Supermoney, page 28
The message of capitalism has been schizophrenic: at work, be hard-nosed, industrious, single-minded, frugal and thrifty, and once you leave work, whoopee, have you seen Carol and Alice in their bikinis? It may be that some doers can step into a telephone booth and emerge as Clark Kent, but I doubt if it works for a whole society.
The second literature of exhortation, advertising, sometimes recognizes this, and tries to say that the deferred gratification of the Protestant Ethic is a matter of hours, not lifetimes and generations. “You’ve worked hard, you deserve this,” says the clever ad, whether it is a beer, the reward for a day, or a vacation, the reward for a season, or whatever: buy, try, fly.
The less intensive attitude toward work also applies to play. In the winter of 1972 Columbia barely managed to field a basketball team for its Ivy League opener; it could send only six men to Providence to play Brown. “Four members,” the New York Times reported (January 6) “had resigned, making it a particularly dramatic example of student unhappiness with organized extracurricular pursuits ... Several other college teams have suffered similar player shortages in the last month.” Said the team’s second-highest scorer as he departed: “My father thinks I’m just a degenerate hippie now, because when I left high school I had all these fantastic ambitions for wealth and fame—and I wanted to be the greatest lawyer in North Carolina. Now I just don’t have that.”
Oppose this to that paragon of the extreme ethic, Vince Lombardi. You could say, of course, that this is not quite fair: soldiers and professional football players are supposed to win. But the example is not frivolous. When Lombardi died, his death was a major front-page story in all—including the most serious—of newspapers, and personally grieved the President of the United States. Lombardi’s hold on the country and the President was that for ten years the teams he had coached had either won championships or come in second. The ethic according to Lombardi, all from Lombardi and Run to Daylight: Winning is not everything. It is the only thing.
The will to excel and the will to win, they endure. They are more important than any event that occasions them.
To play this game, you must have that fire in you, and there is nothing that stokes fire like hate.
And from Lombardi’s players:He had us all feeling that we weren’t going to win for the Green Bay Packers, but to preserve our manhood . . . and we went out and whipped them good and preserved our manhood. Vinny believes in the Spartan life, the total self-sacrifice, and to succeed and reach the pinnacle he has, you’ve got to be that way. The hours you put in on a job can’t even be considered.
He treated us all equally—like dogs. I don’t think I’d want to be like Lombardi. It takes too much out of you. You drive like that, you’ve got to give up a lot of time with your family, and you lose a lot physically ... Still, now that I’m in business, I’m applying Lombardi’s principles. I sent my secretary home crying my first three days on the job. One gal retired on me. I was putting them through training camp. I walked in and the first thing I said was, “Your job is on the line. If you don’t make it, you’re through.” I said to the secretary, “What the heck you been doing all day? I don’t see anything you’ve done.” And if she gave me a letter and there was one mistake in it, I’d make a big X all the way across it and say, “Type it again.” It worked out pretty well. They’re organized now . . . I’m strict. A lot of him has rubbed off on me.
And the players on the changes:If you were told to beat your head against the wall, you did it ... I think we’re entering a different period now. I think we now have to give youngsters a good reason to get them to beat their heads against a wall.
Kids today don’t fight like we did. They can play football and basketball like hell, but they’re very gentle, very kind. They’re out playing for fun, and it’s not going to interfere with their demonstration for the week or with the things they consider important . . . Those kids don’t look at it like the whole world is going to fall apart if you don’t beat the Bears.
The examples are so eloquent they need no comment.
Someday we may have such technology and science-and-compound-interest that whether people work hard or not would be marginal, but meanwhile there has been a lot of talk about alienation and unhappiness and The Blue-Collar Blues and, for that matter, The White-Collar Blues. Industry notices this because of absenteeism, turnover and the lack of candidates for foreman, but at bottom nobody really knows.
Five years ago [from 1970] the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress tried to survey existing knowledge on job satisfaction and dissatisfaction under modern industrial conditions. There was pitifully little. With all the talk about alienation, dehumanization, and the loss of satisfaction from work, you would think that many researchers would be trying to find out the facts, by asking questions and by devising more direct measurements, by trying to figure out what aspects of particular routines are most destructive of satisfaction, and what loss of production would result from changing the routines. But apparently not so.
(Robert Solo in Capitalism Today)
I suspect, pending the reconvening of the National Commission to fill in the gaps, that two things are true in this country. One is that there are certainly a lot of jobs in this country that are boring, not built to the human spirit or the human body, or not fulfilling in some other way, and that most of American industry is only beginning to pay attention to this. The second is that people like to work, as opposed to not working or hanging around the house. They like to work, or at least they like to go to the place where work is, because they see their friends, they have a beer afterward or a coffee break during, and it gets them into motion, and anyway we have not developed the tradition of playing the lute and counting that as a good afternoon. Given any degree of pleasantness, encouragement and satisfaction, they would go to work even without the exhortations of the Ethic and the prospect of the Shoar of Eternal Blessedness.
