I’m still struggling with “On the Road”. I’m tempted to go into Google and type “What’s it all about, Jack Kerouac?” Seems like a gay novel to me, but I’m not an expert on that kind of thing. Sal, the narrator, keeps running away from Dean but hopes that he’ll chase. Which in fairness, he usually does. Maybe in 1950, that was an establishment rocking moment, but to me it reads like an out take from “Will and Grace”.
I’m nearly at the end, but I’ve already started cheating on Jack. While he was sleeping soundly in my knap sack, I slipped out and picked up a copy of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain De Botton. Alain is a philosopher, so he’d understand when I tell him that Jack just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I need the thrill of something new. Jack doesn’t need to know that I’m seeing somebody else. I’ve had three books on the go in the past and got away with it, although the lying and subterfuge does get a little tiresome.
I have a feeling I’ll be a lot happier reading about work, than I am about crisscrossing America in a beat up Chevrolet. Work is, after all, something I’ve been doing all my life (my parents had us changing our own nappies at six months). I also have some theories in this respect, which I’d like to save for posterity. That way, I’ll be able to look at this blog in twenty years time and act like a smarty pants because my predictions came true. If the turn out to be nonsense, I’ll just say this posting is fiction, like pretty much everything else I’ve written.
As a caveat, I should point out that most of the ideas expressed in this posting have come from watching the History channel while balancing a pizza on my stomach. That is the way all knowledge should be imbibed.
Work, in the organised sense, only really began with the Industrial Revolution. So in the overall scheme of human existence, getting up at 7am to go and sit in somebody else’s building and work for them until 7pm at night, is relatively recent. You have to ask yourself who benefited more from this change? We poor fools who get up in the dark to go and work in offices that produce nothing tangible? Or the billionaires who profit from our toils?
The initial plan was to cull thousands from the fields and corral them into sweatshops for twelve hours a day. This worked for a few years until the workers got all bolshy and started organising themselves.
Seems they wanted to be able to go to the toilet once a day and not have their arm ripped off by an industrial hammer.
So we had a few years of revolution, World War and a depression before Hitler came along and conveniently took everyone’s minds off the issue of work. A strange thing happened during that Second World War. The machinery of killing had overtaken the old ideas of warfare. Men were no longer stupid enough to group in large numbers and climb out of trenches to be fodder for the other side’s cannon. So the people who sit thousands of miles behind the front and send others to their death had to come up with a different approach.
Their solution was to organise soldiers into small platoons of ten to fifteen men. These men would bond with each other and be more flexible and moveable. It worked so well that people would dive on grenades to save their comrades and do other things which are frankly dumb.
America of course benefited most from World War II, not only because it’s infrastructure was still intact, but also through the agencies it was able to establish and agreements such as Bretton Woods. Having neatly sown up the world as a servant of the American master, the US settled down to organise work in a manner that would stifle worker revolt and maximise productivity.
Business leaders, such as GE’s Jack Welch, looked to the lessons of the war for their template. They realised that if they organised their workers into teams, they could squeeze a lot more from them. The comradeship of soldiers would come through and staff would start doing things like working late to cover for team mates or so as not to be seen as “letting the team down”. Pretty soon, the most negative thing you could say of a worker was that they are not a “team player”. Not something that was a problem in the cotton mills of the 1860’s.
The other brilliant wheeze that business leaders came up with was to set unachievable or vague goals. Welch realised that if you asked somebody to make ten widgets a day, they would struggle on day one but eventually get the hang of it and pretty soon be able to finish their allotted work by 11am and spend the rest of the day surfing the internet, or whatever the equivalent was in 1960. And this drove the likes of Welch mad. They wanted to feel that they owned their staff, in the manner of some 19th Century Virginian plantation chief.
So staff were set goals like “make more than ten widgets per day”. This introduced an element of uncertainty which. Pretty soon staff would be producing fifteen widgets a day and going home agitated and depressed. If Welch wanted to squeeze the last pips from the ragged corpses of his underlings, he could call them in and tell them they failed to meet their goals because he expected them to make twenty widgets per day.
We stand today at the end of paths taken. Something fundamental will happen in the next few years which will change the way we look at work and the way we run society itself. Capitalism and the Bretton Wood concepts are dead and a new world order is at hand.
“What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
As long as it’s not Jack Welch, I don’t mind.
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