Voices In My Head...

As part of my efforts to satisfy my monthly craving for foreign (especially non-Western) fiction, I was scouring the Internet several weeks ago for audio recordings of classic Chinese fiction.  I find audio recordings to be really handy, since these days most of the time that I would spend in actually sitting down to read anything is taken up in reading technical literature for my business.  That is why although a few months ago I picked up a used copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I haven't yet read more than a few pages.  On the other hand, how different would things have been if I had been able to find an audio recording of the book narrated by a Latino voice actor! (And no, I will definitely not watch the Netflix version!  Many things that Netflix touches get turned into garbage.)

Anyway, back to classic Chinese fiction.  During my Internet searches, I found a website called the Chinese Lore Podcast produced by a man named John Zhu.  As he states on his website, his mission is to bring classic ancient Chinese literature to Western audiences who don't speak Chinese.  The classic works he covers are very long, so that re-telling the story contained in one book takes between three and four years' worth of episodes.  However, Mr. Zhu's re-telling is done with humor, fresh perspectives, and helpful insights into various historical aspects of Chinese culture.  I listened to his re-telling of the Water Margin (水滸傳), and am working my way through his re-telling of Investiture of the Gods (封神演義).  One characteristic of both stories is that each tells of an imperial center that is in decline due to internal corruption, and each shows the effect of that decline and corruption in the lives of the ordinary people of the land.  In the case of the heroes of Water Margin, the corruption and decline was partially and temporarily reversed, although some of the chief heroes were at the end cheated out of the enjoyment of that reversal.  I haven't yet finished Investiture of the Gods, yet I know from the historical events on which the story is based that in that story the decline could not be reversed, since the corrupting cause of that decline lay with the emperor himself.

Stories of imperial decline have held a growing fascination for me since the days of the corrupt U.S. presidency of Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020.  I fervently hope that we don't get another taste of Trump starting in 2025, yet the possibility of such an outcome has once again stimulated my interest in reading (or in my case, listening to) stories of corruption and the resulting societal decline resulting from that corruption.  Thus I have been listening with interest to Investiture of the Gods.  Note: in Investiture, Jiang Ziya is a cool character.  He's the brains behind the good guys... However, while Investiture does focus somewhat on the corruption and resulting decline at the center of the Shang dynasty during the reign of its final emperor, it also spends a lot of time in describing epic battles between massive armies who are sometimes helped and at other times hindered by the intervention of superhuman creatures with special powers.  If that sort of thing is your main interest and you've worn out all your Star Wars DVD's (for those who still own DVD's), then Investiture of the Gods should be right up your alley.  

Now I can enjoy a really good sword fight scene about as much as any other U.S. male, yet my interest in listening to Investiture lay more in tracing how the outworkings of corruption at the top of a society lead to the fracture of that society and the fracture of the power base on which the people at the top rely.  So I was motivated to search for nonfiction accounts of that sort of fracture.  And I chose to search particularly for examples of recent corporate decline and collapse.  This choice was partly motivated by my recent exposure to a book about the ethical failures at the Boeing Company which led to serious and sometimes fatal problems with the 737 MAX airplane.  As I previously mentioned on this blog, the problems within the Boeing Company are symptomatic of almost all of American late capitalism in the first half of the 21st century.  Thus it is fairly easy to find examples of once mighty and dominant U.S. corporations which have crashed and burned within the last twenty years.  

One such corporation is General Electric.  From my perusal of the book Obliquity by John Kay, as well as a brief examination of the history of GE, I had some idea of what to expect when examining GE. I knew I would find a company which started out by trying to make itself an industry leader in the manufacture of artifacts of beautifully good work that meets necessary needs, yet which lost its way once it made its primary goal the continuous growth of shareholder dividends and stock price.  According to many sources, this shift was most strongly exemplified in the reign of former GE CEO Jack Welch, who boasted 40 straight quarters (or ten years) of exceeding Wall Street projections of GE stock earnings growth.  Unfortunately, he did it by means of "creative earnings manipulation" according to a number of sources.  That manipulation included firing or laying off massive numbers of people in order to cut costs, as well as speculation in real estate and other debt markets through the subsidiary GE Capital.

