Bosses and Bossism

The AFLCIO’s Working America project has launched a “bad boss” contest. Unfortunately, the prize is only a free vacation, rather than the opportunity to see your nominee drawn and quartered after a lengthy and humiliating public trial.

I’ve heard so many bad boss stories, some of them on this website, that I’d hate to be one of the judges. The boss who makes you work overtime without pay (which would include Wal-Mart unless they’ve cleaned up this practice)… The boss who expects little personal services, like back rubs or picking up his or her dry-cleaning…The boss who regards you as sexual chattel … The boss who likes to keep you in a state of constant anxiety about your employment status … The boss who throws tantrums, along with various heavy objects…

I’ve had a few bad bosses myself. One of them, a restaurant manager I encountered while working as waitress for Nickel and Dimed caught me chatting with a dishwasher (he was an immigrant trying to learn English) and harassed me for the rest of the shift. And there was the housecleaning franchise owner who got 45 minutes a day of unpaid labor out of us, although at $6 and change an hour, you’d think he could have afforded to pay for our time.

Much as I’d like to see all these miscreants brought to justice – in something like the “thought reform” camps of the Chinese Cultural Revolution – I tend to think the emphasis on bad bosses is a little misguided. The problem isn’t particular bosses, but what I call Bossism-- the hierarchical system which governs all known bureaucracies, both public and private. Giving one person huge power over others is like a giving a three-year-old a hose: not everyone will get soaked but the chances of coming out dry are slender.

But, you may be wondering, how would anything get done without bosses and Bossism? Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time, as I saw in my Nickel and Dimed jobs. If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don’t count on a manager to tell you what to do – if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance. In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of “boss.” As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in – or get out of the way.

What I was witnessing was workplace democracy in action, or, more fancily put, what French sociologists call “autogestion,” or workers’ self-determination. It may sound exotic, but it’s not just an attribute of the rare anarchist collective. In fact, it’s a notion revered in contemporary corporate culture as the team.

The rhetoric of teams, employing some sort of equality among the players, is everywhere today. You’re not an employee of Whole Foods, you’re a “team member.” You don’t work for Wal-Mart, you’re an “associate,” theoretically as capable of making a creative contribution as the Regional Manager. According to Wal-Mart folklore, for example, it was a lowly associate who came up with the brilliant idea of “people greeters.” (But whenever I, in my brief stint as a Wal-Mart associate, made a useful suggestion –like why stack so many of the women’s plus-size clothes at floor-level, where they were accessible only to the young and agile? – I was always told that such decisions were made by the big bosses in Bentonville.)

When corporations uphold the idea of “teams,” they’re grasping for the kind of ingenuity and creativity people naturally bring to a challenging situation – if they’re allowed to, i.e., if they’re treated like participants instead of like servants or subordinates. So why isn’t the team rhetoric taken more seriously, at all levels of bureaucratic endeavor?

Well, one thing a boss will tell you is that there’s too much turnover among his or her subordinates to take them seriously. Why should a mere “team member” have a role in decision-making when he or she could be gone tomorrow? But that is circular reasoning: It’s the lack of real teamwork – along with a lack of respect and, often, decent pay and benefits – that leads to the turnover. Which is another way of saying that Bossism is self-perpetuating, even when everyone knows it’s not the best way of getting things done, or at least pays lip service to the notion of the “team.”

So, yes, line the bad bosses up against the wall, but let’s not forget that the real problem is Bossism, with all its nasty effects. It’s Bossism that generates arrogance among the bosses and learned passivity among the bossed, along with fatalism or corrosive resentment. Everyone knows there’s an alternative embodied in the idea of the team. When are we going to start taking it seriously?

To enter the bad boss contest, go to http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/06/14/gotta-bad-boss-working-america-wants-to-know/

Comments

[dan]

The "Team Empowerment" concept must have been published in a business journal in the late 80s, I was a McDonald's employee all through high school and there was an meeting where we were all told of our importance to the company and were empowered to make decisions to help improve the work environment and help to make the stores more efficient. I worked with a pretty sharp group of people there, half of the summer staff were college students home for the summer. As you could probably figure out this was in essence a load of bull and any real changes suggested didn't make it anywhere and absolutely under minded the program. I'm sure overall it hurt moral more than it helped as people had their hopes raised only to see them crushed.

