Comfortable Security?

Do you feel safer?

I’m sitting in a situation now where I look around at the “business world” and I have to wonder. When did we buy into this lie? Perhaps I should lay down a few disclaimers for all the thousands of people that don’t read my blog but that could potentially be sending me tons of hate mail (or worse, stupid advice on ‘no, no _this_ is how it actually is). A further disclaimer is that I do not advocate the idea that we should rebel against authority. So, I don’t mean to say that everyone with a job is clearly wrong, and you’ve been duped. I’m just becoming aware, now more than ever, how easily people buy into a lie. How often managers will claim, and probably believe, that they only have your best interest at heart. The idea behind that is that if you work really hard, you secure your future and you earn money and stability which is the best thing you can do for your family. Essentially it is career above everything, because career in fact, is what makes you a responsible adult/parent/spouse. If you work hard enough, and make some sacrifices for your career, you are being responsible, and are really doing the best thing. So, a manager will guide and counsel you into that pattern, because it really is the best thing. The benefit to business is secondary to your greater good. Perhaps part of this is the idea that a material end justifies the means. By this I mean to say the comments about sacrificed family time is justified because now the child gets to go to that expensive school, in mom’s fancy car.

So, I see employment as essentially this. You have whatever skills you have, be it muscles to physically move things about up to the brain capacity to calculate LHC collisions in your head, these being least and most highly paid, (in theory) respectively. So, you sell your skill to someone that needs it for an agreed price per hour/day/unit of time. If you end up working longer, for the same pay, you are essentially selling your skill more cheaply than it was worth in the beginning. The excuse for this might be that you get performance bonus’ at the end of a specific period, that is all well and good, however going on a soft target like that is like playing the lottery with your skills. Do you in fact make the same in that ‘bonus’ as you would if you put the same time into a second job, or business. If you do, great, if you don’t, you have lost the game, and in pretty much all of the examples I can think of, that’s exactly the case. Please try again next year. I personally think this is also an exponential curve, 8 hours are sold at this rate, if you want 12 hours of my dedicated time, it should be more expensive. It shouldn’t become a bargain bulk buy discount which is essentially what unpaid overtime is. You stop being a specialist retailer of your time, and you become Makro, anyone with a card and enough money to buy in bulk gets a discount rate.

However, this idea I have of employment must be, and is demonstrably untrue, because during the course of I don’t know how long, we have given up our identity as people with skills for sale, still being in command of what exactly we are willing to do and what we are unwilling to do. We abandon that to the employer, who somehow becomes the arbiter of our lives. You may or may not behave, dress, talk or exist in any manner other than is ratified by us. I don’t disagree with the necessity of specific decorum at work. But that has been rather perverted in most places, so it becomes like the army. You will obey commands, or you will be court-martialled. Your employment contract and job specification are more like suggestions, but you will do whatever you are told to do, because the company has paid for your time and can therefore make you do anything. Which I think is ridiculous. I sign a contract to do feather dying, if you demand I wash your car, I should have the freedom to refuse.

Anyway, I said all that to say this. We do this because we gain a sense of security I guess. This is how things work, and if I fit into the pattern, I’ll be safe. Humans tend to abandon many freedoms for a false sense of safety, to the degree that the institutions that are meant to benefit us, become the very objects of fear. You want a secure country? Then we demand the right to infringe on all your privacy rights. Pretty soon you have people living in fear of the state, where it should be the other way around. To greater and lesser degrees this is prevalent and evident in all areas and on all levels of our lives. Abandon something for ‘security’, end up enslaved to the things we surrender our freedoms to.

Perhaps this is another level of the Romans 12:2 scripture that just hits me every time. This link gives the scripture in a variety of translations; the NLT most closely mirrors what it is that I am trying to communicate. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%2012:2&version=AMP;KJV;NIV;NLT;ESV

2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Stop just blindly following things because that is the way everyone else does it, or because that’s just what you do, and start to think a little further. Not handing over to perceived authority the freedoms that should be kept and celebrated for a false sense of security.

(a final disclaimer is that I am not a manager, maybe I’m wrong, maybe that’s just how it is, and that’s how everyone wants it to be)

(The really last final disclaimer. Overtime isn’t completely abhorrent, I do work overtime, even unpaid overtime. It just becomes expectation ridiculously easily. No business expects to give products away, so why should managers expect employees to just give their “product” away?)

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