Mind The Gap

Although it’s more like chasm these days

I Didn’t Mean A Word I Said

Sometimes a story defies commentary. Sometimes a story is impossible to satirise. Coming across a story that does both is like your lottery numbers coming up.

Well, we’ve hit the jackpot with the story about Qu Jing, Head of PR at China’s biggest search engine, Baidu.

One weekend she decided to post a bunch of videos outlining her attitudes towards staff and eulogising China’s ‘work-til-you-drop’ culture. I don’t know why she felt moved to do this, maybe it was just for shits-and-giggles, maybe she’s having some kind of breakdown. Whatever, the world has fallen on her head as a result. Let’s see if she deserves it.

So, amongst the things she said were:

• she would not take responsibility for her staff’s wellbeing “as I’m not your mother”

• “If you work in public relations, don’t expect weekends off.”

• demanded that employees keep their phones on 24 hours a day and be “always ready to respond”, adding: “I only care about results.”

• claimed to be so caught up in her work that she did not know what year her son was in at school.

• threatened employees who dared to question her management style, saying: “I can make it impossible for you to find a job in this industry with just a short essay.”

You can imagine her colleagues on the senior management team (she’s also a vice-president of the company) holding their heads in horror and screaming, “Nooooo! You’re not supposed to say that bit out loud!!!!”.

Which was nothing compared to the noise they made when the stock price dropped by 2%. (Shame, eh? Let me find the world’s smallest violin…)

I mean, where do you even start with that lot? It’s exactly what many employees suspect their management really thinks despite all the bullshit about belonging and being like family and the other corporate gaslighting.

If you look at how organisations treat their employees, you would deduce these are the very attitudes that drive their actions.

• We don’t care about you. Your welfare is your concern, not ours.

• We own you and expect you to always be available.

• We only care about results (not an observation, a verbatim quote!).

• Nothing matters more than work. Not family, not even self. (I mean, this lady is obviously just so lost, it’s sad.)

• We have the power to destroy you. Do not complain or criticise.

Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well with the employees. Equally, unsurprisingly, she has apologised for “the many inappropriate and uncomfortable points in the video”. Well, half-apologised then.

It’s also caused a PR storm, which seems to be staggering incompetence from the, er <checks notes>, Head of PR.

I guess she could argue that ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’. But she’s certainly stress-tested the concept.

Lucky Man

Another who is pushing the boundaries of the concept is the CEO of Tesco, Ken Murphy, who’s pay has doubled in the last year to almost £10m. Murphy now earns more than 430 times the average pay at Tesco, up from a multiple of 197 in the previous year.

Unions have described this as ‘a slap in the face’ for workers who are struggling in a cost of living crisis. A cost of living crisis exacerbated by higher inflation in the prices of basic foodstuffs. You know, the sort of things sold by large supermarkets like, er, Tesco. Who have seen their profits grow during this crisis (pre-tax profits for last year soared by 159% to £2.3bn). But they’re definitely not profiteering, they just happen to have been super-efficient at, quite co-incidentally, the same time.

This follows hot on the heels of a news story that Tesco had delayed the latest pay rise for shop floor workers by a month, which meant some of those workers getting less than the statutory minimum wage for that month. This saved the company £17m. Well, those fabulous bonuses have got to be paid for somehow.

The company came up with the usual defences to this.

• much of the this award relates to a long-term incentive plan and relates to an earlier period
  (over half of it)

• part of this award is in share that have to be held for over two years
  (i.e. he’s not guaranteed the full amount, the shares might go down. Somehow this makes it better? He could, of course, get more because the shares could go up, but apparently that’s not relevant)

• part of it is a bonus for hitting performance targets
  (£3.4m bonus linked to sales, profits and individual objectives)

• Murphy’s pay was benchmarked against pay for other FTSE 50 companies and other comparable international businesses

• Without the bonuses, he’d have to struggle to get by on his £1.41 million basic
  (OK, maybe they didn’t quite say it like that…)

These statements are all true. They are also the generic justifications for CEO pay awards. They’ll be trotted out next year, when it is entirely possible Murphy will get a similarly gob-smacking amount of dosh.

