Does Your Job Own You?

“WE DON’T really live. We merely exist. Our only excuse for existing is to serve our jobs,” Earl complained bitterly.

Mr. Kinley,a his superior and luncheon companion, nodded. “We are slaves. Our jobs own us.”

“Look at the sales record I turned in last year. And how do you appreciate it? You tell me to do 10 percent better this year.”

“That,” reminded Mr. Kinley, “is the coldhearted corporation speaking through me to you. My job is to s-t-r-e-t-c-h men.”

The older man reflected ruefully that things had not been so impersonal, so dehumanizing before the company merged with the giant “growth” corporation. Before the merger the company president was also the owner. Relationships were more on a personal basis. There was room for understanding and fellow feeling. But little was left of those days except tattered confidences between himself and a few people like Earl. Even these confidences were superficial. Down deep Mr. Kinley was not about to reveal his real convictions.

“Now we’re part of a big growth corporation,” said Earl, his voice loaded with sarcasm. “Our stock is on the public market. Anybody with money can buy a claim on us. They invest their dollar. Without turning a hand they want two dollars back. That means we sweat out more profits. Never mind how, just make profits. The only way we can get even is to make a shoddy product.”

Trapped by Giantism

This real-life luncheon conversation between Earl and Mr. Kinley is common whenever men feel trapped in the modern business world, often to corporation giants. It is a trap that few seem able to spring. They were, Mr. Kinley reflected, shaking two helpless fists in the face of Commercialism, That face is set in lines of greed etched in steel, transfixed by a spirit defined by an executive of a giant American steel corporation as quoted by Fortune: “We’re not in business to make steel, we’re not in business to build ships, we’re not in business to erect buildings. We’re in business to make money.”

Growth, by expansion, by merger, by any means, is the hallowed highway to profits and more profits.

A society in which the central drive is profit by growth generates a competitive race between businesses, accelerating them toward the status of giantism. Vanishing is the influence of the small tradesman whose store was his empire, the artisan whose skill was his wealth, the farmer who owned his acres and was greatly self-sufficient. “This is the age of the vast multibillion-dollar corporation,” writes Fred J. Cook in his book The Corrupted Land. “It is, increasingly, the age of the computer and automation. . . . The result has been not just that the individual has been driven into a corporate existence, but that the small corporation has been driven into the larger. This irreversible thrust toward the creation of ever more awesome structures of power has featured the entire post-World War II era.”

From 1950 to 1960 more than a thousand major American businesses merged. The pace accelerated during the 1960’s. Well over two thirds of United States industry (transportation, manufacturing, mining and utilities) today is controlled by just a few hundred corporations. A mere 316 manufacturing corporations employ 40 percent of all working Americans. In such a world, observes Cook, the individual’s will weakens and his conscience atrophies.

To author Erich Fromm it is a frightening reversal of order: “What is alive are the organizations, the machines; . . . man has become their slave rather than being their master.” Men become no more than well-oiled cogs in the machines: “The oiling is done with higher wages, fringe benefits, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and human-relations experts; . . . none of his feelings or his thoughts originate with himself; none is authentic. He has no convictions, either in politics, religion, philosophy. . . . He identifies himself with the giants and idolizes them as the true representatives of his own human powers, those of which he has dispossessed himself.”

Unethical Practices

Another reason why many businessmen feel trapped is the strong trend toward unethical practices. In fact, the historian who wrote of ancient Carthage, “Nothing which results in profit is regarded as disgraceful,” could let the words stand for the business world today. The Harvard Business Review, interviewing 1,700 business executives, found that four out of seven believed that every other executive in their company would violate a code of ethics anytime he felt that he could get away with it. Four out of five admitted that their own firm was unethical, guilty of some such practices as bribery, hiring of prostitutes for customers, price rigging, untruthful advertising, antitrust violations, falsifying financial statements to get loans or credit and handing out or accepting kickbacks.

Then there is the race to climb the corporate ladder of positions. As one oil company executive admitted: “Some people in this company will do just anything to get ahead.” Doing “just anything to get ahead” leads to many unethical practices, what has been described as “trickery, a venomous subtlety and a complete lack of ethics.” The book The Corrupted Land tells of executive backstabbing and throat cutting being done in hundreds of businesses with “gangland professionalism.”

“Is it possible for a man to move up through the ranks of management solely by honest, decent methods?” Modern Office Procedures magazine asked its executive readers. Nearly all responded, “No.”

Any unscrupulous methods employed tend to become contagious. Warns New York management consultant Norman Jaspen: “When you have dishonesty at the top, it spreads downward like a catching disease.” Those who want to avoid catching a diseased morality may well feel trapped.

“Planned Obsolescence”

Another reason some businessmen feel trapped in their job is that they cannot manufacture products of the high quality that they would like to. The trend is toward “planned obsolescence.” This means that the producer makes his product somewhat shoddy on purpose, but not obviously so. Thus, the product wears out sooner and the customer will have to buy another. This practice is called by a writer on economics “an integral part of the American economy.”

