This is a good piece, but I think it's talking about a number of highly important trees without naming the forest they belong to: Class and power.
The ultimate problem for employers with having genuinely happy employees as a genuinely major goal is, some of the things that make employees happy involve power . . . power over their own jobs, power to make their jobs meaningful, power to secure reward and recognition . . . in aggregate, these imply significant power over the firm as a whole. And if it was the norm over most firms, they would imply significant power for employees over the economy as a whole.
The point of the factory model, the point of the neoclassical economic model, the point of employee surveillance and a bunch of other things we see in our economy, our politics and our firms, is to maintain the power of employers over employees. And while it may be that loosening that power and ceding some to the employees will increase the productivity and profits of the firm as a firm, it will weaken the ability of the employer to secure all of those profits for themselves and to keep doing so in the future. Ultimately, the employers, as a class, what Marxists used to call the bourgeoisie, the people who own stuff for a living rather than primarily working for a living, fear that if you go around empowering employees, they will use that power to wrest at least some control over the firm and its profits from the employers.
To them, it is worth having a smaller surplus if in return they are able to keep exclusive control over that surplus, by keeping strong control over the employees who generate it. All the ideological models designed to pretend that greater control actually implies more profit ultimately derive from a realization, sometimes tacit and sometimes overt if you look in the right places, that greater control is MORE IMPORTANT than more profit. Politics, specifically the maintenance of class power, is ultimately more important than economics even in the ideological system (capitalism) built on acting as if the reverse is true.
I agree with your analysis and I do talk to this in my newsletters on occasion. I point out the difference between their professed aims and the results of their actions, which is sometimes due to ineptitude but often down to maintaining the power differential.
Thanks for making the point, I’ll try to do better in future! 😉
You said that way better than I ever could. Great piece.
This is a good piece, but I think it's talking about a number of highly important trees without naming the forest they belong to: Class and power.
The ultimate problem for employers with having genuinely happy employees as a genuinely major goal is, some of the things that make employees happy involve power . . . power over their own jobs, power to make their jobs meaningful, power to secure reward and recognition . . . in aggregate, these imply significant power over the firm as a whole. And if it was the norm over most firms, they would imply significant power for employees over the economy as a whole.
The point of the factory model, the point of the neoclassical economic model, the point of employee surveillance and a bunch of other things we see in our economy, our politics and our firms, is to maintain the power of employers over employees. And while it may be that loosening that power and ceding some to the employees will increase the productivity and profits of the firm as a firm, it will weaken the ability of the employer to secure all of those profits for themselves and to keep doing so in the future. Ultimately, the employers, as a class, what Marxists used to call the bourgeoisie, the people who own stuff for a living rather than primarily working for a living, fear that if you go around empowering employees, they will use that power to wrest at least some control over the firm and its profits from the employers.
To them, it is worth having a smaller surplus if in return they are able to keep exclusive control over that surplus, by keeping strong control over the employees who generate it. All the ideological models designed to pretend that greater control actually implies more profit ultimately derive from a realization, sometimes tacit and sometimes overt if you look in the right places, that greater control is MORE IMPORTANT than more profit. Politics, specifically the maintenance of class power, is ultimately more important than economics even in the ideological system (capitalism) built on acting as if the reverse is true.
I agree with your analysis and I do talk to this in my newsletters on occasion. I point out the difference between their professed aims and the results of their actions, which is sometimes due to ineptitude but often down to maintaining the power differential.
Thanks for making the point, I’ll try to do better in future! 😉