Collared
Police call an arrest a collar. Being arrested limits your options, affects the way you think – particularly if you’re innocent. Or if you had no idea that your behavior was in any way destructive or self-destructive. What if the workplace “collar” we identify with has been arresting our development all these years?
The collar you’ve been wearing and identifying with can, metaphorically, arrest you. It can limit your options, affect the way you think (in ways you never thought of). Your collar can choke you … with the very tie or necklace that was part of your work uniform if you identify yourself as a white-collar professional.
Feeling a tad insecure? Survived several rounds of layoffs? Been ripped by a
Shed that collar, yet? Who are you now?
No need, really. You can keep the collar. All you really want to shed are all the lies you’ve been brainwashed into believing that collar represents. Eventually, you may even earn enough again to get those collars dry-cleaned every week. Meanwhile, break out the iron and the Magic Sizing. Your collar is entirely in your hands.
What does it mean to be a white-collar, exempt, professional in today’s corporation? It no longer means you are a valued employee, part of the family. It means you work a 60-hour week with no overtime wages. You’re a college-educated salaried professional. Your employer is entitled to your intellect and intellectual property developed on its time. But it’s sucking up more of your time and leaving you less energy to be so smart for yourself.
Employers expect white-collar professionals to be smart for the company but stupid for themselves. Sadly, the companies often get exactly what they expect. And the employees? They don’t get much at all. No defined-benefit pensions, and very little matching funds in the 401-K. Higher contributions to the health insurance for lower benefit levels. Longer hours in buildings less carefully maintained for the employees’ health and comfort. Fewer familiar faces around the water cooler in the break room, more foreign accents around the speaker phone in the conference room.
And still we believe that the path to success is individual contribution, in competition against all our peers. We have been brainwashed. We have drunk the Kool-Aid. We are brilliant fools.
Remember the mantra of teamwork in its heyday? “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
That’s still true. We just have to redefine the game the team is playing and the nature of the goal. The team is still “all of us,” but in the broadest sense. Not our business unit against their business unit. Now, it’s all professional-level employees against our corporate masters. You know what masters own, right? We’re not that, right? Not exactly … not yet … or are we closer than we like to admit?
But there’s hope and it’s a hope we know is true and that we know how to work. None of us is as smart as all of us – I mean, ALL of us. None of us is as loud as all of us. None of us can afford as many lawyers and lobbyists as all of us. None of us can muster as much media attention as all of us. None of us possess the power of all of us. The power of numbers. Numbers high enough for negotiating purchasing power. Numbers high enough to attract marketing attention … journalistic attention … political attention … the attention of the same societal forces that have clamored for our attention all our lives.
What “target market” group or groups are you part of? Female over fifty – you control the lioness’s share of the disposable income in the
Whatever target group you were or are part of, surely you’ve grown weary of the bombardment of advertising blasting us from every form of entertainment, transportation and just plain wall surface (public restroom stalls, for heaven’s sake) – and we’re not even going to think about the male portion of the target market’s target area at the bottom of urinals. Oh, wait … we did just think about it. Well, I warned you in the first posting, we’ll think unthinkable thoughts here. And, really, haven’t you always wanted to piss on the advertisers?
Now we can achieve more than the “piddle on the ad” pyrrhic victory. We can use those targeting us to target the bulls…, um, I mean bulls-eye we really want to hit: employers who have shifted the risk part of the “risk-reward” equation onto the shoulders of their employees. And they have been doing exactly that, you know. Follow the money like this – corporate profits are enriching the executives disproportionately more than the shareholders (who aren’t realizing fair rewards for their investment risk) and the employees (whose salaries have not kept pace with rising costs of petroleum products, products whose transportation to retail destinations relies upon petroleum products, real estate taxes tied to madly inflated house prices, and insurance on those houses and on our own health. (See “Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity” by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, August 28, 2006, Section A; Column 6; National Desk; Pg. 1. Many local newspapers’ business sections in August and September carried the same statistical information with related local corporations’ profit and local workers’ wage stats.)
The rich are getting way richer, the poor are still poor, and they’re being joined by former middle-class workers turned out of the workplace into the soup kitchen, and by the middle-class workers hanging onto jobs with double or triple the responsibility and longer hours in return for a salary falling ever farther behind the cost of living. Ugly picture.
Now picture these fragmented white-collar professionals, uniting. All of us. The same “all of us” that’s smarter than any one of us. All of us professionals, united. United Professionals. Here ya go! See you there. All of us. Let’s get smart together. And take smart action – in the interest of the social contract at the core of our nation.
© 2006 Kate Diamond
posted by Kate Diamond @ 9:43 AM
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