General Motors turned other corporations green with envy when it led the auto industry into adopting the “planned obsolescence‘’ policy of changing models of cars every year. One critic commented that pioneer auto builder Henry Ford, with his idea of building a car that would last for years, would be “a positive national menace today.”

Outstripping all of “free enterprise” combined is governmental spending on arms, called “a delightful stimulant to the economy in a society of waste because military weapons become so quickly obsolescent and must be perpetually renewed.”

“Planned obsolescence” results in a cycle. Businesses encourage debt, make consumer credit easier and set off the endless cycle that Business Week called “Borrow. Spend. Buy. Waste. Want.”

No Positions of Quiet Retreat

Mr. Kinley faced a personal dilemma. He was sick and tired of his job. Top management completely ignored his pleas against flooding the market with shoddy merchandise. Since the company merged into the corporate conglomerate the pressure to stretch men and bloat production had only intensified. Most men around him were the conformist type, taking to corporate ethics like ducks to water, hungry for advancement. How does one man stand up against an overwhelming, ruthless, impersonal corporate power that uses and drains and discards men?

What alternatives were there? As long as the company had been small and independent it was possible in a few instances that, as a man grew older, he could withdraw into the security of a quiet, fixed position to which younger men hardly aspired. But now there was a corporation chart hanging in the general manager’s office, a chart shaped like a pyramid. Every position was a block in that pyramid, a step of ascension upon which younger, stronger, abler men were ever eager to climb.

Stress Illness

Mr. Kinley knew deep down that the danger signals in his nervous system were crying “crisis.” Businessmen who sport their ulcers like badges of honor have a euphemism for it​—the word “stress.”

What help could he get from the company psychologist? Mr. Kinley knew what he would advise: “Scrub your scruples and play the business game by its own rules.” In his book Business as a Game Albert Z. Carr says: “Men whose economic decisions and actions are overcharged with personal feelings find it difficult to endure the stress of business.” He advises businessmen to reserve their scruples for everyday life, because “the strategy of business is sharply differentiated from the ideals of private life.” Andrew M. Hacker in an article entitled “The Making of a [Corporation] President” concurs: “How he reacts to this challenge [of condoning a shoddy product] will be noted by his superiors.’’ Not only will the man who is too squeamish to “play the game” hardly become president, but, as Carr adds: “He will be lucky if he holds on to any executive job and manages to avoid stress illness.”

Troubled executives, all through their thirties and forties, if they have survived, have competed in a world that demands achievement. Constant assertive drive sets them going at a pace that eventually overtakes their entire personalities. Then, as they enter their fifties they find themselves unable to decelerate, to relax, to adjust to the aging process. Those who cannot face reality, says Professor William E. Henry of the University of Chicago, “literally race themselves to death.”

Modern business often drives men unceasingly, relentlessly to a churning of destructive attitudes within them​—fear, hate, anger, jealousy, suspicion, frustration, envy, guilt, insecurity, self-doubt.

Mr. Kinley was finding himself not only tense, nervous and short-tempered, but, worst of all, exhausted. It was a kind of dark, dismal exhaustion. He could not close the door on his business vexations at the end of the day and shut them out of his mind at home. A hangover of exhaustion built up from Monday until, by the weekend, he needed Saturday and Sunday just to rest and recover.

Springing the Jaws of the Corporate Trap

But at fifty-four years of age what chance did he have of finding employment elsewhere? Where could he find a position that paid as well in money, prestige and benefits? True, there were competitors that would gladly hire a man of his maturity and qualifications if he would help them overtake his present company. But that meant climbing as hard or harder up their corporate pyramid.

First he must resolve​—and reconcile his family to it also—​that relief from job pressure might be a commodity that one buys and pays for. The cost? Possibly a lowered living standard. Money must no longer be the sole measuring rod of values.

To get a sensible view of money is important, Mr. Kinley knew. The Bible had put it clearly: “The love of money is a root of all sorts of injurious things, and by reaching out for this love some have been led astray from the faith and have stabbed themselves all over with many pains.”​—1 Tim. 6:10.

Mr. Kinley sensed that if he wanted to live much longer he must make a change. Something in his own body and mind was telling him the same thing that a fifteen-year study by Duke University’s Medical Center had concluded: work satisfaction is one of the most vital factors for a long life.

A week after that luncheon hour with Earl, Mr. Kinley quietly handed in his resignation.

Within two months he was working three to four days a week as an independent consultant serving smaller companies in his field. He was not earning as much money as before. He had lost some valuable fringe benefits, such as group insurance. It was the price he was paying for relief from job pressure. Was it worth it?

In his own mind, Yes. “I feel an infinitely superior inner happiness. I sprang the corporation trap. Now I have time for hobbies, for study and reflection, time to flex my own thinking abilities. Now I work to live. I hope I never again have to live just to work.”

This true-life account of one American businessman raises the question for you: Does your job own you?

[Footnotes]