Working towards his full human potential. |
Chimney Sweep: Get up the chimney and clean it.
Boy: No. It's dangerous and dirty.
Chimney Sweep: It will be good for you.
Boy: Bollocks.
Chimney Sweep: It will help you reach your human potential.
Boy: Go fuck yourself. I'm off to be a cutpurse.
The above is, of course, a genuine dialogue from 18th Century London.
In my 36 years of work, no manager, supervisor or employer has ever said, "Well, these changes are going to be really shit for you. You'll have to work harder, for less, have shorter breaks and eventually we'll be able to get rid of you completely. Nothing I can do about. I just have to squeeze more value out of you".
Instead, we get platitudes of bullshit. It was bad enough in the early 1980s, when I first through a 'change' at work. This was in the Post Office in Liverpool. There was less of the "it will be good for you," and more of the "it will make you more efficient and will be better for the customers."
Once the process began, we soon discovered that 'efficiency' was measured in terms of the longer queues that each of us had in front of us in the office. If you only had one or two people in front of you, the office was overstaffed.
By the time I was made redundant from another job in 2004, the company paid more to 'change consultants' than they actually saved from the redundancy. Prior to the 'consultation' process, we had months of going to change seminars which was at least amusing as you could wind up the speaker by
pointing out the absurdity of the process. At the last seminar, the speaker essentially walked out in the end after facing a barrage of hostility from all present.
There is a huge industry of psychologists involved in the whole apparatus of control in the workplace and in the rest of our lives that vindicates my adolescent view of most psychologists (with the exception of at least some of those who work in the mental health sector) as distinctly sinister.
That's without mentioning the role of psychologists in the CIA and intelligence world from at least the 1950s - A road that led to Guantanamo Bay.
Tempting target |
Our proudest design achievement, and most powerful piece of furniture, is what I call the “anti-ergonomic chair”. It’s just not that comfortable, for which we love it. Having installed these in our offices at the Human Potential Centre we found that sitting on them for more than 10 minutes made our bums sore enough to prompt us to GOYA (Get off your Arse).
Our trials using “Sit-to-Stand” desks in other workplaces have shown similarly encouraging results. We’re seeing increased mood and vigour, more standing (about an extra 2 ½ hours a day), reduced back pain and overuse injuries. In some cases, the standing desks and un-ergo chairs have proved so popular people have been hiding them so we wouldn’t pick them up at the end of the trial.
Unfortunately, Schofield is not so clever with some things. The quote at the top of his article attributed to Orton Jobs is actually from Job Orton. If he'd been sitting down, he wouldn't have made that mistake.
As someone who spends all his working hours standing up, my view is the exact opposite to what he says. Of course, despite the way it is dressed up, as the answer to a variety of health problems, the aim is increased productivity. The problem at heart is not that you sit at a desk at work but that you have to go to work at all. I define 'work' here as anything that you have to do purely through economic compulsion As Paul Lafargue put it in 'The Right to be Lazy,' "In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity."
How can you argue with that?
The best antidote to listening to Schofield's nonsense to sit in a chair and listen to Music with My Insane Friend.
It became clear that staff weren't persons when Personnel became Human Resources. Can't remember the date when it changed to this weird title, a kind of market-speak. Anyway, speaking personally, I've been much happier since leaving the day job and working from home.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I noticed our book, The Megalithic Empire, is on your reading list. If you enjoy the company of insane friends you would probably feel right at home on the applied epistemology site http://www.applied-epistemology.com/phpbb2/index.php -- hope to see you there!
Thanks Hatty, you are the 7th person to comment on my blog and only the second I didn't know personally!
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read the book which is excellent and dabbled on the AP boards. I can't remember my user name atm but it is a really interesting read.
Very cheered by the thumbs-up, thank you. The writing took about 3 years but it turns out the marketing side is even harder.
ReplyDeleteWill look out for you on the applied epistemology site, the more the merrier. Actually, there's not that many or even merry posters but can be fun in a masochistic sort of way. Hope you'll enjoy it there!
Good to hear you not only read the book but enjoyed it, thank you for the thumbs-up.
ReplyDeleteWill look out for you on the AEL site. It's fine to read along from the sidelines but please feel free to join in discussions, the more the merrier. It's more sociable than blogging though not necessarily merry.
Hope your writing is going well, keep in touch anyway.
I've just been added. I couldn't find my old log in or even remember the email I used so I'm now Tricksy Mix
ReplyDeleteWelcome aboard, Tricksy Mix!
ReplyDelete