I’m no economist, but though I’m distressed, I’m not terribly surprised by the current economic collapse. That’s because it’s been clear to me that fundamental attitudes underlying business practices of the past couple decades have been so clearly wrong, which is plain for any normal person to see. And eventually what is wrong comes crashing down, because of all the bad consequences and effects of the wrong.
Fortunately, I am not the only one who sees what is wrong, and some in a position to speak up are speaking up. I just found one such person, Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, doing so in an excellent article in the Globe and Mail. For starters, he says,
American management is still revered across much of the globe for what it used to be. Now, a great deal of it is just plain rotten - detached and hubristic. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting engaged, too many CEOs sit in their offices and deem: They pronounce targets for others to meet, or else get fired.
. . . Executive compensation, the most evident manifestation of this legal corruption of management, was labelled scandalous by Fortune magazine more than 20 years ago, and repeatedly ever since, to no avail. While America escalated its love affair with leadership, its corporate leaders singled themselves out for increasingly obscene pay packages, all the while extolling the virtues of teamwork and sustainable enterprise.
That is so true. My husband worked for a long time for a large corporation – and as the years went by saw them go increasingly in the direction of demanding profits at the expense of good business practices and the welfare of the actual people they employ.
When I met him four years ago, he was running a large division of the company, struggling to keep up with the constant demands of the higher-ups to increase profits, while still running a good ship and treating his several hundred employees fairly. He routinely worked 70 hours a week, brought work home, was up and on the road before dawn and home after dark. His division was one of the most profitable in the company. And yet still they made demands – and as I got to know him, it became clear to me that the demands were unreasonable, all out of bounds, driven by sheer greed, not by love for the company product or care for their employees or the people they served.
After we got engaged, he left the company, and sought a better, less stressful job for the sake of our marriage. And just in time. The company it turns out is now going down, driven down by its own greed and heedless concern for actual good business practices. I am so glad my husband is out of there – and his physical health and state of mind have improved drastically since he got out.
The article continues,
Alongside this came all that "downsizing": Fail to make the targets, no matter how profitable the company remained, and out the door went thousands of employees, those "human resources." So conveniently called, in fact, because while managers have to be careful about human beings, they can dispose of human resources like any other resources.
But at what cost? Rather high, because these people carried out much of the critical knowledge of their companies, as well as those companies' hearts and souls. A robust enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources.
I’ve been alive long enough to remember when the term “human resources” was first coined – and what the world was like before working people came to be considered “resources,” and how drastically and quickly the world changed afterward.
As a kid growing up, my dad ran his own small business as an architect, employing a secretary and several young architects in a small downtown office. He worked a normal 40-hour work week, and so did all of his employees. No one was expected to work more than 40 hours a week, unless there was some sort of emergency. No one got rich, and neither did my dad, but everyone received decent pay.
Dad got to work at 8:00 in the morning and left at 5:00, was home by 5:30 every day, in time to roll on the floor and play with us kids while mom finished making dinner. Then we all sat down and ate together and talked about our days. After dinner we went off to do homework or watch TV or read, and we were all in bed by 9 or 9:30, mom and dad by 10:00. No one was ever overly tired, we got plenty of rest, and spent our weekends hiking, skiing, camping, picnicking, or just relaxing around the house. Mom worked too off and on, but mostly took care of us and the house – and neither she nor dad ever brought work home. When they were home, they were home, with us as a family.
How different things became after people became “human resources.” “Resource” sounds like a thing, an object – and the term “human resource” had the effect of reducing people, the people doing the work, to objects. And as objects, they became expendable. Since, as the saying went, the “human resource is the most expensive resource,” because, you know, you actually have to pay them and provide benefits for them, then the way to cut costs and increase profits is to cut the most expensive cost – but while ensuring that productivity remains high. The result? Read on:
We have been told how productive the American economy has been. Well, check the way productively is calculated: Firing great numbers of people, and expecting those left behind to carry the load before they burn out, is productive, indeed - until the longer-term consequences show up. They have been partly showing up in the massive U.S. trade deficits. The U.S. economy is collapsing because the American enterprises - and worse still, the country's legendary sense of enterprise - have been collapsing.
Yes, we have been productive – by engaging in a kind of economic slavery, cutting human “resources” and expecting the rest to carry much too large a load, damaging their health, families, and home life, while those cut out are forced into lower-paying jobs, because so many jobs have been shipped overseas, where the “human resource” is a lot cheaper. And so the American people are slowly strangled and impoverished, while the rich enrich themselves on our suffering.
Yes, people, we have been scammed, turned into objects and used for the pleasure of the very few. But why? Why did this happen? Where did these attitudes come from, and how did they become so quickly entrenched?
Here’s another great article on the same subject, also in the Globe and Mail, this one an interview by Gordon Pitts with Peggy Cunningham of Dalhousie University:
Business schools stand guilty as charged for creating the mess we're in, Peggy Cunningham says. That's a pretty common sentiment these days, but it carries particular weight because Dr. Cunningham is the new director of the School of Business Administration at Dalhousie University. A pioneering academic in corporate social responsibility, she recently left Queen's University for the chance, she says, to build a new kind of business school around the core concept of responsible leadership.
