Putting HUMANS back into the corporate for-profit equation and into American culture
There is much ink pouring over the evils of the trump administration,
the person of the president, and the growing gap in incomes around the world.
Even Oxfam, yesterday, in the klieg light of the Davos conflab of the
uber-rich, asked the top 1% to take action to bring about a modicum of
equalization of incomes, residual wealth, investments and, most important the
disproportionate degree of power and influence residing with the rich.
Given that the United States is still demonstrably the
most influential world power, in terms of economics, business and corporate
power, it is important to parse the fine print of what that means. Obviously,
headlines from Washington and Wall Street
and the White House magnetize eyes, ears and minds in capitals around the globe.
And while some American leaders, especially those Democrats currently
pillorying themselves on the petard of the American tabloid media in their
pursuit of the White House, repeatedly speak about the demise of “American values,”
invariably missing from their stated or implied list of values is the reigning
corporate value of profit at all costs.
In his “Lucid Manager,” the high priest of American
capitalism, Milton Friedman writes, “There is one and only one social
responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed
to increase its profits so long as it stays in the rules of the game, which is
to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.”
Given the indisputed and indisputable evidence that this “gospel” is so embedded
in the corporate culture inside America, and through the massive colonization
of American corporate culture into the farthest corners of the planet,
examining the deeply embedded danger flags in this “gospel” lies the very seeds
of the demise of that culture, both within the U.S. and around the world.
The unalloyed, undiluted, and laser-like focus of the
pursuit of profit, dominates all of the activities in the smallest cubicle, on
the largest loading dock, in every sales call, purchase agreement, and certainly
in every board-room discussion of corporate policy and vision. Known and
accepted by all participants in the corporate culture is the indisputable creed
that it is simply a matter of corporate apostasy, and probably excommunication
from the corporate “church,” to express even a moderate and modest proposition
that people must be factored into the corporate equation differently than the
latest vehicle purchase, or the shipment of raw materials just delivered to the
loading dock. Going further, it would be considered corporate treason to
express what, only a half century ago, was considered by many of the business
thought leaders, to be the “human side of the enterprise.”
Douglas McGregor even chose that phrase for the title
of his 1960 book. Based on the old shibboleth of Maslow’s hierarchy of
motivations, theory X focused on the need for worker supervision, and theory Y
emphasized worker satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. Self-actualization, a
word and concept long ago lost in the archives of business school libraries, only
to be resurrected outside the workplace/corporate gated community* by yoga
instructors, and life coaches, and pilates gyms, and perhaps even the nutrition
guru’s, has been sloughed off to the backwaters of Human Resources department drowning
in pay skips, benefit packages, holiday and personal days, performance reviews
retirement packages and bonuses, and to the Employee Assistance Programs.
The very nature of each of these “files” has been
reduced to mere numerical digits, the management of which, including the job of
making those numbers smaller and less impactful on the budget. Reducing costs, clearly, does not mean merely
finding the needed raw materials for the production line; it also means off-loading
the “human costs” of the enterprise to a back office, or better yet, an
outsourced contractor, thereby reducing the impact of those costs, as well as
their size, to a different corporate balance sheet. And then, dividing those
within the corporation between two categories, also implicit in the balance
sheet vernacular, into revenues and costs, and assigning a higher value to
those in the former category compared to those in the latter category, is
another of the insidious injections of corporate “for-profit” mentality.
Disposing of the “costs” as an accounting exercise, (of course, with the empathic
intervention of the HR department) in the cases of down-sizing, dismissals, redundancies,
corporate mergers, and implementation of new corporate visions (also
exclusively dependent on the search for the holy grail, increased profits) imitates
the boundary of the surgical sheet that forms a lighted square, triangle, or
possible circle where the surgical operation will take place, eliminating, for
the purposes and time of the procedure, the identity and person of the patient.
