due to lack of maintenance,  absent-mindedness, and pure ignorance. Software support personnel, aided and  abetted by Customer Relationship Management application suites, are curt  (when reachable) and unhelpful. Despite expensive, state of the art supply  chain management systems, retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers habitually  run out of stocks of finished and semi-finished products and raw materials.  People from all walks of life and at all levels of the corporate ladder  skirt their responsibilities and neglect their duties.

Whatever happened to the work ethic? Where is the pride in the immaculate  quality of one's labor and produce? Both dead in the water. A series of earth-shattering social, economic, and  technological trends converged to render their jobs loathsome to many - a  tedious nuisance best avoided.

1. Job security is a thing of the past. Itinerancy in various McJobs reduces  the incentive to invest time, effort, and resources into a position that may  not be yours next week. Brutal layoffs and downsizing traumatized the  workforce and produced in the typical workplace a culture of obsequiousness,  blind obeisance, the suppression of independent thought and speech, and  avoidance of initiative and innovation. Many offices and shop floors now  resemble prisons.

2. Outsourcing and offshoring of back office (and, more recently, customer  relations and research and development) functions sharply and adversely  effected the quality of services from helpdesks to airline ticketing and  from insurance claims processing to remote maintenance. Cultural mismatches  between the (typically Western) client base and the offshore service  department (usually in a developing country where labor is cheap and plenty)  only exacerbated the breakdown of trust between customer and provider or  supplier.

3. The populace in developed countries are addicted to leisure time. Most  people regard their jobs as a necessary evil, best avoided whenever  possible. Hence phenomena like the permanent temp - employees who prefer a  succession of temporary assignments to holding a proper job. The media and  the arts contribute to this perception of work as a drag - or a potentially  dangerous addiction (when they portray raging and abusive workaholics).

4. The other side of this dismal coin is workaholism - the addiction to  work. Far from valuing it, these addicts resent their dependence. The job  performance of the typical workaholic leaves a lot to be desired.  Workaholics are fatigued, suffer from ancillary addictions, and short  attention spans. They frequently abuse substances, are narcissistic and  destructively competitive (being driven, they are incapable of team work).

5. The depersonalization of manufacturing - the intermediated divorce  between the artisan/worker and his client - contributed a lot to the  indifference and alienation of the common industrial worker, the veritable  "anonymous cog in the machine".

Not only was the link between worker and product broken - but the bond  between artisan and client was severed as well. Few employees know their  customers or patrons first hand. It is hard to empathize with and care about  a statistic, a buyer whom you have never met and never likely to encounter.  It is easy in such circumstances to feel immune to the consequences of one's  negligence and apathy at work. It is impossible to be proud of what you do  and to be committed to your work - if you never set eyes on either the final  product or the customer! Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, "Modern Times"  captured this estrangement brilliantly.

6. Many former employees of mega-corporations abandon the rat race and  establish their own businesses - small and home enterprises.  Undercapitalized, understaffed, and outperformed by the competition, these  fledging and amateurish outfits usually spew out shoddy products and  lamentable services - only to expire within the first year of business.

7. Despite decades of advanced notice, globalization caught most firms the  world over by utter surprise. Ill-prepared and fearful of the onslaught of  foreign competition, companies big and small grapple with logistical  nightmares, supply chain calamities, culture shocks and conflicts, and  rapacious competitors. Mere survival (and opportunistic managerial plunder)  replaced client satisfaction as the prime value.

8. The decline of the professional guilds on the one hand and the trade  unions on the other hand greatly reduced worker self-discipline, pride, and  peer-regulated quality control. Quality is monitored by third parties or  compromised by being subjected to Procrustean financial constraints and  concerns.

The investigation of malpractice and its punishment are now at the hand of  vast and ill-informed bureaucracies, either corporate or governmental. Once  malpractice is exposed and admitted to, the availability of malpractice  insurance renders most sanctions unnecessary or toothless. Corporations  prefer to bury mishaps and malfeasance rather than cope with and rectify  them.