I sought to learn more about the finer details of the decisions that derailed GE, so several days ago I bought an audiobook copy of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan.  I was particularly hoping to learn the role of Jack Welch's leadership in the demise of GE.  As far as Cohan's book, I can only say that while there were good points, there were also bad (or weak) points.  The book's good points include a fairly accurate history of GE's early days.  For instance, Cohan rightly points out that GE was not actually founded by Thomas Edison, but was founded against Edison's wishes.  This is contrary to the mythology which has sprung up around GE.  However, Cohan fails to mention that neither Edison nor GE actually invented the world's first commercially available incandescent light bulbs.  (That honor actually goes to William E. Sawyer.)  Cohan also implies that GE was materially involved in the invention and development of the world's first turbojet engine.  That also is not true.  The first jet engine for aircraft was actually invented by a British air force officer and engineer named Frank Whittle.

The book's bad or weak points include the fact that Cohan glosses over the fact that Jack Welch's "rank and yank" system of firing those at the bottom ten percent of his staff in annual performance reviews actually created a toxic culture in which people strove to be in the mediocre middle because that was the safest place to be in the organizational culture.  Cohan also glosses over the impact of Welch's massive layoffs and other downsizing initiatives on both GE's products and on the workers who were let go.  And Cohan glosses over the impact of Welch's "creative earnings manipulation" on the future of GE - especially with regard to the reliance on the GE Capital subsidiary to make quarterly earnings targets.  The book goes on to lay the vast majority of the blame for the decline and fall of GE on Jeff Immelt, the CEO who succeeded Welch in 2001.  (While Immelt had some serious managerial weaknesses and GE under Immelt certainly made some serious errors (see this for instance), from other sources I get the impression that it was Jack who sailed the ship of GE into treacherous shoals.  Jeff was simply not equal to the task of getting GE away from the rocks.) Meanwhile, Jack Welch is portrayed as a Really Swell Guy overall.  Indeed, at times the book reads like a secular hagiography of Jack Welch and of GE.  Cohan's book in some ways reminds me of another book I listened to last winter: Family Reins: The Extraordinary Rise and Epic Fall of an American Dynasty by Billy Busch.  The publisher's blurb for this book touts it as an expose of the factors which led the Busch family to lose the Anheuser-Busch beer company to a foreign conglomerate.  Yet it actually reads as a self-indulgent portrait of the Busch family - almost an auto-hagiography of Billy Busch himself.  

Books like these make me wonder not only about the future of capitalism in the United States, but also about the future of serious scholarly study of the failures of American capitalism.  There is a crying need for such serious, rigorous, objective, well-informed study - especially in light of the number of formerly large American companies which have either been bought up by foreign investors in the 21st century or which have gone bankrupt and disappeared.  Otherwise people of the future may well be forced to look with perplexity at the monumental wreckage left behind by such companies, unable to discern the clues to their crashing end except that they were run by Really Swell Guys who somehow bear no culpability for the mess that has been left behind.  Meanwhile I am left wondering a few things myself, namely, whether the unrealistically optimistic group expectations fostered by a steady run of unrealistically good news actually doom organizations when those organizations are suddenly forced to face really bad news.  Also, how completely do the characteristics of corporate decline match the characteristics of imperial or societal decline?  Good questions, no?

And now back to the next epic battles of Investiture of the Gods!

The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat: Prelude To The Great Resignation

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.  In the last post in this series, I introduced the concept of a social nonmovement.  To quickly review, a social nonmovement is the spontaneous, unplanned emergence of a set of social practices among a large number of people, among whom these practices begin to encroach upon and ultimately disrupt an existing status quo.  The concept of the social nonmovement is introduced and explored in Asef Bayat's book Life As Politics.  What is especially relevant to the precariat is the emergence of social nonmovements among the poor and powerless in response to the pressure inflicted on these people by the rich and powerful masters of an existing status quo.  These social nonmovements encroach upon and weaken the power of the masters of the existing status quo, yet they frequently operate outside the notice of these masters even as they weaken the power of these masters.  However, sometimes a social nonmovement catches the eye of a large number of the privileged members of a society - especially when the social nonmovement appears suddenly, spreads quickly, and achieves a massive amount of disruption in a short amount of time.

