|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
Rant--Slacker!!! |
Current rating: 0 |
by Bill Gorrell
(No verified email address) |
08 Mar 2004
|
|
Bill Gorrell's rant, broadcast some time near the beginning of February on WEFT, 90.1 FM, Champaign. (Between 11 am and noon on a Saturday.) |
Subject: slacker!
Play CD1, Track 1 - Working Man
Fade CD1 out on cue
Cue cD2 to Track 1 - The Star Spangled Banner
There is a specter over America, the specter of mass worker sabotage.
According to a recent Gallup survey 71% of American employees state that they are “not engaged in their work. This statistic is based on detailed quarterly surveys of 1,000 to 1,200 employees over the last 2 1/2 years conducted by Curt Coffman who is presumably a non-slacking employee of the Gallup Organization.
The study shows that slacking usually starts after six months on the job and continues to increase as long as the worker stays with the company. The behaviors of slacker employees described by Coffman range from just not doing work, to taking long breaks, to being rude to customers. Their motives range from laziness, to realizing that hard work isn’t recognized, to hatred of their employer.
A Hewlett-Packard employee in Denver increased his slacking after the firm’s merger with Compaq was announced and the company began laying of his coworkers. He told Coffman, "I was basically coasting for the last six months. I knew what was coming. So why would I kill myself on the project I was working on?"
Moreover, while most slackers are just unmotivated workers doing as little as possible to earn a paycheck, Coffman defines 17% of the workforce as “actively disengaged,” or people who consciously act to undermine their employers. Coffman tells about a woman who worked at an optometrist center who made sure that every customer used a little-known 50% discount on eyeglasses offered by the center. The Denver Post quoted Coffman as saying, "This was a perfectly legal thing to do and it just killed revenues." Employees at call centers said they were often rude to customers so that they would get off the phone quicker. Furthermore, some claimed to drive customers away because they hate their employers.
What’s Coffman’s prescription to cure slacking? Well he should take “Chainsaw” as a nickname because he would go farther than General Electric’s infamous CEO Jack Welch when it comes to cutting out dead wood in the workplace. He advises firing the bottom 20% of employees in most large firms as well as firing their bosses. Coffman was quoted as saying, “Frankly, I don't think executives care that much about employees right now.” Right now? When did they care about employees Curt?
You might wonder at this point, why I started this commentary with the term “sabotage” when I’m mainly talking about unmotivated workers slacking off. I realize that the word “sabotage” conjurs up images of Hogan’s Heroes bombing the ball-bearing plant near Stalag 13. As the following quote from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s book, titled, “Sabotage, the Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency,” point’s out, sabotage can be much more subtle.
Flynn wrote:
“Sabotage was adopted by the General Federation of Labor of France in 1897 as a recognized weapon in their method of conducting fights on their employers. But sabotage as an instinctive defense existed long before it was ever officially recognized by any labor organization. Sabotage means primarily: the withdrawal of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up and interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality, of capitalist production or to give poor service. Sabotage is not physical violence, sabotage is an internal, industrial process.”
By the way, “Sabotage” was published in 1916 by the Industrial Workers of the World and you can read it on their website, www.iww.org.
According to Coffman’s polling, 17% of American workers are definitely saboteurs. Those workers are actively responding to their job dissatisfaction by consciously undermining their bosses efforts at making profits, and I salute them. Coffman’s data shows that we have, perhaps, 3 kinds of employees. The American workers who aren‘t slackers appear to mainly be short term employees who haven’t been disillusioned into slacking yet. There is probably a small cohort in this group who aren’t slackers because they feel that their company cares about them and that they will be justly rewarded for their efforts by their firm’s success.
There is the huge group of casual slackers who don’t hate their company, but they don’t think they will be rewarded for working harder. That leaves us with the 17% of unorganized, nascent revolutionaries who actively sabotage their employers because they are completely disgusted with the bosses.
Although sabotage wasn’t formally defined until 1987, it is a time-honored tradition that probably started when a strong caveman forced weaker cavemen into doing work for him. It’s a tactic that can be used when a strike is unfeasible. It’s also an instinctive tactic for individual, unorganized workers. Unfortunately, it’s mainly a tactic for revenge. Since most sabotage is illegal, or at the least would get you fired, it’s hard to formally tie demands to sabotage. However, unions can legally use sabotage by “working to rule.” In the real world, union workers often perform beyond the strictures of their contract when they are satisfied with their employers. This employee cooperation results in small improvements in production efficiency that quickly add up to increased profits for the company. When employees work to rule however, those efficiencies and profits evaporate.
Unfortunately, working to rule does hold some risk for union workers. When the Staley workers tried it 10 years ago they were locked out by the company. You might remember how the dispute became very bitter, the company hired replacements, and the union caved in.
READY TO FADE CD 2 UP UNDER BILL’S MIC
Sabotage is useful in the building trades, although it can’t be organized or sanctioned by the union. However, a bad contractor could be run out of town if workers surreptitiously organized resistance. We can afford to do this because the work will be there for us, we’ll just do it for another company. There are countless ways to make a construction project unprofitable, thus decreasing the company’s ability to bid on future work. Often, the margins are close enough that massive slacking can make the difference. I even saw a company the sort of sabotaged itself to death. They were building a basement for a large building. This company was small and this project was their first step into the big time. There first mistake was being cheap on materials. Their second mistake was treating their employees like crap. The carpenters knew that the forms that they were ordered to build wouldn’t hold, but the bosses were such jerks that the carpenters didn’t argue with them about it and went ahead and built the faulty forms.
The forms blew out, the contractor was fired, and the company went out of business. If those bosses weren’t trying to low-ball everything and if they treated their employees like human beings, they’d still be in business today.
FADE CD 2 UP UNDER BILL’S MIC
As we’ve seen, sabotage can be useful in rare circumstances, although it can be a dangerous practice. In fact, the IWW runs a disclaimer at the introduction to Flynn’s book warning that some of the practices she prescribes are illegal. On the other hand, their are millions of American workers not represented by unions, or represented by ineffective unions. Those millions of workers face the power of the bosses alone. There is no way that they can formally succeed as individuals in making demands on their employers. However, those millions of employees still have power and, again, I salute the ones who use that power in silent protests that undermine their bosses. |
See also:
http://www.iww.org
|
This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license |