9. The quality of one's work, and of services and products one consumed,  used to be guaranteed. One's personal idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and  problems were left at home. Work was sacred and one's sense of self-worth  depended on the satisfaction of one's clients. You simply didn't let your  personal life affect the standards of your output.

This strict and useful separation vanished with the rise of the  malignant-narcissistic variant of individualism. It led to the emergence of  idiosyncratic and fragmented standards of quality. No one knows what to  expect, when, and from whom. Transacting business has become a form of  psychological warfare. The customer has to rely on the goodwill of  suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers - and often finds himself at  their whim and mercy. "The client is always right" has gone the way of the  dodo. "It's my (the supplier's or provider's) way or the highway" rules  supreme.

This uncertainty is further exacerbated by the pandemic eruption of mental  health disorders - 15% of the population are severely pathologized according  to the latest studies. Antisocial behaviors - from outright crime to  pernicious passive-aggressive sabotage - once rare in the workplace, are now  abundant.

The ethos of teamwork, tempered collectivism, and collaboration for the  greater good is now derided or decried. Conflict on all levels has replaced  negotiated compromise and has become the prevailing narrative.  Litigiousness, vigilante justice, use of force, and "getting away with it"  are now extolled. Yet, conflicts lead to the misallocation of economic  resources. They are non-productive and not conducive to sustaining good  relations between producer or provider and consumer.

10. Moral relativism is the mirror image of rampant individualism. Social  cohesion and discipline diminished, ideologies and religions crumbled, and  anomic states substituted for societal order. The implicit contracts between  manufacturer or service provider and customer and between employee and  employer were shredded and replaced with ad-hoc negotiated operational  checklists. Social decoherence is further enhanced by the anonymization and  depersonalization of the modern chain of production (see point 5 above).

Nowadays, people facilely and callously abrogate their responsibilities  towards their families, communities, and nations. The mushrooming rate of  divorce, the decline in personal thrift, the skyrocketing number of personal  bankruptcies, and the ubiquity of venality and corruption both corporate and  political are examples of such dissipation. No one seems to care about  anything. Why should the client or employer expect a different treatment? As Weber observed largely correctly, the Protestant work ethic underlies the  rise of modern capitalism. Calvinism regarded work as a form of worship and  success as proof of divine approval. Protestants of all creeds valued time -  God's-given gift - and sought to maximize its benefits.

But the Puritan and Non-conformist empathic values of a Commonwealth wherein  everyone is equal before God and therefore deserves to be treated well and  with respect were abandoned along the way. Even the infusion of Jewish  values - charity, community, industriousness, the idea of progress and  self-betterment, learning, and pragmatism - in the late 19th century failed  to stop the erosion in communality and the rise of malignant, short-sighted  narcissism, the anathema of the work ethic.

11. The disintegration of the educational systems of the West made it  difficult for employers to find qualified and motivated personnel. Courtesy,  competence, ambition, personal responsibility, the ability to see the bigger  picture (synoptic view), interpersonal aptitude, analytic and synthetic  skills, not to mention numeracy, literacy, access to technology, and the  sense of belonging which they foster - are all products of proper schooling.

12. Irrational beliefs, pseudo-sciences, and the occult rushed in to  profitably fill the vacuum left by the crumbling education systems. These  wasteful preoccupations encourage in their followers an overpowering sense  of fatalistic determinism and hinder their ability to exercise judgment and  initiative. The discourse of commerce and finance relies on unmitigated  rationality and is, in essence, contractual. Irrationality is detrimental to  the successful and happy exchange of goods and services.

13. Employers place no premium on work ethic. Workers don't get paid more or  differently if they are more conscientious, or more efficient, or more  friendly. In an interlinked, globalized world, customers are fungible. There  are so many billions of potential clients that customer loyalty has been  rendered irrelevant. Marketing, showmanship, and narcissistic bluster are  far better appreciated by workplaces because they serve to attract clientele  to be bilked and then discarded or ignored.