It is almost axiomatic in the literature of work that part of the problem comes of bending the men to the machines. But computers are machines too; the pay may be less than that around nonelectronic machinery; yet the blues are not so much heard from this sector, and among the differences may be style, atmosphere and air conditioning.
How hard, or with what care, people work is something else. William H. Whyte, Jr., and the other observers of the fifties told us of the crossover: the executives were working the seventy-hour week and taking work home while the blue-collar hours were going down.
The difference is that both the executive and the blue-collar worker are now conscious of options that heretofore they did not think they had. Conscious only, for relatively few have acted on the alternative; behavior and attitude do not necessarily go immediately together. Most of the attention has been paid to the younger generation; at least the future executives were thinking about a balanced life, and the corporations were getting a bit shyer about telling them how demanding corporate life was going to be. Whatever the terrors that haunted the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—not Making It, not having the House in the Suburb—the terrors do not have quite the same intensity that they used to. The terrors are also less for the industrial workers. For one thing, if you have a house and a car, another house and another car become much less urgent, however pleasant or convenient. (There is a lake within cruising range of the Vega plant in industrial Ohio which is, to put it baldly, a blue-collar lake, which is to say most of the boats belong to union workers from the plants. If they put five more boats on that lake you will not be able to see the water for the boats; thus if you are an industrial worker and don’t have a boat to take the kids in, the chances are you have a friend who does, or maybe your old man will lend you his.)
A lack of things, unless those things are food, clothing and shelter, does not provide terror except for a Man in a Gray Flannel Suit who has bought a distortion of the old ethic, its tangible evidences without its spirituality. Back to the Ford memo:Because they are unfamiliar with the harsh economic facts of earlier years, [new workers] have little regard for the consequences if they take a day or two off.
That’s about as succinct as one can be. The harsh economic facts of earlier years were an unpleasant but effective motivator. You do not even have to have gone through a Great Depression yourself, if you heard enough talk about it while you were growing up. Now it has been more than thirty years since the end of the Great Depression, and not only do the Prince Valiants in the plant not know about it, they have not even heard that much about it because granddad does not live with them. I had a series of chats with Daniel Yankelovich, social scientist and the head of the leading marketing research and social science research firm that bears his name, a firm that polls continuously in this area for corporate clients. Only in the last five years has this change in attitude taken place so strikingly. The changing of work goals from salary to interpersonal relationships to content of work has also been documented by Professor Ray Katzell, chairman of the Psychology Department of New York University, and others. It took that long—almost two generations—for the motivation by economic fear to fade.
Granted, all the moonlighting to make ends meet at the current levels; granted, all the places and pockets that have been missed, and some of the unemployment which persists. Mass employment is not a political possibility—almost everyone would agree to that—and the economic whiff of grapeshot (what this country needs to shape up these deadheads is a good depression) has gone out of the lexicon of bargaining. What Yankelovich calls the “sacrifice consensus” is breaking down. The sacrifice part of that phrase means that deferrals for something else are not as popular or necessary: I am doing this for my family, I am working so that my son has a better life than I do. And the consensus, obviously, is that there was agreement that this was a right and proper way of life. The breakdown of this sacrifice consensus does not mean that it is replaced right away with something else, only that now there are many elements present—some sacrificers, some not, but no agreed-upon consensus.
(“If women’s lib breaks the equation between masculinity and being a good provider, what does that do to motivation? And, say, to insurance?” Yankelovich asked at one point, which started something that made us both late for dinner.)
So: our productivity curve begins to flatten not only because we are becoming a service economy, but because some of the motivations—the spirit and the fear—have gone out of the producers. And maybe our inflation is persistent. If you want the dank side of the extrapolation, some of the workers retire right there on the job and wait for their pension, some take Fridays off. The servicing of all our things (and indeed even the services themselves) become so erratic and sloppy that the manufacturers have to work to make them service-free, no checkup for ten thousand miles, and the consumers get so irritated they transfer that irritation into political channels and gladly accept more government regulation of business.