[dearkitty]

Speaking on bosses and Wal-Mart: see also http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2006/06/14/britain-asda-wal-mart-workers-against-bosses/

[realpc]

That's why I'm glad we are not assigned our jobs by the government, and if a boss is intolerable we can leave.

A world without hierarchy is just a dream. We see hierarchical organization in all aspects of nature, and for a good reason.

It's nice when workers are treated with respect and their ideas are valued, but this cannot be forced. And there are situations where a democratic approach would not work.

The US is a democracy, sort of, but the government is still organized as a hierarchy -- or, more accurately, as a tree structure. We cannot have each individual vote on every question -- voters in one state do not have adequate knowledge of the issues in a distant state, and they should not have to learn all about them. It would be terribly inefficient, not to mention impossible.

Similarly, in the workplace, individuals must specialize and concentrate on their own areas, if anything is to be accomplished.

Our world has become extremely complex, so specialization cannot be avoided. Not that it ever could be.

The most democratic and egalitarian societies were probably the hunting/gathering tribes. They lived in small groups and work specialization was minimal. We cannot recreate that situation, even if we wanted to.

We are free, in the US, even if we are employees with bosses. Employment is a contract, an agreement to do a certain job for a certain amount of pay, and this agreement is entered and continued depending entirely on the free will of the employee.

[nancy w-s]

I completely disagree that we are free even if we have bosses. We are utterly dependent for our survival needs on a system that regards us as disposable.

And, yes, non-hierachy can work and work WAY better.

But that's not why I want to post.

I wanted to post because I'd love for somebody else to email this to my boss -- and in return I'll email it to yours! (I'll admit, I'm a coward who's afraid of ending up on the streets.)

[realpc]

nancy,

You know there is more than one job in the world. You can change jobs, or start your own business, or whatever you want. It would not necessarily be easy, because there is no one to figure things out for us. That is why we are free.

What is an example of non-hierarchy that works? There is hierarchy at all levels of society, from the nuclear family on up. Even among close friends, one or the other person is more in control at different times.

Of course, this is a matter of degree and a workplace that is extremely hierarchical and patriarchal can be a very dysfunctional place.

But an overly egalitarian workplace could be extremely dysfunctional also, in different ways.

There are no perfect bosses, but no perfect employees either. And no workplace can ever be ideal.

I doubt you can provide a single example of a truly non-hierarchical organization. Not one that actually functions, that is.

[realpc]

"We are utterly dependent for our survival needs on a system that regards us as disposable."

Yes, that's what it's like to be alive on earth. When did you notice?

[fieldjo]

Guys, guys, guys! (and gals) why don't we just point out the obvious? The late, great social psychologist, Chris Lasch said, "Bureaucracy takes collective grievances and turns them into personal problems." In other words, if you're having a problem with your boss, then it's your own inability to cope with authority, etc.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara hints at the importance of unions -- and unions are all about collective grievances.

Lasch (please read his classic, "Culture of Narcissism") where he describes the breakdown of religion (in the 60s) which created a vacuum and chronicles how that vacuum was mightily seized by corporate greed.

The whole notion of creating "teams" is an attempt to convert working into some sort of (almost) religious experience. Because Americans have 'lost' authentic religion, the vacuum is being exploited by these companies..

[realpc]

fieldio,

Excuse me for saying this, but you're out of your gourd. In other words, you're nuts. Americans have not lost religion.

Working together in teams is human nature, nothing new.

[Rhea]

Barbara, you're a woman after my own heart! What I have noticed in many of the workplaces I've been in is that people without a clue -- who happen to be in the right place at the wrong time -- happen to get promoted and just thrash around trying to 'manage' people. I know, I am one of them!

[realpc]

Rhea,

Don't you think most of those clueless managers are doing their best, and that managing is difficult?
I'm an employee, not a manager, because I would rather work than manage. If I envied managers and thought they had a better deal, I would have tried to be one.

The fact that bosses are imperfect is not, in my opinion, a good argument for socialism or ownership by workers. Ownership by workers is a completely illogical idea -- for one thing, managers are often employees, not owners. For another, workers are not owners because they did not have to raise capital or take a risk.