The Guardian found someone to give a different perspective on this award:

Luke Hildyard, the executive director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, added that Murphy’s pay gap with a typical employee was the third highest since pay ratio reporting began five years ago.

He said: “You couldn’t really get a better indicator of how the UK economy serves the interests of the super-rich at the expense of everybody else than this – a multimillionaire chief executive trousering another £10m while their customers endure major price rises and their employees have to get by on less than a quarter of a per cent of what the CEO takes home.”

Tesco’s advertising promises ‘everyday low prices’. Whilst this may apply on the shop floor (although, as I’ve already said, that is open to dispute), it clearly doesn’t apply in the Boardroom. They prefer the company’s tagline ‘Every Little Helps’. Generously applied, of course.

(The source articles I used are ‘Tesco CEO’s near £10m pay a ‘slap in the face’ for struggling workers, union says‘ and ‘Tesco pay rise delay leaves many workers earning under minimum wage’ )

Out Of Sight

Against this sort of disparity in pay between the top and bottom of organisations, we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth from senior leaders about the low levels of employee engagement.

I wonder if, by chance, the two could be related?

These stratospheric levels of pay, and the ever-growing level of inequality, are an expression of power by those at the top. They pay themselves these amounts because they can (and given that remuneration committees are routinely stacked with their peers who also benefit from this rigged system, they are paying themselves).

People are not stupid. They can see that. They feel the inequality. Disengagement is a rational response. They are in an abusive relationship with their employers, so they protect themselves by withdrawing.

So this is a systemic problem. It manifests in other ways too, like the sight of CEOs sacking staff whilst their companies are making record levels of profit (something particularly rife in the tech sector right now). Like CEOs presiding over corporate failures but still getting their bonuses and failing upwards into another over-remunerated role.

The system is sick. It is driven by self-interest and greed, not just within the companies but in the stock markets that applaud the jobs cuts and push up the share price.

Employees know this. They respond accordingly.

I don’t know how to fix this but the first step has to be to acknowledge the problem.

However, I can’t see us being anywhere near that first step. So Decrapify Work has to be about our personal relationship with our work, with our employment and our career.

About how to be in this abusive and toxic system without getting damaged. Or how to extricate yourself if you are already damaged, and how you can recover from that damage. And about how to create a relationship with work and career that integrates into your life in a way that is generative and life-affirming.

The Drugs Don’t Work

In the latest episode of Work Punks, we look at how our working environment affects our mental health. This is part of the sickness of the system, the damage caused to people’s mental health is notable and worsening.

Some $40bn is spent on programmes to tackle this, in various wellbeing initiatives and support programmes, including the ubiquitous free yoga and mindfulness apps. Research shows that it’s not even touching the sides, but organisations are forecast to increase spend by another 50% in the next few years.

We riff around this in our usual manner, touching upon many of the points I talk about in this missive. We also look at what the solution is (hint: progressive work practices that focus on the human being tick a lot of the boxes).

You can watch it as a vlog on our YouTube channel, and also listen to it as a podcast at www.workpunks.co.uk or via your favourite podcast platform.

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I don’t have a board of hand-picked flunkies that I’ve appointed to recommend an eye-watering and thoroughly undeserved pay award to me, so I have to rely on doing some work and hoping to get rewarded by those who appreciate it.

This is ‘it’ and they are ‘you’.

So if you feel like you’d like to show your appreciation in a pecuniary way, which I may or may not covert into a pint of beer or other form of alcoholic refreshment (I totally will, by the way), then you can become a subscriber.

If you’d like to buy me a pint, then subscribe for a month. If you would like to keep me eternally* refreshed, then subscribe for a year.
(*strictly speaking, it should be ‘for eternity’ but Substack doesn’t have that option).

Or you can just get in touch and tell me how wonderful I am. Alternatively, we can talk about anything else that interests you or that you’d like some help with.

Whatever, you do, keep reading. I appreciate your attention most of all.