Such a social nonmovement is the Great Resignation - a time in which massive numbers of people decided that their jobs were such a royal pain that they refused to take anymore, and quit.  Most scholars and journalists consider the Great Resignation to be one of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down much of the American economy in 2020 due to the failure of then-President Donald Trump and his Republican Party to effectively prepare for the pandemic.  These scholars and journalists consider 2021 and 2022 to be the peak years of the Great Resignation, and some of these even say that the Great Resignation is now largely over.  However, there are minority voices such as journalists at the Harvard Business Review who say that the Great Resignation is actually a long-term trend which began at the beginning of the last decade and is still continuing.

Most people who have been alive for any length of time realize that throughout history, worker attitudes have fluctuated between job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in cycles that are reminiscent of the alternation of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy.  In today's post I hypothesize that the 1960's in the United States were a time of increasing job satisfaction for an expanding number of people.  However, in making such a hypothesis, I am confronted by the difficulties which social scientists have had in defining what exactly is job satisfaction, let alone in figuring out how to measure it.  (See, for instance, "What is Job Satisfaction?", Edwin A. Locke, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1969.)  Nevertheless, a 1982 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supports my hypothesis, noting that in 1973, 87 percent of workers were either very satisfied or moderately satisfied with their jobs.

Yet that picture has obviously changed over the years.  In 2017, an organization called the Conference Board provided a chart outlining the historical measurement of U.S. worker job satisfaction from 1987 to 2016.  According to that chart, worker satisfaction was at or below 50 percent during five of the eight years of the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.  According to the 2022 "Job Satisfaction Chartbook" from the same source, job satisfaction "is the highest it has been in a decade" at 60 percent.  Yet according to the Achievers Workforce Institute, two-thirds of employees are thinking about leaving their jobs in 2024.  This was also true in 2022, according to the Institute. This is yet more evidence that the Great Resignation is an ongoing trend.  (Maybe the people who answered the Conference Board surveys in 2022 weren't fully sharing their feelings...)

Now declining job satisfaction can be tolerated by workers for a time, yet as it intensifies, it leads to a point in which people decide that the pain of staying in an existing intolerable situation exceeds any potential suffering involved in making a change to that situation.  And workers have from time to time reacted explosively to their workplaces as illustrated by songs like "Oney" (written by Gary Chesnut and sung by Johnny Cash) and "Take This Job And..." (written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck), as well as idioms such as "going postal."  (By the way, I do not condone or encourage workplace violence!)  But stories about successful quitting have been made to seem like the sort of rare events that are beyond the reach of most working stiffs.  Yet the undeniable fact is that during the last years of the last decade and the first years of this decade, a huge number of people found themselves pushed into quitting.  It is natural to ask what factors pushed so many into quitting at around the same time.

I will not definitively answer that question today.  However, I will suggest what I consider to be the likely factors.  Treat my suggestions as hypotheses, if you will.

• First, there is the erosion of the power of organized labor, an erosion which actually began with Republican President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls in the early 1970's.  This erosion kicked into high gear under the Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and has not slowed down since.  The power of unions to protect their workers from low wages and excessive work demands was thus eroded.
• There is also the removal of the guarantee of lifetime employment for good and loyal employees of large corporations.  This was pioneered by such CEO's as Jack Welch of General Electric and was a direct contributor to the economic precarity suffered by a majority of working Americans today.
• There were the stresses imposed by globalism as wage and labor arbitrage.  This globalism was championed by right-wing, conservative executives of major corporations - the same sort of executives who are in many cases supporting the MAGA hostility to open borders championed by Donald Trump, as they see that sometimes smart people from poor countries can turn the tables on economic systems that are rigged against them.
• Consider also the removal or weakening of workplace protections against employer abuse.  Many employers (as well as business customers), thus unhindered from having to be humane toward their employees, turned some of those employees into metaphorical toilet paper, doormats, and punching bags onto whom these bosses could project their unresolved and unjustified hostility.
• Lastly (at least for today's post), there is the rise of the toxic workplace - a workplace in which bosses either perpetrate or enable bullying and mobbing behavior by popular workplace staff against those who are deemed to be scapegoats.  

