Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

8. The Future of Work – Failing Upwards

When I was growing up we looked to a future in which machines did chores, robots maintained the household and people were free to sit around like ancient Greeks contemplating the meaning of life. Only the togas were missing.

All this free time could also be spent playing in string quartets, making pottery or composing quatrains. Lots of sport also featured, naturally.

When ‘leisure’ did turn up in the 1980s it was called unemployment. There were few pots and fewer poems. Since then work has grown like technology: it is messy, changeable, uncertain, fragmented and ruled by new kinds of bureaucrats: technocrats and human-resources people, the dreaded HRs.

My own employment record is simple. I have had only one constant employer: the ABC. But I have had substantial contact with other organisations, many of which I’ve chaired (Australian Museum, Commission for the Future, NSW Peace Trust, National Council for Environmental Education).

On only three occasions in 35 years has the ABC’s HR department contacted me. Once it was about a colleague’s RSI, once to read me the legalistic restrictions on business-class overseas travel (we qualified, but no one was going to pay) and once to attend a course on bullying. Straight after spending the compulsory three hours at the latter, a straightforward recitation of rights and (again) legal responsibilities, I attended a function at which I met a well-known TV reporter who told me that she had left the ABC in distress when it closed ranks around a bullying boss instead of fighting her cause. The most puzzling thing for me about HR people is that, in all the decades I have been in the building, none of them have thought to enquire how I am getting on. Are they like God, benignly watching from afar, not wishing to trouble my busy day but willing to step in should something flare, and leap to the rescue? I don’t believe in God.

David Williamson has produced several disturbing plays about HR fascism and the psychopathology of many modern bosses. He has noticed the way the modern corporation has relinquished its ambition of the 1970s to go from the hierarchy of an army to the pluralism of an orchestra. The ranking would remain there but it would be devolved, honouring specialisation. The theory was that essential decisions should be centralised but all the rest handled at the coalface, among staff. Now we are back in the army. This is partly to do with the abolition of executive careers. No longer do you ‘come up’ through the Post Office, or David Jones, or the ABC, where girls and boys could once start delivering mail and end up running the joint. Nowadays executives are guns for hire and do not expect to stay more than five years in a company (running airports, national broadcasters or bean factories is taken to be much the same), and they become used to a five-stage assault on the status quo.

First year, paint the walls purple (I’ve arrived!) and sack a third of the staff; second year, train up your newly hired executive force and jemmy your new plan through the system; third year, sack some more, fix some intercorporate alliances; fourth year, cope with bad results, blame government and international conditions, foreshadow plan B; fifth year, produce figures and charts showing results have been staggeringly good but more austerity is required. Adopt plan B: accept golden parachute.

As managers become more itinerant, underlings become shiftless. Even in ABC-TV, where you would think jobs would be prized and not easily relinquished, there is a turnover that would shock even the English cricket team. My partner, Jonica Newby of Catalyst, finds that every time she returns from leave or a long recording trip half the staff are new. How do you build teams or loyalty in conditions like that?

Students prepare for all this when young. Gone are the days when (especially arts) students lounged on lawns dreaming of…well, whatever noble things we 1960s students did dream of: Utopias, world peace, remedial massage (more likely beer, more beer and Jenny Lustgrove). Now students have three part-time jobs, call in to campuses for what they need, then shoot through. University bars are almost deserted.

The managers also have new priorities: compliance. And compliance. I am usually grilled three times to justify a $240 trip to Melbourne. Why am I going? asks clerk No. 2 preparing to send my answers up several layers of determined executive scrutiny. ‘Why, to shag the choirboy I have secreted there,’ I want to reply. ‘Oddly enough, to record radio, as I’ve been doing for 35 years,’ I once answered. The clerk, who didn’t know me from Peter Foster, sent the form back.

Managers are seen at 1. fare-well parties, 2. strike negotiations, 3. airport club lounges. Some are never seen by staff at all and are said to be shy. This is the strange world David Williamson has written about in plays such as Operator and Charitable Intent. Psychopathic bosses are encouraged by a top-down, ruthlessly competitive system because they are manipulators par excellence and can combine charm with lots of cod jargon and pseudo MBA guff. Their path to power is made easier in a world of short-term goals and high turnover. It seems unlikely, but it’s true, and worrying. On one occasion, following a Catalyst report on psychopathic bosses, a startled Geraldine Doogue, who has wide contact with executive Australia, asked whether we were really referring to all the chaps from the Forbes 500 List as megalomaniacs, and we replied, ‘Not at all.’ The villain in the piece could just as well run a mail room or a shoe shop as run the company.

Dr John Clarke (no, not Fred Dagg, I’m being serious for a change) who has written about all this in Working With Monsters, estimates that 0.5 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men qualify as corporate psychopaths according to his definition-and they’ve never had a better time. Despite the current obsession with compliance, it is they who slide around systems by knowing their inner workings and by playing colleagues off against each other.

The answer? Well, Dr Clarke doesn’t recommend therapy for the offenders. They’d just learn new tricks. I am convinced that old-fashioned devolution is the way forward. It is surprising, but shouldn’t be, how much workers know about the breadth of their job and how both efficiency and creativity can be nurtured. It is also interesting to see how little the checks and rechecks fail to spot the fraudsters. In this age of bureaucracy sans frontières, companies still miss rorters hiring yachts on expenses for New Year’s parties and managers creaming hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions.

Compliance can also be counterproductive. An example from outside the workplace: fear of paedophiles has generated an obscene list of regulations in the UK covering clowns at kids’ parties, Santa Claus and Scouts. The result is that parents are no longer content to allow their children to walk or bike to school. Predatory men might be hiding behind pillar boxes. As a result, children are driven to and fro. Apart from the green implications of this extra chauffeuring and the children’s lack of exercise, and even an undue fear of strangers, it now turns out that, for every child saved from a predator, three hundred are killed in car crashes. The price of vigilance can be greater than the gain.