". . . I have a colleague in a very large bank in Australia. She was doing work on responsible leadership with a group of us who are senior people in business schools. She looked us in the eye and said: 'You have graduated a generation of monsters.'
". . . It's been too much focus on individualism - not only of individual success but individualism of one business pitted against another. Also there are businesses and individuals who don't believe they are embedded in a wider social system and are accountable to this wider system.
"Competitive models and individualistic models have taken us a very long way. But we have forgotten some of the grounding that we are part of a much larger whole and we have to be accountable to that whole."
The larger whole. What used to be called the common good. In others words, what we do matters, because it affects others. In a single word, virtue. Virtue, understood in the ancient world as being that which not only makes a person good, but contributes to the good of the community, the good of the whole – it was a matter of survival for ancient people surrounded by barbarians in a budding civilization.
How we lack virtue in the world today. Many college campuses, where MBA’s are educated, are not just individualistic, they’re licentious, hedonistic – breeding the opposite of virtue in students. Anyone who’s gone to college in the past 40 years knows that, and in recent years I lived in a student neighborhood of a very large university, and witnessed first hand the hedonistic behavior of the students. They behaved as if the world existed to be their party place – and if we complained, we were intruding on what was rightfully theirs. No one, it seemed, was actually teaching them how to be grown ups, and get along in the world with other people – how to be virtuous, and so be prepared to be a good part of the community, and contribute to the good of the community. We have made a cult of youth, and no longer require youth to grow up by the time they’re grown up. Frederica Matthews Greene wrote about that very thing some time ago, in a very interesting First Things article.
So they graduate and enter the work force unprepared – and then people like my husband have to deal with them, have to teach them basic rules of behavior just to get along in the workplace, such as iron your shirt, show up on time, and don’t call in sick every time you want to go skiing. They don’t like it – but some of them learn to play the rules, get promoted, and wind up in high places where the world once again becomes their party place.
Is that not exactly how the heads of our corporations have behaved? They are monsters – monsters of selfishness and hedonism and utter lack of care for anyone other than themselves. In other words, they lack virtue. And with a majority of them at the helm, we have just all been given a massive lesson in the need for virtue, by the very magnitude of its absence and the effects its absence is having on our economy. We don’t live in a vacuum, and our behavior affects others. Freedom, in other words, is not licentiousness, not freedom to do anything you please, but freedom to do that which leads to authentic happiness for everyone involved. For real freedom, the kind that leads to real good for everyone, you need virtue.
Which brings me to the main point: what is the purpose of work? Our country has a really skewed understanding of work: that it is simply to make money, profit, or to seek self-fulfillment in a career. That is not what work actually is for.
F. Carolyn Graglia summed it up well in her book, Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism. She asserts that prior to feminism, not even men for the most part understood work as a means to self-fulfillment, or solely for the purpose of profiteering (though there have always been profiteers in history). Most men understood work as a means to have a family, to support a family, and so to have a community and contribute to the community. She was writing a critique of contemporary feminism, but her insights have a wider application.
Specifically, work did not exist for its own sake. It was a selfless activity, self-sacrificing, subservient and in support of family, community and relationships. Family and relationships were what was important – like my family, my dad making sure all his employees got off on time so they could all go home and be with their families. So he could come home and be with us, roll around and play on the floor with us. If his job had demanded he give that up, he would have simply quit, and found something else to do, because his family came first. But how many of us in the world today even have that choice?
In the Catholic view, work, the economy, is meant to reflect the work, the economy, of God, which is selfless love, love for others, looking out for the welfare of others. Catholic workers and business people have a responsibility to bring their Catholic values – virtues - into the workplace and insist on them. Catholic corporate heads especially have a responsibility to use ethical, virtuous business practices that ensure the welfare of all the people who work for them, and all the people they serve. It’s not just about profit, and not all about the shareholders. It’s about everyone affected in any way by your business practices – because whatever you do affects everyone, affects the culture itself, affects the well-being, directly or indirectly, of everyone on the planet.
And if you are making obscene profits while people are getting laid off or losing their retirements, do you really not believe that God will hold you accountable? Do you not realize that you cannot take your profits with you – but only your soul, the state of your soul, which God sees nakedly, through and through?
The Catholic Church is not an economics institute. But it does understand the value of people, and knows what work is for. I hope that Catholic business people will speak up, and assert a stronger role in ensuring sound business practices that place work in its proper perspective: in service of people, families, relationships, and community - rather than subjugating people, and the good of the community, to itself.
Here’s one more reason why Catholic business people must speak up: because we believe in grace, and that without grace, we are blind. We actually need grace in order to see and understand reality clearly, correctly – so if we have grace, and can see, we are bound to share it with others. Because others, you see, cannot see. They need someone to help lead them out of the mess we’re in – and only a person in a state of grace can see clearly enough to do that.
So if you are a Catholic business man or woman, especially if you are in a position of power, you must pray, go to confession, receive communion, and study and apply, live, the teachings of your Faith. Correct yourself, if you have been living incorrectly. Then you will be able to see clearly enough to go out into the world and help lead us out of the mess we’re in. The government can only do so much - but grace is capable of doing all, if we would only lend ourselves to it.
