Last year my wife was attending an employment seminar to hear a presentation from the manager of a telemarketing firm. After he had made his pitch about what an excellent job prospect this was, he invited questions from the group. It turned out that workers put in eight to 12-hour shifts, mostly evenings and nights. Workers had one day off per week, but the company decided which day. There was monitoring of calls and video surveillance. Salary was marginally above minimum wage. There were no perks or benefits.
“Well, then,” he asked, “who would like an application form?” Not one person responded. In a room of 20 unemployed people, not one wanted to sign on with this company.
Indeed, there are numerous indications that many people today would do almost anything rather than one of these McJobs. Worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, mental, emotional and sick leave, self-employment, working at home, social assistance, and simply toughing it out with much-reduced finances are some avenues being taken to avoid low-paying, disagreeable jobs.
But it isn’t only the lower level jobs that inspire avoidance behaviour. Positions that used to be considered desirable, including some government jobs, are now being given a wide berth. Today’s virulent strain of neo-capitalism generally views employees as expenses and liabilities, and seems determined to make sure that they don’t get too comfortable. Exceptions tend to be growth areas, such as new technologies, where companies anticipate making substantial profits.
It has become standard in some industries to have a 90-day “probationary period,” which allows employers to “cherry pick” the best workers and let the majority go. Others make sure that employees don’t get enough hours to be considered full-time. There is also an array of “dirty tricks” which allow employers to get more work than they are actually paying for. An example would be only paying for business hours but expecting workers to spend extra time on the job, such as staying on to tidy up or coming in early to set up.
Unfortunately, administrative activity often goes beyond tricky rip-offs to actual harassment and bullying. One human resources officer told me he would meet at conferences with other HR people to plan ways to get rid of workers whom management didn’t like. He had a 16-step guide to isolate, marginalize and emotionally punish “undesirable” employees. Perhaps these people would get the message and quit on their own. If not, some may eventually experience nervous breakdowns and physical collapse.
The modern business system works on a cost-benefit analysis model. Employment is seen as a cost and must be reduced to the minimum. The ideal would be slave labour, but 15 cents an hour in Bangladesh also works pretty well. In Western countries, however, corporations often vent their frustrations by treating their employees badly.
When the U.S. introduced anti-discrimination legislation in the workplace, it was anticipated that visible minorities would be the major complainants. However, 75 per cent of the cases filed were based on age discrimination. Older employees usually earn more than new hires and the conventional wisdom is to dump them before their pensions mature.
Since any system of business is concerned with generating wealth, it must necessarily be regulated to avoid major social damage. For example, it was decided in the 19th century that slavery was not an appropriate mode of turning a profit. Nowadays governments themselves operate on a cost-benefit basis, and argue that regulating business is both costly and counter-productive. So corporations now are largely free to regulate themselves (wink, wink! Nudge, nudge!).
Normally, the simple ethical answer to harm is to stop doing it. However, the profit motive is so ingrained in the business model that discontinuing a profitable product is usually considered the last possible alternative. For example, the U.S. tobacco industry spent more than $8 billion on advertising in 2011 in an effort to maintain high levels of cigarette sales.
Sharp practices easily become established. For example, Black and Decker introduced its hand-held “DustBuster” in 1979, and within six months, rival firms had knock-offs on the market. This example became the industry rationale for decimating research and development divisions. With the courts either bemused or caught up in deregulation, companies were mostly free simply to steal ideas for new products. Microsoft reportedly rode to success on the wave of co-opting the innovations of others.
Churches, on the whole, either take the conservative attitude that capitalism is better than the alternatives, or else they adopt a rather unprofitable Marxist-type opposition to all business enterprises. The real point is that all systems of doing business require regulation to avoid harm. Since cost-benefit analysis is a decision-making tool which side-steps moral issues, there exists an excellent opportunity for churches to point out the pitfalls of unregulated business. The first initiative of the churches should be to establish (chapter and verse) where business needs to be regulated in order to avoid the moral hazards that are part of our current mode of doing business.
The churches are also well situated to address the larger question regarding how global economic developments can be brought under a responsible democratic framework. At the national level they could be asking: How many citizens voted for out-sourcing of jobs? How many agreed to increase their proportion of taxes to compensate for the corporations who have found tax havens? How many Canadians decided to do more work for smaller wages in order to aid the corporations and their stockholders? And, how many voted in support of government moves to marginalize unions and workers’ associations?
Capitalism and socialism have become so engrossed in maximizing production and economic power that participants in these systems no longer think of themselves primarily as human beings interacting with other human beings. (As Thoreau put it, “We have become tools of our tools.”) Both at the personal and systemic levels then, the human scale of things needs to be restored as our primary reference point. A more balanced view of society and its activities can be summed up neatly with a variation on one of Jesus’s more revolutionary sayings, Economic systems were made for man, not man for economic systems (Mark 2:27).
About Kevin McCabe
Kevin McCabe is a writer, teacher and poet who lives in St. Catharines, Ont. He is the author/editor of several books and numerous articles.