Objectivity, in the pursuit of profit, linked even
married to the technology that provides enhanced monitoring of the minute-by-minute
costs, and thereby the specific project costs of every operation inside the
corporation is a malignant seed of corporate self-sabotage. It elevates
clinical rationalism, detachment, the focus on those sanitized cost-benefit
analyses with which the corporation is identified. The human “costs” impose a
heavier weight in the decision-makers’ minds and choices than the “rewards” of
the occasional promotions, rewards and bonuses, unless and until the issue
applies to the top of the corporate hierarchy. CEO bonuses, for the last few decades,
even when the corporation has deviated from “good business practices,” have
exploded in too many headlines. For the surgeon,
after the patient recovers from that clinical surgical procedure, s/he will re-appear
in the surgeon’s office for a post-operative appointment, as a fully restored human
being. And this re-emergence is not a part of the corporate executive’s life
after the termination of workers,
whether they number in single digits or in the thousands.
Another measure of the insertion of the “for-profit”
culture of the corporation into the culture pertains to the ways by which politicians
perceive and speak about the education of their culture’s children. Numbered in
costs of teacher salaries, and class sizes and holiday days, along with the
percentage of graduates at all levels, students and teachers individually and
collectively are reduced to the same kind of pawns to which corporate workers
have been reduced: costs, drains, problems, and annoying irritants, in fact and
in the attitudes of many of the people in the public domain. This is especially
true among the poor and the underserving, while the wealthy can afford the private
and charter systems, the latter system currently benefiting from the shovelling
of public funds away from the public system, thereby enhancing the
opportunities of the wealthy, while reducing the offerings available to the poor.
Politicians, at all levels including municipal,
provincial/state and national levels, are also reduced to managers of different
numerical digits: numbers of arrests, convictions, murders, imprisonments,
homeless, unemployed, all of them “costs” on the public purse. Enforcing this
mind-set is the framing of time, in the shortest possible term, boundaried
almost exclusively on the length of memory of the voters (as another digit of
social psychology) and the length of time until the next election. After all,
longevity, that other holy grail available to the corporate “lords” through
their appointments, has to be “pursued” daily by the political class, through
fundraising, and the maintenance of a squeeky-clean public reputation including
the refusal to “upset” the men and women who write those sacred cheques.
The pursuit of profit and the measures devised to
generate the appearance of the “best record” in each and every department,
insinuate themselves into every conversation in the corporation, and also in
the media that reports on the public’s business, is balanced by the “loss”
(that other side of the balance sheet, endemic to the corporation) when jobs
are off-shored, when factories die, when homelessness rises, when taxes rise,
when fire departments eliminate over-night coverage in their community.
The public’s business, including the political
activities of any town, city, province, state or nation cannot and must never
be reduced in the public mind, and especially in the mind of the poll-takers, and
the political “masterminds” to the manipulation of mere numbers, especially numbers
exclusively measuring winning and losing, for the players, the elected or the wealthy
puppeteers.
Our children, and our teachers, are much more than
mere “costs” to our education systems. Our workers are much more than mere “means”
and “costs” for the purpose of the corporation’s cultural attitudes, decisions,
choices, and strategic planning. And to surrender the lives of 800,000 federal
workers in the United States, along with the thousands of contract workers
under contract to the federal government to the mere personal whim of an
obviously insensate, autocrat, without so much as massive street protests, is a
culmination of the evidence of insouciance at the core of the American
political, social, economic, and even the academic culture.
Similarly, the separation/segregation of young children
from their families, after weeks of their pilgrimage with their parents, all of
them fleeing the ravages of death threats, drug lords, (in business to feed the
drug addiction of the American culture) and political chaos that prevails also
demonstrates and illustrates the demise of the significance of the human being at
the highest levels of the American cultural pyramid.
I have no legal background, and am not qualified to offer
a legal opinion. Nevertheless,
·
with the lives of hundreds of thousands of
Americans furloughed, or required to work without pay, being threatened,
through choices that eliminate needed prescriptions, necessary treatments, essential
nutrition, and certainly the dignity of legitimate work (another stimulant of
the need for “pain-killing” medications),
·
and the lives of hundreds of thousands of travellers
in American skies, due to the overwork (without pay) of air traffic controllers,
·
and the increased threat to public safety
at U.S. borders with Homeland Security workers either furloughed or working without
pay,
·
and the permanent devastation of families
at U.S. borders, not to mention the deaths of at least two children
And all of this willfully accomplished as a result of
the iron-willed, arrogance, and autocracy of a single albeit “elected” individual,
why does America have to wait for the Mueller report to take up the prospect of
removing this president.
When do “crimes against humanity” actually occur? And who
owns that decision?