So: it is affluence itself that has taken the edge off our edge. But the President need not exhort us to get out and return to the honesty of a day’s work for a day’s pay, which he has done on several occasions. Nation Number One will not be unique, because these elements don’t stop at the water’s edge; at different times, but for the same reasons, they will take place in all the Western industrial countries. The exhortations of Chairman Mao may be to a different end than the Shoar of Blessedness, but the tone is the same. In the capitalist industrial countries, it is the first generation off the farm that provides the longest hours and the most uncomplaining workers. Somebody who has spent sixteen hours a day looking at the wrong end of an ox for sub-subsistence on a patch in Poland may not complain at all when he emigrates with a paper suitcase to a steel mill on the south side of Chicago, but his grandson may not think it is that good a deal. We are the furthest off the farm. Japan had a generation that made its industrial reputation; those glee-club singers in the Matsushita plant think Matsushita is about the most dazzling thing that ever happened, but meanwhile the Germans are using Turks and Spaniards—again, fresher from the farm—to fill out the ranks in the Volkswagen plants. All of which does not solve our problem, but gives us company.
Perhaps that just gives us a challenge. Adolph Berle, among his other activities, was coauthor with Gardiner Means of the granddaddy classic in all this line of thinking, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. In one of his later books, The American Economic Republic, Berle suggested that we had a flexibility of response which he called the Transcendental Margin, those qualities that accounted for the prosperity of Israel but not Iraq, of the Netherlands but not Bulgaria—a certain creative energy. It propelled our system not toward profits but toward—are you ready?—beauty and truth. In a younger and more optimistic America that did not seem so strange. If we still have it, or something like it, it should be possible to make of work something fulfilling that does not need either the spiritual exhortation or economic fear to motivate it. That is a tall order and a big challenge, but the luckier of our citizens who have experienced something like it know that under those propitious circumstances it can be fun to bust your ass.
We ignore revolutions at our peril. Current evidences may or may not lead to profound changes, but we know that even when changes seem to happen quickly the ideas behind them have been hanging in the air for a long time. Our man at the desk considering how goes the world, had he been in the City of London in 1913, would have been one of the merchant princes of the world: to him for capital came the Moscow Power and Light Company, the breweries of Bohemia, the trolley lines of Shanghai, the apples of Tasmania, the oil of Mexico, the ranches of Texas and Arizona, the tin mines of Malaya, the hemp of Tanganyika, and the railroads of absolutely everywhere. Half a century later our man was still at his desk and still at work, a bit shabbier, but his role and the world had changed.
At this point the metaphor is going to break down, because revolutions do not come neatly across a desk; if the change is profound enough, the frame through which we have looked at this scene will go away, and the desk and the chair will still be there but nobody will be sitting at them.
But once again, a degree of skepticism is in order. In going through an inordinate amount of the literature, for example, I found one phrase a number of times: “Our youth is in revolt.” The writer is a verbal, conceptual person, usually an academic, and what he means is “My graduate students are in revolt”; or, “My students have just worked their way through some Marcuse and they have had it with the System.” The Faculty of Engineering is not so prompt to report that the students are in revolt.
This is not at all to write off small numbers of people. They may have a symbolic value to everybody else articulating what larger numbers feel. But I think it is important to distinguish the flavor of what has been done: greenhouse people have reported on greenhouse people, which is to say that academics and book writers have talked about students, who may not end up being greenhouse people, protected from the storms and freezes of life, but who are in a stage of life—being at school—where they are protected from what shapes everybody else. Just the simple numbers have gotten so much bigger. Twenty-five students here and there do not make the impact that a “counterculture” of a million makes, but that million counterculture is possible because of a trillion-dollar economy and, among other things, a student population of eight million. When everybody has to spend sixteen hours a day behind an ox, there is no counter-culture.
Obviously I would not have taken this time and space if I thought we were still at July 4, 1955, in the Eisenhower Regency. Obviously, in spite of the looseness of the ways in which we have learned, Something Else Is Going On. I belong to a Club housed in a magnificent old building in New York which is supposed to be made up of Distinguished Intellectuals, because, I suppose, somebody had written The Wealth of Nations as an achievement by my name. The Club has been infiltrated by foundation executives and downtown lawyers, and the average age of the members is 94.3, because foundation executives and downtown lawyers are very long-lived. Anyway, following the precepts of intellectual inquiry, we had a debate one night on Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. This is the most talked-about of the revolutionary tracts. Corporate America—an idea, incidentally, from the old Berle and Means classic—has taken over the country, to the mindless end of its own perpetuity. “This apparatus of power has become a mindless juggernaut, destroying the environment, obliterating human values, and assuming domination over the mind and lives of its subjects.” We are not only an incredibly rich country, but a desperately poor one, because we have disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, war, distorted priorities, an artificiality of work and culture, powerlessness, absence of community, and a loss of self. (Apologies for the abruptness of the summary.) But out of biological necessity, a new consciousness “has emerged out of the wasteland of the Corporate State, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement.” The revolution is individual and cultural, and only changes the political structure as its final act.
