Or, why are working Americans such cheery motherfuckers?
I hate work. I hate it with a passion. Like the title says, the only thing I hate more is unemployment. It's a European thing generally, but it's also and particularly an English thing. One of the most alien (to me) attitudes I've encountered since arriving here is the American attitude to work. Any good working-class Englishman (which is what I am at the marrow - working-class and proud of it) will tell you that employers per se are the enemy of the worker.
In part this attitude has to do with the fact that the Industrial Revolution, the Age of the Machine, and the chronic disruption that Mechanism and Sweated Labor brought to the social structures of the laboring classes, began in England. The Luddites, those heroes of the working classes, destroyed machines used in the textile industry, and later still the threshing machines that deprived agricultural workers of their livelihoods. I am at heart a Luddite: if I could I would burn down and obliterate the entire technological basis of twenty first century existence, and do so happily.
Work, as every good Englishman knows, is a curse. And those who employ workers are at heart mere exploiters and profiteers who derive their gains from the sweat of others - no matter how hard they may work themselves. This is not a rational point of view. It is, however, deeply ingrained in the psyche of every European. If it were not for the fact that work, and payment for it, is the only way (short of winning the Lottery) by which I can gain the money I need to allow me to do the things I actually want to do, nothing could persuade to engage in it. It's not that the work I do is trivial or meaningless: I help keep your lights burning, your air conditioning ticking over. I help keep the doohickey that automatically opens your garage door when you hit a button in operation. I perform a socially important, useful function.
And? So? The only meaning this work has for me, personally, is the pay check that lands in my bank account each week. I grant you, that's not something of little consequence, and I do my work to the very best of my ability to ensure that that pay check keeps arriving. But I look at my colleagues and I see their apparently genuine enthusiasm for the Rob-dog swine for whom they work - and I cannot understand it. That is, I cannot understand their unaffected enthusiasm.
I'm currently participating in a training course developed and provided by the Company for which I work. We'll call my instructor 'J'. J has a burning enthusiasm for her employer: at every turn, and with perfectly genuine enthusiasm and commitment, she exhorts us to go the extra mile - to volunteer for extra duties so that we can learn as much as possible about every aspect of the Company's work, and thereby become better employees who add extra value, over and above the value we have all contracted to provide, to the Compay's enterprise. I look around me at the eleven others involved in this training and on every face I see agreement, enthusiastic agreement. To me they look like so many rabbits hypnotized by a snake.
This is not meant to disparage J. She's an effective, able teacher. She is in general articulate, knowledgeable, and brings to her work humor and even, sometimes, a sense of irony. But that sense of irony is sadly under-developed and is one of the few areas in which she is less than articulate. Nonetheless, her irony is too sophisticated for my classmates, who look at her with expressions of vague unease whenever she says something that doesn't quite fit within their mindless enthusiasm for those who have condescended to give them work.
Work is only a more complex, a more subtle, form of slavery. My employer does not own me, as it owns the other assets of the Company. But nonetheless, without work I am only technically free. I am as much bound to the necessity of work as feudal peasants were once bound to the necessity of obeying their Lord's will. Without work I have no standing in the community. Without work I'm dependant (after the unemployment checks run out) on the grace and charity of others - unless I want to scrabble among the filth of our society, as some do, to recycle what the employed throw away as trash. Without work opportunities to advance economically are non-existent, the possibility of entertaining myself, of advancing myself through education, and of expressing myself through participation in society, are grievously limited.
To do what I want to do, to do what pleases me, I must work in order to gain the resource, money, that makes all these things possible. I am, and you are (unless you're independently wealthy) a wage slave. No matter what work I do, no matter how intrinsically satisfying that work might be (and I'll admit that there aspects of my work which do please and satisfy me) I will always loathe, detest, abominate, despise and condemn, the necessity, the compulsion, the wage slavery, of work.
J, filled with near-Messianic zeal, exhorts us to become better employees. I, European that I am, will never do more than is necessary to keep my employer from dismissing me, or more than is required to serve my interests. Whereas most Americans seem to work, and wish to excel in work, so that they can better serve the interests of the Company that employs them, I work so that the thieving devils who profit from my sweat will be compelled to pay me.
I can hear the Good Americans among you saying 'What theft?' They are thieving devils because they profit far more from my work than I receive in compensation for it. I am compelled to work: but they are not compelled to employ me. They receive profit, I receive a wage. There is no reciprocity, no equality (save that of market value) involved, and therefore no dignity. Work, and the necessity for it, is not only a curse - it's an insult. An insult, an indignity, from which I cannot escape.
This situation, which in its basic structure is the same for everyone who does not live from profit but is paid a wage (there is no difference between 'wage' and 'salary' - except the obfuscation and deceit of those who wish to hide the shared interests of all workers through the creation of artificial distinctions) is made all the worse in my case because I am a 'contractor' and not a 'direct employee'. I receive a higher hourly remuneration than direct employees of the Company for which I work - but extremely limited (in practice, almost non-existent) health benefits. For me, every Federal holiday that falls on a working weekday is simply a day for which I am not paid, because I have no choice other than not to work. I can choose to leave my employment, after giving fourteen days notice, for any reason or no reason - just as I can be dismissed, with fourteen days notice, for any reason or no reason, because my employment is 'at will'.