I agree that unions are sometimes needed, as are laws to protect workers.

But there is no wonder cure for strained boss-employee relations. That's like expecting perfect marriages, or perfect parents.

[Firefly]

"That's why I'm glad we are not assigned our jobs by the government, and if a boss is intolerable we can leave."

"You know there is more than one job in the world. You can change jobs, or start your own business, or whatever you want."

So in other words, if you don't like the system, it's all your problem, eh? Wow! Whatever you're smoking, realpc, I want some. Or perhaps you're on a "Netvocate" payroll somewhere? I'm sure there _are_ plenty of opportunities for astroturfers such as you seem to be, especially now that the conservatives are losing their grip on the culture and increasingly desperate for damage control -- whereas in the real world there are lots of well-educated people out there who have been unemployed or underemployed for months on end, and bossism, including rampant CEO compensation not justified by a corresponding increase in company fortunes or worker salaries, is the norm.

The fact that you are dominating this thread and have taken it upon yourself to answer each and every comment here, as if you own this blog, is not only annoying, it's suspect.

Yes, we live in a democracy, and so far, we still have free speech.

So please, shut up and let others have their say. Or, to phrase this in terms you'll understand using your own logic, you weren't assigned this blog by the government, and if you find the comments on this blog intolerable, you can leave. You can change blogs, or start your own blog, or whatever you want.

[realpc]

meridian,

I can understand wanting to improve the system, by making better laws to prevent unfairness, for example. But I cannot understand getting angry about certain basic facts of life. People are not always nice to each other and that will be true under any economic system.

Are wives always fair to their husbands, or husbands to their wives? There are laws that protect us from violence and theft, within our families and our communities. But you can't make laws preventing couples from yelling at each other, or bossing each other around. If you think your husband, or wife, is too bossy, and will not change, and you can't get used to it, the only option is to leave.

You can't make laws preventing companies from being hierarchical. Even if you could, it would not make sense. The world and nature are hierarchical, for good reasons.

Barbara prefers a socialist economic system, a system run by workers with no bosses. This is pure fantasy, it cannot exist.

It makes sense to dream of a better society, but dreaming of an impossible society is not very useful.

Of course companies could try to be less hierarchical, and bosses could try to be more empathetic. We would like people to be nice, in general. Very often, the best approach is to be nicer ourselves, to set an example.

[Philip]

realpc:

1. It's easy to set up straw men and knock them down. Example: "a socialist economic system" is "a system run by workers with no bosses."

2. In an earlier response, you said that "unions are sometimes needed." If you were working at WalMart, would you try to organize a union?

[realpc]

"If you were working at WalMart, would you try to organize a union?"

That would depend. A lot of people work at WalMart, and similar stores, because they offer flexible part-time hours, which can be good for students, housewives, retired people, etc. Not everyone wants a regular full-time job with benefits.

If WalMart were unionized, hours might become full-time and inflexible. There would be benefits and higher pay, but the jobs would be much harder to get. And as the union becomes more powerful (and/or more corrupt), the company's profits decrease, and they might not open as many new stores. So WalMart jobs would become even harder to get.

In general, I don't like the idea of worker unions very much. They encourage people to stay in low skill jobs, rather than improve their skills, because the pay and benefits are good.
They also make low-skill entry-level jobs hard to get for inexperienced people. This is a problem in France, for example.

Would employers treat their workers like slaves if there had never been unions? I don't know.

[realpc]

And I did not set up a straw man. As far as I know, Barbara is a socialist, and socialism means the workers own the companies. Or, just as bad, the government owns everything.

[Dingo]

"It makes sense to dream of a better society, but dreaming of an impossible society is not very useful."

This is a very defeatist view of the world. They use to say that fighting against slavery was an utopian dream, that the 8 hour work day or the 40 hour work week was a dream, but yet both those things have changed. They were not changed by governments or by people in power, they were changed by people like you and me. People who had a dream and refused to be told that it wasn't possible.
I hear a lot about how it is human nature, war is human nature, crime is human nature etc. etc. perhaps "human nature" is a result of society. Starve enough people and they will become criminals. Society needs to change, and that cannot be through the law and the existing authoritarian system. What authority in the history of the world has willingly given up power and control?
None.

