Metaphysics of job-holding

There's something strange about holding a job.

I don't mean there's anything strange about working. Working is straightforward. I have a friend who is an artist: he gets commissions, creates the art, delivers it, and gets paid. Nothing bizarre about that. Done and dusted.

But I'm thinking about those of us (very much including myself!) who work (or have worked) for companies, or other organizations. People who work for employers, where those employers are not sole proprietors (a farmer who hires a field hand to help him bale hay) but some kind of corporate entities. Underneath the day to day grind of the work, and the pleasant (or not-so-pleasant) interactions with your coworkers and supervisors, there is a fundamental incoherence in the structure of the activity itself.

Corporations are invaders from Mars …

On the one hand, corporations are not human beings. They are in principle incapable of human emotions. They treat humans dispassionately, as disposable parts. This is not a bug, but a feature: corporations are supposed to behave like this! The ones that don't, end up wasting their strength and resources to support the weak and unproductive—and therefore lose out in the competitive marketplace to others that are not similarly encumbered. The advice to managers is absolutely consistent on this point: 

Don't let your emotions get in the way. Your duty is to secure the well-being of the organization. Therefore you must be absolutely objective in rewarding the productive and pruning the unproductive. Sure, maybe he's unproductive because he has been diagnosed with cancer and will die in six months—but that's not your problem. It's unfair to his coworkers to keep him on when he's not pulling his weight, so let him go now before his absences and missed work end up hurting everybody else. 

[In fact I had this exact conversation more than once with my company's HR department, about an employee of mine who genuinely was dying of cancer! I ended up delivering a eulogy at his funeral.]

Charlie Stross has a good essay here, which compares corporations to invaders from Mars. He's not far wrong.  

… but people quit if they feel exploited

On the other hand, the advice to managers is also full of exhortations to empower your people so that they find meaning and purpose in their work. Everybody knows that cynical or disengaged employees will soon quit. (Or if they don't quit, their inattention and lack of caring will lead them to do stupid or reckless things that end up very badly for the organization.)

Most of the time, money isn't enough to hold them. I have a friend who landed a well-paying career as a software engineer. After a while she found it hollow and meaningless, so she quit it for a much lower-paying role in retail, where at least she had contact with her customers and felt like she was helping them. 

Occasionally companies are able to retain employees through financial pressures alone, even when their hearts aren't in it: these arrangements can be summarized under the expression "golden handcuffs," and even Wikipedia says that the "experience that follows an agreement of this sort may be draining and abhorrent."

So corporations can thrive only by lying

The consequence of these two points is that corporations can thrive only by lying. In order for a corporation to flourish, its employees must fail to understand its true nature.

The employees must find meaning and value in their work. The team must have a kind of ésprit de corps that animates them. Otherwise the organization will be moribund.

But a team that finds meaning and value in their work, a team that experiences the frisson of a true ésprit de corps, cannot help but feel deep loyalty to the organization that makes it all possible. And this organization cannot—by its nature!—feel any loyalty in return. The employees might as well be romantically in love with an alligator; the fact is that the alligator will do what it likes, with or without them.   

  

How is this supposed to work?

Right now I don't know the answer, but I think it is important that we recognize it is a question, and a problem.