My experience here leads me to believe that most Americans will have no sympathy for my feelings in this matter. It's a cultural attitude which, apparently, is as alien to you as your zeal for your employers is alien to me. Workplace culture in America is fundamentally foreign to me, and I'm only just beginning to get to grips with it.
My last employer in the UK was an electrical utility. There, a software suite called 'GE SmallWorld' is the industry standard and is used for almost all GIS (geographical information systems) work. That being said, the community of experienced GIS digitizers (the people who draw the maps) is actually quite small, and we all know each other.
When I took up my last job in the UK the first thing I said to my immediate manager, with whom I'd worked previously, was "You sheep-shagging Welsh cunt: what are you doing here?" His response was to laugh and call me an English bastard, and then to tell me to shut the fuck up and get to work. Had I not addressed him in that fashion, and been willing to accept his insult in turn, he would have made my life an absolute misery.
None of that would ever happen here. In fact, the first time I worked for the Company that presently employs me, I made the mistake of treating my immediate manager in the same way. He never forgave me, and blocked my progress within the Company at every turn. A case of cultural mis-communication, and I don't resent him for it. I resent him for being an appallingly bad manager and a weakling, but that's another story entirely. I've since learned to be rather more 'respectful', outwardly at least, and in consequence am doing rather better than I did the first time.
Another, minor, illustration of the differences in workplace culture between America and the UK. There is no such thing as 'coffee service' in the UK. In fact, Companies are prevented from providing such amenities on the grounds of health and safety. We considered ourselves lucky if the Company provided tea and coffee vending machines - and luckier still if the tea and coffee (no matter how bad) was free: most vending machines charge you for the privilege of using them. And bringing in your own coffee-maker was utterly unheard of. I was astounded when I got my first real job here - almost every desk was equipped with a personal coffee-maker.
I no longer bat an eye at such things: but every now and then it still strikes me as utterly bizarre. I remember working at Swan Lane in Wolverhampton (an excellent town, and an excellent work location, full of highly skilled people) and making frequent trips to the Tea Machine - which charged roughly fifty cents per cup of lukewarm feeble-ass tea. And being grateful for it.
I could go on and on about the differences in work practices and conditions between There and Here. But the one constant is the difference in attitudes towards the Employer: everyone I've ever spoken to There hated his or her Employer, precisely because the Company was his or her Employer - even if he or she liked the work itself. Whereas here, apparently, everyone loves his or her Employer - precisely and solely because they are employed.
I've come to the conclusion that both attitudes are equally irrational, and that I prefer the European attitude to work only because it's familiar, ingrained and, by now, inescapable. I find the American attitude of subservient ingratiation towards managers both utterly irritating and abominably offensive - but I have no choice except to accept it in others and conceal my own furious resentment in regard to it as best I can.
Why do I resent such an attitude? That's hard to explain and is perhaps best left for another blog. But it has to do with appreciation, with respect. And it has to do with the fundamental reality that payment for services is not a mark of respect but simply a quid pro quo which serves as as a dismissal and not as a sign of acceptance. Those who employ us condemn us for being powerless to do anything except serve them. Employment is a mark of contempt, not a mark of respect.
Work will always be a necessity wherever I am, Here or There, and it will always make demands of me that I have no choice but to accept. Be that as it may, I am not free to do anything but collaborate in its indignity and its profound insult in relation to the freedom of the individual (an insult made all the deeper by my understanding that the modern concept of the Individual and of Work are inextricably linked). My collaboration in that insult, unwilling though it is, marks me as a slave. And despite my comprehension of my status it is as a slave that I must live - because I can do nothing else.
I suppose I could be self-employed, which might be seen as an escape from this system of condemnation and contempt. But the fact is that those who are self-employed still participate in a system of exchange (labor for cash) which is predicated on the idea that profit is of more value than labor - even though it is labor that is the sole source of value (hello Marx ... - is it possible that I am the last real Communist left alive in the world?) And profit is the motivator of all endeavour, in the contemporary world, whether on behalf of an external employer or on behalf of oneself, and as such is a betrayal of the freedom of the individual. Work is work, whether pursued for the profit of a Company, or the profit of the individual licensed and identified as a Company.
The only freedom the working man has left is to hate (and I do mean hate) his employer. And even though I am Here, rather than There, this is a freedom I am glad to exercise - even if it works, ultimately, to my disadvantage. Be damned to those who pay my wages and profit from my sweat. Be damned to them: how dare they use me so.
If hatred is my only freedom I will exercise it as I may. As I have said before, to many who did not understand me - the only thing I hate more than work is unemployment.