As for examples of a non-hierarchical sytem that has worked, look at the Spanich Revolution. In places like Catalonia, where the workers took control and were doing very well, until Franco's Fascists and the Western supported Nationalists decided to put a stop to it.
Also look at the Russian Revolution before the authoritarians (Lenin and company) took control. The Soviets, which were self-governed, self-determined factories, farms etc. worked wonderfully, and better than they had under the Czar. Both are great examples non-hierarchical systems. Unfortunatly, they are both examples of my previous point, the authoritarian system crushed them very brutally.

[Barbara E]

To realpc:

Actually, all the socialist societies so far have been pretty much boss-ridden. The vision of a deeply egalitarian society -- right down to the workplace -- more properly belongs to the anarchist tradition.

As for worker-run enterprises, there are plenty of examples worldwide, mostly in the form of co-ops. My own experience of such undertakings comes in part from the early feminist movement -- magazines, health clinics -- and we all worked just fine without bosses!

[realpc]

Barbara,

I think that as the scale and complexity of an enterprise increases, the need for hierarchy and specialization increases. Workers can focus on things they do well, rather than worry about sales, marketing, finance, production, bookkeeping, etc., etc. And workers do not have to worry about generating the capital in the first place, or coming up with the initial great idea.

Let's say you got a great idea, put up your life savings and worked hard for ten years, and your business became successful. Do you want each one of your workers, regardless of skill level or seniority, to have an equal say in your business? Do you want the guy you hired yesterday to sweep the floor to be your equal in major financial, creative and marketing decisions?

Yes I'm sure egalitarian co-ops can work fine in some contexts, but certainly not in all.

[Hattie]

We accept a lot of stuff in this country because we think we will eventually be successful and therefore able to play with the rich boys. We identify with bosses and other authoritarian types, believing that one day it will be our turn.
For most of us, the day will never come.

[realpc]

It is not at all uncommon for Americans to own small, successful, businesses. You don't have to be a billionaire to be successful.

And if work for a company and have the necessary drive and ability, you can be promoted. No one is forced to stay at the lowest levels.

[jalvascruggs]

The classic pyramid hierarchies encourage irrational decision making, realpc, and diseconomies of scale are a real problem. Ricardo Semler's multi-million dollar business is a testament to the efficacy of workplace democracy. Here are some brief articles if you're interested.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/diseconomiesofscale.asp

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-irrationality-of-large.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

[A Canadian]

"And if work for a company and have the necessary drive and ability, you can be promoted. No one is forced to stay at the lowest levels."

Yeah, right! Try getting promoted when 300 other people are vying for that one promotion. In my experience the deserving don't get promoted. There is too much favoritism and ass-kissing going on for that to happen. Only the ass-kissing suck-ups get the promotions and once they are in they stay in no matter how incompetent they are.

[realpc]

" Ricardo Semler's multi-million dollar business is a testament to the efficacy of workplace democracy."

They still have managers, and workers still specialize. It is relatively less authoritarian and workers get a share of profits, but the workers still do not run or own the company. It is not anarchy, and it is not really democratic.

It's a question of finding the right balance, and that requires inspired leadership. Semler had some good ideas and the ability to make them work.

He did not make all workers equal, and he was still the boss.

[jalvascruggs]

The workers do run most of the company, realpc. I don't know where you get the idea that self-management is different from running a company. Semler's inspired leadership was to unclench and let people who know what they're doing do it.

Compare his practices to Carly Fiorina's. She nearly destroyed Hewlett Packard, and would have, if the relatively enlightened management practices in place before her wild schemes hadn't given the company a solid product line and culture of people who felt comfortable innovating.

Steps away from managerial royalism are very positive and offer further confirmation of Barbara's points.

[realpc]

"Steps away from managerial royalism are very positive"

It is not that simple. Just giving workers more power will not automatically result in a better company. Whether a company is relatively authoritarian is not the only factor determining its success.

Taking anything too far results in failure. Too much or too little management, too much or too little anarchy -- balancing everything requires inspired leadership.

Anarchism is not a viable ideology, and Semler's success is not evidence for it.

Yes, authoritarian management can be stifling. But it is naive to think that management is completely unnecessary.