Technology And The Work Ethic

    James W. Leth

    6 May, 1995

     

    What turns a "fired up" professional into a "burned out" employee? If you ask a young engineer what is the role of engineering, you'll get an answer like "improving people's lives by solving real world problems." If you ask that same engineer the same question after they've been on the job for about fifteen years, you'll get a more mature perspective: "improving the company's profitability by increasing product quality or decreasing cost." Along with this change of perspective comes other, subtler changes. Younger engineers want to get ahead by demonstrating intense commitment to the job, willingness to put in long hours, and brilliant solutions to complex problems. Mature engineers want to stay on schedule and still have some time to be with their families. I can't speak for other professions, but this appears to be a widespread phenomenon.

    I believe in the basic philosophy of the free enterprise system -- that individuals must be free to reap the fruits of their own labor; that the opportunity to achieve personal goals motivates the worker to produce; that the competent and the specially skilled deserve rewards commensurate with their performance. But I also have come to believe that the real world is far more complicated than is allowed for in any ideological philosophy. Modern Industrial Capitalism (at least as I've experienced it in the United States) has inherent limitations that have not been solved philosophically. It is necessary to try some empirical adjustments.

    The biggest limitation of our existing system is its inherent inability to achieve its fundamental goal. Whatever happened to the dream of progress -- that modern technology would free people from drudgery, and everyone would be able to live in comfort, spending their time enriching the world and thinking great thoughts? Wasn't that what we really set out to achieve? Toward that goal, we can now make virtually any region of the earth comfortably habitable. We can produce food and clothing in staggering quantities, at unbelievable rates of production, using very little labor in proportion to the output. We have greatly extended the life span of our species, and we know how to cure or eliminate the suffering of a great range of diseases. We can communicate around the globe in less time than it takes to hear the voice of someone across a room.

    And yet, with all of these capabilities, have we removed people from the confines of drudgery? Do we live in a world free from want? Does each new advancement reduce the burden on the everyday life of the average person? Why not?

    In a perverse way, the efficiency and success of the modern industrial system has become its own nemesis. The competitive economy -- which is fundamentally necessary to bring about the technological advances that can produce the good life -- is incapable of freeing people up to live it. Utopian fantasies of one form or another have been at the core of most people's idea of progress for hundreds of years. Personally, I'm rather fond of the Future According To Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here's a society in which people pursue whatever careers interest them. No one does menial labor, no one has to worry about money, and everyone can have just about everything they want. Food and clothing can be manufactured essentially out of thin air with no manual effort involved. An interesting question to consider is this: if the technology necessary to live this way really could be developed, would it result in such a society? Starting from our present society, I would say "absolutely not."

    Technology that could produce everything we want with virtually no labor would, upon its introduction, immediately cause mass layoffs of workers, as businesses would adopt the technology in their own manufacturing systems. Intense legal battles over patent rights and monopoly control would pour immense riches into what has already become the High Priest Class of our society, the lawyers. Almost everyone else would join the ranks of the unemployed. The technology that could easily feed the world would probably result in mass starvation. The competitive system can produce the tools we need to create a future of freedom and enlightenment, but unless the system evolves, it will work against our using those tools to the benefit of humanity.

    Take a look at business today. The trend today is "downsizing" -- learning to do more with less, to be more efficient and cut costs in order to stay competitive. If you can't do that, you lose. You either cast off your waste, or the whole enterprise collapses. The average worker knows there is no guarantee of a job tomorrow. To keep your job, you have to stand out. You have to show that you can do more. There'll be more work to do in order to stay ahead, and fewer employees left to do it. That's more efficient! But a lot more stressful. Overtime is cheaper than hiring more workers, because more workers means more health care and other benefits. Better still, lay off the full time workers and hire temps and consultants with no benefits. It's a natural evolutionary step in the corporate system. If we don't do it, how can we compete in the emerging Global Economy?

    These concerns are very real. I do not belittle them. But the logic is flawed because it does not take into account the big picture. We are separating the labor force into two groups of extremes: the unemployed, disenfranchised, disgruntled minority, ever increasing in number, who are on the path toward paranoia, homelessness, poverty, and crime; and the diminishing majority of overworked, under-rewarded, stressed-out workers, alienated from their families, who are constantly told that they're not doing a good enough job and it's up to them to save the company by doing more work on shorter schedules using less resources.

    Those who have jobs can't afford time to be with their families. Those who don't have jobs can't afford homes in which to raise families. Meanwhile, our Fearless Leaders are telling us that the breakdown of the family is due to our "permissive society". Perhaps if we all chipped in, we could buy them a clue.

    But, if we don't focus on efficiency, how can we compete? Perhaps the answer is that we're not being more efficient this way at all. Consider the United States as a single, complex system. As technology evolves, we find better, faster, cheaper ways to produce more goods and services at lower cost. We become, in a word, more efficient. In response to which, we idle our less productive resources in order to put overwhelming strain on our more productive resources. To use a sports metaphor, we put more players on the bench so that we can completely exhaust our more skilled players. Or, in an engineering metaphor, we distribute a larger load over fewer supports, in order to throw away more supports. This is not a net increase of efficiency. The system becomes less stable, more intractable, stagnant, unable to respond to changing conditions. As a nation, and as a society, we become weaker and more vulnerable.

