I’ve been around long enough to notice a few patterns to life.  Here’s some repeating patterns that I’ve noticed:

When the economy is taking a dive:

1)      There is some sort of scandal about high-level white-collar fraud that has a wide-ranging effect on the economy.

2)      The government declares “war” on some overwhelming threat to our way of life (internal or external).

3)      Gas/power becomes expensive and sometimes difficult to get.

4)      You start to see the commercial with the pruney old lady telling you to buy gold.

5)      Illegal immigration becomes an urgent, hot-button political issue.

6)      The television newsmedia start trashing on the American worker.

A couple of weeks ago , I saw a smirking Fox News anchor talking about how the Productivity of the American Worker had fallen, but the average American Worker’s wage had gone up.  Both statistics were small percentage points, something like two or three percent…and as I don’t know exactly how the productivity is computed, that statistic was pretty meaningless to me.

I mean, I KNOW that it’s done using man-hours and production units…but what exactly IS a production unit?  A customer served?  A hamburger cooked?  An appliance delivered? A car assembled?  I don’t know.

Anyway, the smirking info-wench on the tube didn’t go into it, because the exact technical meaning of those numbers was unimportant.  She just dropped the numbers showing a slight decrease in productivity, and put a wry twist into her mouth and cocked her head ironically and delivered the stat about the miniscule wage increase.  As if to imply that SOMEBODY was getting a free ride.

The other day I saw a CNN blurb where some financial pundit was beaming happily and talking about how workers can expect smaller and fewer wage increases going forward, and how employers are now going to emphasize bonuses.  The reason for this is that bonuses can be more directly tied to the profitability of the company, and only have to be given out once, whereas raises are expected to be permanent.

This will inspire employees to get off their lazy asses and work harder, and be more productive, she implied.

And I would be OK with that if most of the salaried people I knew were lazy slug-a-butts out to gyp their employers.  But they’re not.  Most of the salaried people I know work and excess of forty hours per week.  I have friends that average fifty hours or more per week, and I even know people who work sixty or seventy hours per week.  Average.  It is not unusual for me to hear about someone pulling the occasional eighty-hour week.

There are a lot of reasons that people do this:

1)      Sometimes they care about their job, and are passionate about accomplishing something they feel is important.

2)      Sometimes they love their job, view it as a calling, and there is really little else they would rather be doing.

3)      Sometimes their managers are really crappy, and are constantly changing their job requirements and priorities on them so that they have to frequently have to re-do work, invest time and energy in projects that ultimately fail or are abandoned, do the work of co-workers who leave because the boss doesn’t want to hire anyone to replace them and are under semi-permanent deadline crunches.

4)      Sometimes lay-offs are coming.  You can smell it on the wind.  Everyone is in a fevered competition to keep their job.

5)      Sometimes there are only so many raises/promotions available, and the competition is stiff.  You have to get up early and go to bed late if you want to win the big prize.

Maybe it is sometimes the big bonuses that you get when the company is profitable.  I know that many of my family members work for Marvin’s Windows, and Marvin’s gives out HUGE bonuses whenever they reach a certain level of profitability.  They actually pay livable wages year-around, and then, in a good year, people who have been with the company for many years will sometimes get a bonus equivalent to their annual salary.  It is a very real motivational factor, because the company actually follows through fairly often with the bonuses.  Most of the people I talked to feel they are being treated fairly.

On the other hand, my first office job out of college went very differently.  I was technically a temp, though I worked there for a good six months after I was supposed to leave.  I wasn’t eligible for bonuses.  But the permanent employees treated the bonuses as a joke.  Whenever the bonus projections got really really huge, something would always happen at the end of the year to bring the company’s profitability down.

Sometimes it was the firing of a high-ranking executive, and the resultant “golden parachute” severance.  Sometimes it was an expensive investment, for instance, acquiring a competitor in an expensive take-over bid, but regardless, the bonuses that people felt they had earned all year evaporated in executive actions that the rank-and-file had no control over.

A person I knew who was a permanent employee there got a bonus two out of the six years he worked there.

In another company where I knew several of the employees, middle management were consistently paid at below-market-wages.  The compensation was supposed to be that they would get huge bonuses at the end of the year when the company was profitable.  This worked great, until one year when one of the departments lost a lot of money.  Then, nobody got a bonus.

Up until this point, the executives of this company had successfully created and maintained a very intense sense of team spirit and camaraderie.

Those people who had worked hard and built up huge bonuses and saw them evaporate were not happy, but they were willing to tighten their belts, cut out some of the non-essentials, bite the bullet and take one for the team.  They were prepared to shrug it off, and get back to work…aiming high for next year.  There was a sense of circling the wagons, we’re all in this together, etc.

Until the head cheese drove in with his new Jag, which was his latest addition to a long string of expensive cars and assorted other toys.  The rumor was that when someone suggested that maybe that wasn’t the most constructive thing to rub his increased wealth in the faces of employees who were in the process of tightening their budgets, he reportedly said “Who are they to tell me what to do with my money?”

Then things started to fall apart.  Some people weren’t being team players…and it was the people at the very top.  Attitudes tanked.

The point for you big business types out there:

I guess the point here is that whatever strategy you use to get the best out of your employees, it will succeed or fail based on whether or not it is viewed as fair.  People who think they are being treated fairly will do whatever work is required of them, in the time allotted, for the compensation they agreed to.  People who feel like they are being screwed will just do what they have to in order to get through the day.

And if they are being screwed, they will know it.  They can see the huge profits and salaries made by the people at the top.  You might be able to get them to blame themselves and their “lack of work ethic” or “lack of performance” for a while, but eventually they will notice if their life consists of little else but work, if they hate every minute of it, and if they can't seem to shake the nagging feeling that they are being punked.  After that, you might get them to spend some time blaming the working poor and the welfare cases and the illegal immigrants for being a “drain on society”, for not working as hard as they do - but that will only go so far before it starts to wear thin.

And eventually, no matter how desperately you try to tie the principles of laissez-faire capitalism to the foundational principles of our country, no matter how you try to convince them that they are to blame for their lack of success, no matter how hard you try to pit them against other elements of the underclass, eventually they will realize that it is YOU who is getting richer while they get poorer.  Then, the general office worker will realize that you shouting "Hey look!  Those Mexicans are picking YOUR cabbage...go git 'em!!" is a distraction, and a silly one at that.

They will realize that it isn’t the damned Mexicans that are taking their jobs…it’s all the wage-slaves burning sixty, seventy, eighty-hour weeks competing for your scraps. (Hint:  every two people who work an average sixty hours a week are “stealing” the job of another person, and giving the salary for that third job away to the company they are working for – well, at least they can be said to be “stealing” that job as much as any illegal immigrant can be said to be “stealing” a job.)

You might be able to hold them off for a while by putting the fear of un-Americanism in them, making them believe that it is Anti-American and somehow communistic or terroristic to demand to be treated fairly, and that unrestrained control of the country and government by the monied interests is the American Way…but eventually, it always swings back the other way.