The dystopian narrative of news headlines
The dystopian narrative of news headlines
Don't believe them.
I don't have a news app on my phone. I'll read articles if they're sent to me. And I see headlines through Threads and Instagram. But I don't have a way to open a news app and scroll through the latest stories.
It wasn't always this way. I had CNN's app installed for a long time. When Twitter started to decline (my primary news feed), I tried the Google News reader, which gave me a lot more than CNN's selection of breaking stories.
But I wasn't getting any joy out of the news. In fact, the opposite was true. I found myself feeling angry or hopeless. Eventually, I decided it was better to remove myself from the constant barrage of headlines. I still read articles and pay attention, but it consumes a much smaller portion of my day.
Good thing, too, because the business-related headlines over the past few years often cause my eyes to roll so far back that I can see what's happening behind me. It's like CEOs exist in an entirely different world. That's probably always been true, but now they don't even pretend to understand (or care) about what employees need. As a result, we get headlines that are astonishingly out of touch.
In September 2023, a Business Insider headline reminded workers everywhere just how little CEOs care: A millionaire CEO is rooting for higher unemployment, saying it's time to 'remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. Imagine advocating for the suffering of human beings...
I save articles I come across in an app called Pocket, so today I reviewed some of the more dystopian or cringe-worthy headlines.
"Many remote workers have 'absolutely no attachment, no passion, no creativity" - Business Insider
This headline is a quote from L'Oréal's CEO, Nicolas Hieronimus. The article goes on to say, "Experts and CEOs agree with Hieronimus' assessment of remote workers
Other headlines have tried (and failed) to convince remote employees that working from home is bad for them. Bad for their mental health. Bad for their career advancement. A company called Furniture@Work created a ridiculous 3D model showing what humans could look like by 2100 if remote work continues.
These feeble attempts have done little to dissuade people from remote work. While some people may operate better in an office, they don't need to be convinced: they know it's better for them. But what's true for some isn't true across the board. Plenty of headlines, research, and employee surveys support the argument that remote work is better and people are more productive.
So instead of trying to scare people into returning to the office, CEOs have taken a different approach: talk to each other. Convince each other that in-office work is best and return-to-office mandates are necessary. CEOs have adopted a paternalistic "we know what's best for you and the company" approach. It's had a domino effect, with more companies ordering people back into the office, even amid decreased employee engagement and morale.
Corporate executives seem to think that the only reliable opinions about remote work are those of other executives. Not the people actually doing the work.
"These people who work from home have a secret: they have two jobs" - Wall Street Journal
Executives can't seem to decide which reality they want to believe. Either remote workers are lazy, or they're SO productive that they're working two jobs. Some dude on LinkedIn even claimed that there's a 70% chance that remote employees are working a 2nd job, and 37% of those people are secretly working a full-time job (a claim he wasn't able to back up when people in the comments demanded a source). He advocated for things like remote employee monitoring systems.
Forbes rightly dunked this WSJ article about people with two full-time jobs. According to the Federal Reserve Economic Data, only about 0.27% of the total working population has two full-time jobs. A far cry from what the WSJ and the dude on LinkedIn would have you believe. Forbes asserted:
It's no surprise that the more traditionalist executives and board members who read these narratives integrate these stories into their vision of reality.
After all, one of our most fundamental cognitive biases is the confirmation bias, our mind's predisposition to look for information that confirms our beliefs, regardless of whether the information matches the facts.
Even if that were true, and a larger portion of the remote workforce juggles two jobs, who cares? What if people need two jobs to feed their families? What if a side hustle is the way to protect oneself in the face of looming layoffs? As long as the work is done satisfactorily in the role, what people do with the rest of their time is no business of the employer.
Holding down a full-time job and a side hustle is how I managed to change careers. It's also what saved me when I lost my job. I wish the world weren't structured in a way that offers so little protection to employees (at least in the U.S.), but we do what we have to do to protect ourselves. If employees were guaranteed severance, health insurance, and decent unemployment benefits, this wouldn't be such an issue.
"Here's how you can communicate your value proposition effectively when facing a layoff" - LinkedIn
This one wasn't a news headline, but a prompt from LinkedIn in my notifications.
What complete nonsense and utterly dehumanizing. Are employees lined up for a Hunger Games-style competition, where they prove that they're worth keeping in the face of a layoff?
Spoiler alert: employees have no ability to save themselves from a layoff. The myth that if you're good at your job, you will survive has died. The best people may be let go because they're the most expensive.
LinkedIn uses AI to generate these prompts and then relies on human responses to make them not suck. It's a game that rewards the players with Top Voice badges, while Microsoft uses these unpaid contributions to further train its large language models. I thought about giving the machine a piece of my mind with a response, but why bother?
Instead, I rolled my eyes, like I do with every asinine headline, and quickly deleted the notification.
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