    And what happens to the corporation that is caught in the "downsizing" cycle? Some succeed, but many more find that it's the start of a downward spiral that's far easier to start than to stop. Workers left behind to pick up the pace become fed up with the assumption that they can keep doing more work with less resources. The implicit rebuke that they've just been lazy all along gnaws at their self respect. The hopelessly tight schedules and unrealistic expectations convince them that their managers have no clue about their jobs. Knowing that they can't do what's expected, they see little reason to try to do much of anything at all. As more workers are declared "excess," those who remain become paranoid. Will they be next? Under pressure to succeed against unreasonable odds, the first things they abandon are all of the links to humanity that kept them productive in the first place -- their family life, leisure time, comradeship, and sense of team spirit. They become distrustful of each other, afraid of change, unwilling to go out of their way for anyone else. The working environment becomes more unpleasant and more stressful, causing productivity to decline even further, and projects to slip. This fuels management's panic, and even more Draconian measures are brought out. As one manager is reported to have said (and actually meant!) in such a situation: "The firings will continue until morale improves!"

    In this situation, many employees decide to look elsewhere. Their leaving makes others feel that the situation must be even worse than they had thought, and they start to leave as well. The best workers quit and leave; those who can't find other jobs simply quit and stay. The dilemma of the average corporate employee is, succintly, this:

    • To have a good life, you must earn a good salary.

    • To earn a good salary, you can't have a life.

    The system must evolve. We're not spreading the benefits of advancing technology, we're using it to exclude more and more people from the fruits of progress. Instead of laying off the "excess" workers and increasing the stress on those left behind, consider what would happen if we simply reduced the burdern on everyone. Hire people to work six hour days, rather than eight; thirty hour weeks, rather than forty. Coordinate work schedules with school schedules, opening up jobs to those who can't afford child care and eliminating the "latch key child" problem.

    Two weeks of vacation per year is insane; in Europe four weeks or more is average. Let's try to lead the world in time to be with your family, instead of leading the world in violent crime, ulcers, and cancer. Is it possible that violent crime will diminish if family life is given some importance? If people are less paranoid and less stressed? If jobs are plentiful and urban children see role models for success other than pimps and drug lords? If people have time to get an education while holding down a job? Is it possible that drug use, which has only increased as a result of the disastrous waste of money and resources called The War On Drugs, might actually decline if people had productive opportunities available to them?

    The argument against this, of course, is that no company can afford to be that "generous." They couldn't compete in the world economy, and so would go out of business. I can't completely answer this objection, but I can address some parts of it. Wiser people than I can pick up the challenge to change the protocols of our society and provide the rest of the answer. And if the reorientation I suggest is best for the whole of our society, we ought to be able to devise protocols that make it worth the while of those who would dare to pioneer it.

    First, there is the objection that it costs a company more to hire eight employees working six hours each than it does to hire six employees working eight hours each. The dominant factor here is the cost of benefits, and the dominant component of the cost of benefits is the cost of health care. Cutting health care costs has been a popular platform of all political agendas lately, but we continue to have accelerating costs and declining benefits to the average worker. Politicians will solve this problem when pigs fly spaceships. In the mean time, can we consider something truly radical? Could it be that the best way -- perhaps the only way -- to cut the cost of health care is to be a healthier people? Stress, unemployment, poverty, malnutrition -- these are tremendously significant components of the cost of health care in this country. Ameliorating these conditions will pay for itself in the long run.

    How can a company compete with such a high cost structure? I think there is a great deal of evidence to support the idea that the ability to respond quickly to changing business conditions is the single most important factor for success in the global economy today. We're so caught up with the importance of cost reduction for the simple reason that most businesses are not very innovative. If you're just doing the same thing that all your competitors are, then the only way to get ahead is to do it cheaper. But that's not the kind of enterprise that has fueled the explosive growth of the 20th century. That is maintenance-mode thinking, and it cannot gain you more than a few years. A corporation that wants to succeed for the long term has to be continually coming up with breakthrough thinking.

    Time to market has much more to do with success than cost of development. A company with every resource overcommitted cannot respond to changes. There is no flexibility to try new ideas. A company with a larger number of less heavily loaded resources has flexibility. They can pursue alternatives. They can start up a new project as soon as a market opportunity presents itself. They can anticipate the market even before it appears, because they're playing with the possibilities. They take risks, and are not afraid to investigate, analyze, and reject failing ideas, moving their resources on to the next idea waiting in the wings. And in the process, they can spend time training and developing the people they have.

    We don't need to throw out our traditions of free enterprise and individual responsibility. We just need to revisit our vision of progress and see where we want to go, and where we're heading. A little negative feedback, along with an occasional course correction, is the only way to keep a complex system stable and healthy. 

    Copyright ©1995 by James W. Leth. General permission is hereby given to copy and distribute this text, electronically or on paper, for "fair use", provided that this copyright notice is attached in full, including the URL where the complete text can be found:

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