Everything was better in the old days

 Steve was the Staff Association representative on our floor and came to see me on my first morning at work. This was in the springtime of 1988 when I had embarked on my first step out into the big bad world. With an Accountancy qualification in my back pocket and a head full of dreams, I had boarded a one-way flight for London and landed at a desk in a large insurance company.

I didn’t really know what a Staff Association was. In my teenage years, I had become obsessed with the work of Trade Unions and considered myself an expert on their role in the class struggle. Staff Associations seemed to be a watered-down version of that. Steve begged to differ. They worked in cooperation with Management. It was a consultative process and the threat of strike was never used.

He left a membership form on my desk, along with details about the sports and social club, discounts for local shops and services and an invitation to go to the pub every Friday lunchtime. I stayed there for five years and never had to negotiate a pay increase or promotion. The staff association did all this for me.

It was years before I realised that I was on a collective contract. Apart from anything else, this meant that redundancies where transparent and fair and poor performance was managed.

These days we’re all on individual contracts and can be tossed aside with the casualness of a roman emperor discarding olive pips.

Back in those early days of my working life, I remember a staff meeting where the boss explained that we had three stakeholders. Staff, Customers and Shareholders and that the company ranked them in that order. The logic being that if you treated your staff well and kept them happy, then they would provide a great service to customers. This in turn would increase profits and the company share price.

We had a subsidised canteen which was a blessing to someone like me who couldn’t boil an egg at the time. We had sport fields with tennis and squash courts and a clubhouse selling tasty food and cheap beer. Even our training courses were held in a stately country home with silver service lunches and sumptuous bedrooms.

These days, the ranking has been reversed. Sometime in the 1990s the world was realigned. The Soviet block had collapsed, China was an emerging power and the US spread globalisation and the culture of the individual.

Every job I’ve had since has brought with it an individual contract and the feeling that you are only a useful idiot in the race to maximise shareholder return. We no longer consider staff to be people. They are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Numbers that change to red when the shareholder return is threatened.

I fell victim to this in 2014 when word came from New York that 20% of the staff needed to go and I fell below the line on a distant spreadsheet. I was literally marched out the back door of the building and my feet barely touched the ground. There was no staff association to represent me, no arbitration process. Nothing in fact, apart from a fat paycheck, because money is all that matters these days.

I have done well materially since the change to globalisation. I got on the property ladder in time to surf the bubbles in the boom years  and got off in time when it collapsed in 2007. Even though I’m not ambitious, I have managed to get promotions and pay rises through hard work and playing the political game. But I would swap all of this for the culture of the 1980s and early 90s.

One of my memories of that time was a guy called Alan who was about the age I am now. He was worn down by years of work and probably the laziest and most cynical person I knew. But he had years of experience and a knowledge of the building and the departments within it. So, they gave him the task of re-arranging desks which he embarked on gleefully. He did a good job, but one feature he built in was to place his desk as far a way from the rest of the team he worked in as possible. In those days, there were no mobile phones or email. He then stopped coming to meetings and when we tried to call his desk phone, we would get an engaged tone. Everybody knew he had taken the phone off the hook and nobody wanted to walk to the other end of the building to check if he was there. Later, he would say that he was busy talking to an unnamed branch manager and couldn’t make the meeting.

Everyone knew he was taking the piss, but it was tolerated. The company had got thirty five good years out of him and if he wanted to coast out the last few years, then this was a price they were willing to pay. They worked around it, finding relevant things for him to do, rather than discarding him, as they would today because he doesn’t fit into a cooky cutter version of what they expect from a model employee.

For all his flaws, Alan was a member of our community, and we wrapped our support around him.

Now we are all individuals swimming in a shark infested pool. While we get to enjoy Netflix, international travel and luxury goods, it comes with a price. We now live with uncertainty and stress. We don’t build relationships at work because we suspect we or they won’t be around for long enough for it to flourish. And most importantly we are less productive as we don’t feel a connection to where we work and it’s hard to concentrate when you are uncertain and stressed. So, we spend time looking at our phones or writing blogs. Which might explain why I have a meeting with HR at 4pm.