What of the future of work? Must it be a discontinuous patchwork of jobs, a gypsy-like lifetime of discontinuity? The answer is, yes, for the time being. And it is a terrible waste.

The management model I like, being fond of animals, is the goose-flight-in-formation theory of the workplace. The goose flying in front is not the leader who sets the course. They all take turns in front and they all know where they are going. Those honks coming from the back of the V shape are simply to assure the lead bird that the gang are still there. Keep going, they say.

After a while another goose takes over. Should one goose get exhausted and need to land, two other geese will accompany her, to oblige and protect.

The reason they fly in a V formation is that the slight overlap with the next bird’s flight path saves energy by cancelling some of the air turbulence. The ‘energetic advantage’ could be as much as 50 per cent. A corporate equivalent of this goose theory of management is long overdue. The future depends on it.

The values a society places on something like work are reflected in the wages it offers and how it treats the next generation of employees. The remuneration packages of Australian executives are now so obscene I wonder how those receiving all those millions can face the mirror. A seventh Toorak Tank, an eighth mansion, another vineyard-how do they keep track? How do some of them stay out of jail? Many don’t.

If, on the other hand, you work for ABC-TV as a very highly qualified reporter, you may find yourself hired on contracts that start in mid-January and end in November. This saves the organisation from having to pay for holidays or other add-ons. It also means it can give staff the shove when it’s finished with them. The reporter, meanwhile, earns less than our mega-executive’s third assistant trainee PA (about $75,000). (American CEOs in 2006 earned 320 times average earnings-or only 120 times if you use kinder figures. Their mean annual pay was $US8.5 million and the median $US4.1 million. Don’t fret about the calculations, just feel the rage.)

The skill and health implications are dire. Without security it is very hard to grow professionally and gain confidence. Health is also undermined in fascinating ways. Sir Michael Marmot has gained worldwide fame for his Whitehall study showing that the guys at the top fare best and that there is a direct relationship between power and wellbeing. The lowlier you are, the worse your health and longevity. This research has now been followed up by Dr Cary Cooper.

Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the University of Lancaster, and an American, has examined all those dire characteristics of the modern corporation-the uncertainty, shift work, overload. In a word: the stress. It is stress, he finds, that is the key to sickness that comes from trying to do your job:

Research in the past has shown that it’s now changing. There’s been this issue a long time in the field that if you have control over your job, that is the higher up you go, the safer you are from stress, is no longer the case. The recent research is showing that people from the shop floor to the top floor are in trouble and the reason is when you get to the top you’re just as vulnerable to the axe as you are at the bottom or the middle now. So everybody is now vulnerable because of the changing nature of work. Work is intrinsically insecure now.

Professor Cooper was talking in 2006 to Dr Norman Swan of the Health Report on ABC Radio National. The audience response to this interview was enormous.

What we’re finding now is that most of these countries have been totally, and I guess I shouldn’t say this with my funny accent, Americanised. Totally Americanised- long hours culture, intrinsic job insecurity. Bottom line-much more autocratic management style, short-term performance, the outsourcing of activities and therefore the breaking of the psychological contract between the employer and the employee. Times have changed now, the people at the top are not safe.

Is it not time we realised the overall costs to society of this neglect? Cooper finds it amounts to 5-10 per cent of GDP forgone or an equivalent of 30 million lost working days in the UK alone.

As for young people, who are surely the key to the future, I find this even more distressing. It is our responsibility to keep at least some small doors open for the young talent who should form the next generation of staff. They should feel special when they are hired, secure as they serve probationary months and going somewhere as they experiment and dare to fail. But my impression is that the young are instead made to take up a mosaic of jobs, scattered in time and place, inherently without any career structure-unless they are lucky. Obviously in changing times no organisation wants to be locked into maintaining jobs that may not be needed in a decade or into employees who have long passed their usefulness. But there is, surely, a middle way that treats people like human beings instead of ciphers or liabilities.

I am hardly surprised that ours is a drug culture. Some of these ‘substances’ may merely be stimulants kids have always indulged in. It is the nature of drugs that they are for NOW, the present. They are the negation of any sense of future. The problem may begin at school, or at college, but I guarantee it is made worse and consolidated by workplaces from hell.

To lead people, walk beside them…

As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.

The next best people honour and praise.

The next, the people fear;

And the next, the people hate…

When the best leader’s work is done the people say,

‘We did it ourselves!’

– Lao Tsu, sixth century BC

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Australia finally beats South Korea for longest working day in developed world. Most overtime now unpaid.

2009 Unions in several countries close.

2010 Australian woman claims world record for sick leave, involving 186 different ailments in one year. She attended work for only 37 days. Triumph short-lived; beaten by a New Zealander.

2011 ABC director retires after fifteen years, having never met staff. Payout package exceeds $2.3 million and includes desk.

2012 Average student in Australia turns out to have four part-time jobs. Attends university to sleep.

2013 Employer organisations in OECD countries require 24-hour work agreement for efficiency of operation. Staff can be rostered as desired without overtime.

2014 More white-collar staff required to work from home so less office space needed.

2015 Offshore outsourcing causes unemployment to reach 50 per cent in several OECD countries.

2016 Robots (porn industry) demand union reps.

2017 Five senior managers in broadcasting organisation found to have been absent for two years without anyone noticing. Paid throughout. Offered package to step down.

2018 French unions demand three-hour lunch. Discover this provision has been in place since 1956.

2019 Industries abandoned due to climate upheaval. Minimum wage halved.

2020 Armed forces become largest employer.