Note that the last two factors are the direct result of the creation of a massive power imbalance between employers and employees over the last four decades.  The employees, reduced to a state of naked dependency on capricious bosses and a capricious labor market, were thus exposed to the prospect of either starving or having to meet unreasonable and destructive demands from these employers.  This made the management ladder a very attractive place for abusive, psychopathic, sociopathic, and otherwise personality-disordered people to take root.  Now here's an interesting perspective on the reason why leaders and managers allow abusive workplaces to continue: their continuance satisfies the ongoing psychological cravings of such managers.  A parallel to the abusive workplace is the abusive church.  As "Captain Cassidy" pointed out in a recent post on her blog Roll to Disbelieve, the whole point of creating an abusive power structure is so that the masters of such a structure (and those who are their special pets) can enjoy the psychological thrill of owning such a power structure.  And what is the best way to experience that thrill?  Why, to abuse the people at the bottom levels of such a structure, of course!  Consider Captain Cassidy's third and fourth points from the post I have cited:

• "Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience."

• "The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all."

Captain Cassidy's perspective echoes what Chauncey Hare and Judith Wyatt wrote in Chapter 4 of their 1997 book Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It.  But just as abusive churches (and abusive white American evangelicalism) have begun to suffer a loss of social power as their abuse has been exposed, abusive workplaces throughout the English-speaking world have begun to suffer an erosion of economic power.  Consider that workplace mistreatment cost U.S businesses between $691.7 billion and $1.7 trillion in 2021, according to a 2021 article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.  A 2023 Forbes article puts the cost of toxic workplaces to U.S. businesses at $1.8 trillion annually.  According to a 2019 SHRM report, the cost of employee turnover in 2019 due to job dissatisfaction alone was $223 billion.  No matter what number is used, we're not talking chump change here.  What's more, toxic workplace culture has been a key characteristic of companies that either recently underwent scandals or were driven out of business, companies such as Volkswagen, Theranos (and its jailbird ex-CEO), and WeWork, to name a few.

The pinnacle of ecstasy for abusive employers seemed to come in the early months of 2020, in which powerful employers were able to bully their staff (many of whom were stuck in low-wage "service" jobs) to show up for work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was that pressure and the resulting threat of actual physical death which proved to be the final straw for many people who had hitherto surrendered themselves to enduring toxic workplaces.  This is also what pushed the upward trend of the Great Resignation into something of a landslide-in-reverse and which catapulted the Great Resignation into the forefront of the American public consciousness.  The next post in this series will examine the paths taken by workers from various sectors of the American economy after they quit their jobs from 2020 onward.

P.S. While I have enjoyed many of the posts on Captain Cassidy's blog Roll to Disbelieve, I can't say that I agree with everything she has written.  For instance, I am still a Christian, whereas she has deconstructed to such an extent that she has rejected Christianity altogether.  However, I can't say that I blame her as I look at the sorry legacy of white American evangelicalism and its marriage to secular earthly economic and political power.

P.P.S. I have mentioned Donald Trump a few times in today's post.  Some from the Right may assert that I should not speak critically of him since he supposedly recently survived an "assassination attempt."  And I must say that while I despise Donald Trump, I do not condone any attempt to assassinate him.  However, when I read that his injuries were not life-threatening (in fact, some reports state that he was not actually hit by a bullet at all), I have to wonder if the whole "assassination attempt" wasn't some kind of publicity stunt or false-flag operation designed to boost his media profile and polling numbers.  I don't have much sympathy...