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Which of us cannot sympathise? We all remember when we too met that beguiling hero, Monsieur Career. How impressive he looked. Those broad shoulders. That big desk with all the telephones. The absolute - yet unspoken - promise to deliver us a better and more fulfilling life. And we believed his seductive imprecations - surrendered to the pin-striped embrace fast as a tipsy teenager. I can’t imagine why we don’t wear long white dresses or tailcoats to our first day at work - it is a marriage, after all. But, like all too many modern marriages, is destined to be either brutish and short, or long and deceitful.

Corinne Maier favours the latter option. In fact, she insists it is the essential technique for corporate survival. Her argument is blunt. Most large organisations, whether private or public, are hugely inefficient, bedevilled by politics, sycophancy and abysmal management, and hence breed only malign boredom for employees.

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
If I were an employer, I'd be beside myself with anger that there is a published manual for my employees on how to make my business a miserable failiure.

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Face it, Gir. The reason why this stuff has gotten wide exposure is that since the 1970s, the cultural myth in the USA, Canada and Europe that hard work could get you somewhere has been breaking down. Employers quit giving out As for effort, and started giving out As for how mean, crude and insufferable you could be to your underlings.

Employers have also broken the link between effort and reward by blatantly encouraging the resurgence of nepotism, cronyism and outright ass-patting instead of encouraging merit and solid work. The numerical, hard data that backs me up is that prior to 1973, wages and productivity shot up at the same rate. After 1973, the gap began to grow, and wages have grown less quickly relative to productivity.

So is it any wonder that with the arbitrary and unfair treatment employers seem to routinely give to employees, that employees internalize the notion that nobody gives any loyalty to anyone else anymore, and so looking out for number one means putting in as little effort as possible while collecting the maximal wage possible.

And why not? When working hard just means your head is above everyone else's to get first chop by the daisy cutter of downsizing, why be noticeable? Why be the person who threatens your boss's job, so that he or she reacts by downsizing you out first? Why be the guy who ends up gaining the jealousy of one's fellow workmates and risking a stab in the back via the poisonous snakepit of office politics?

John Kenneth Galbraith once opined that the capitalist and communist economies were converging onto some kind of middle ground, an intermediate between two extremes. That is, capitalist countries were building in features of socialism under the rubric of Keynesian government intervention, while communist countries were building in features of capitalism under the impetus of trying to raise living standards for the population, since central planning was proving inadequate to deliver the promise.

Well, oddly enough, the convergence seems to be happening, only in a twisted, oddly distorted version of the ideal Galbraith held out (which was that this merging would take place over years, decades and generations until finally all countries would recognize that they were operating on fundamentally the same principles and would move painlessly to a worldwide government, built on both broad social freedom and broad economic security).

This twisted version is manifesting itself in the same tendency of the elites to grow increasingly out of touch with those far below them, while those at the bottom enforce a crude kind of levelling effect (just as in the USSR, they spoke of uravnilovka, "levelling" of workers to the same wage and responsibilities) by encouraging each other to put in no more than the absolute bare minimum required to collect a paycheck and keep working - because any extra effort would get sweet fanny adams for appreciation from anybody, be they co-workers or bosses. Co-workers resent you, and bosses either promptly load you down with enough extra work to kill you, or feel threatened and downsize you out.

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Peter: If I bust my ass and InniTech ships a few extra units, I don't see an extra penny. Really, the only motivation is not losing my job , but you know what, Bob? That'll only make someone work hjjust hard enough not to get fired.

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I would suggest you peruse
Whitecollar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
A textbook solution to the principal-agent problem: align the incentives such that the workers' interests coincide with the employers.

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A textbook solution to the principal-agent problem: align the incentives such that the workers' interests coincide with the employers.

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Agreed fully. In this case the workers' are much better off than they ever were under the union, they love it, my friend loves it, but the union hates it with a passion.

Is this a model for the rest of the world? Absolutely, yes. Will it ever happen? No way. Very few people will ever treat their employees as well as my friend does (see note below). And conversely, very few staff will ever respond to their employer the way my friend's do. And forget about any union ever buying into this one, even in very selective circumstances. But even saying that, because of the profit share mechanism, when he suggests to one of his managers that they might want to consider hiring extra staff, the existing staff says no and they figure out how to handle the extra workload without adding extra bodies (simply because hiring an additional person dilutes the profit share mechanism).

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
If I were an employer, I'd be beside myself with anger that there is a published manual for my employees on how to make my business a miserable failiure.

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abnormal:Is this a model for the rest of the world? Absolutely, yes. Will it ever happen? No way.

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Ha ha. Let me get you a shovel. Anecdotal stories are useful for selling religion to simple people but not very good for serious social analysis.

Answer me this: without a union, how do I, as an employee in any workplace, resolve a dispute with my boss? Your answer, and the answer of people who share your view, is to rely upon the good graces of the boss. How pathetic. Just look at what the horrifying paternalistic relationship between the Government of Canada and the First Nations of Canada has done to the First Nations. qed.

Without a union the boss has all the cards. Bosses like that. Working people don't. Unions, by compelling the boss to negotiate the terms of a collective agreement, is required to agree to methods of resolving disputes...the key component of which is the grievance procedure. Even the reactionary Globe and Mail recognizes that in its masthead with its idiotic quote about "loyal subjects" not "advising or consenting to" arbitrary measures.

1) Always carry a full cup of coffee when you are sneaking out early, people think you are just going to a meeting at another part of the building.

2) Leave your jacket in your car. Putting your jacket on is a sure sign your leaving.

3) When out for extended lunches, have someone put a steaming coffee on your desk. It makes it look like you have just momentarily stepped away.

1. don't put anything away, pile it all in stacks on your desk and office tables so that you look inundated.

2. perfect the weary/tired smile, it makes you look pitiful and others feel for you (it also results in less work others will put off onto you)

3. if you stay 20 minutes late you can charge 30 minutes of overtime and others start thinking you live there and that you are a devoted and tireless worker.

4. take every opportunity to let others know how heavy your workload is and how you ahve to stay late every night just to maintain your perpetual "two weeks behind" status.

5. when you nap in your office make sure that if you lie down on the couch that you comb the back of your hair so taht it doesn't give you away.

As to the anecdote, it's a good one. But it does depend on the benevolence of this particular person. Luckily in this case, this person *is* benevolent, and so the employees don't, as it happens, need a union--what they've got is better than a union. As long as he doesn't sell the business, or suffer a stroke and let a relative take over, or something.