The wreckage is not good
Work, as a means to an end.
As a child, I associated the first of May with dancing around a maypole with ribbons and gaiety. April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes.
But May Day is rooted in a labor movement. Around the world, it is celebrated as International Labor Day. In the U.S., we celebrate Labor Day in September, ignoring the historical significance of May 1. In 1886, the organization now known as the American Federation of Labor called for a national workers' strike to demand an 8-hour workday. In 1890, back when the government first tracked workers' hours, manufacturing employees worked 100 hours per week. The 40-hour workweek wasn't established until 1940.
Anti-communist and anti-labor attitudes during the Cold War led the U.S. to suppress May Day's association with labor movements.
Today, I feel very deeply that unrest is in the air. We feel like we've been sold a bill of goods. As an Elder Millennial, I was encouraged to follow my passions. "Do work you love, and you'll never feel like you're working a day in your life!" That sentiment assumes that everyone is playing fairly. And it's simply not true.
Home ownership has become increasingly unattainable for the middle class. College is unaffordable. Chidcare costs have skyrocketed. The U.S. is fragmenting into an Ultra Wealthy Class, and Everyone Else Fighting Over Scraps at the Bottom.
Like the May Day protests of 1886, our anger should be directed toward the people who demand so much and return so little.
The wreckage is Not Good
One of the best article intros I've read in a long time was by David Roth, published on Deadspin in 2019 and titled You Don't Have To Believe Any Of This Shit. He writes:
We live in the wreckage that these people and their failings have made, but also with the moments in which they deign to explain that The Wreckage Is In Fact Actually Good, And You’re Welcome.
The deference demanded by the people that own everything and their repeated howling stupid failures do not coexist easily, or comfortably.
He goes on to talk about the Chicago Cubs.
But the sentiment is pervasive among people working today. The Bosses claim to be out there, doing good — and maybe some of them believe it — but the results are harmful at best and catastrophic at worst.
I've been listening to the podcast American Scandal and recently finished the episodes about Theranos. Theranos raised $1.4 billion in venture capital money (according to Crunchbase), and it was all out of greed. Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs and she was willing to do anything to get there.
The wreckage was, in fact, Not Good.
In the final episode, investigative journalist Charles Duhigg discusses the venture capital system. Many of the people who invested in Theranos, such as Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos, were unqualified to do due diligence on a biotech company. But that's part of the VC system. Duhigg points out that venture capitalists know that 18 of the 20 companies they invest in are going to fail. But one will end up being a unicorn that makes a boatload of money.
But between startup and failure is often a house of cards. The startup can't figure out how to make money with the initial investment of millions. So it raises more VC money. The startup still can't make it work. If VCs walk away, they've lost all their money, so they pour in tens of millions more — hoping the startup can turn things around with more money. Eventually, the entire thing may collapse.
Eventually, the entire thing collapses.
Work as a means to an end
Obviously, not every collapse is Theranos-level fraud. But it has become too easy to raise money and let unqualified people pretend to build a company. Roth continues in his article:
The most patently and potently of-this-moment experience currently available is that of being talked down to by an extremely rich person who is obviously dumber than you.
I believed in the work I did for a long time. I truly thought the company's software product was making a difference. Then I rose to an executive level and got a peek behind the curtain. The CEO was completely out of touch. Over the years, he drove the company into the ground — to the point where I was certain it could not be saved. I left. My next jobs were under the leadership of astonishingly incompetent people, responsible for millions of dollars flowing through the company and no clue how to run a business. Both companies took a sharp nosedive, but not before harming many employees' lives in the process.
Recently, I came across Katherine Pomfret on LinkedIn. She recently quit her job and wrote:
Making rich men richer was for me personally a waste of a good few years of my life. And that's the job. And the more senior you get the clearer it becomes that everything else is just window dressing to that goal.
Katherine now works at a family-owned country house hotel, providing general support and waitressing.
I was listening to an episode of the Hard Fork podcast about how people are using AI in the workplace. One response made me truly sad. The person, a manager at a tech company, said:
I see in my daily life and across my peer set is a massive feeling of workplace overload. And being asked to do too much with too little. The context across many industries here is that most professionals have experienced significant layoffs about backfill. The sheer volume of work expected of employees is astonishing and completely unrealistic.
The May Day events of 1886 were about fighting for the basic right to a sustainable workload. More than 140 years later, we still want the same. We don't want to work unreasonable hours, just to make someone else rich. We don't want to run ragged only have the company collapse due to mismanagement.
Maybe if there were some accountability. That CEOs can't wreck companies and leave employees without a lifeline. That CEOs can't take bailouts or generous severenace packages or bonuses if employees are harmed in the process.
That won't happen. All that can happen is workers stop caring. Or take their talent and walk away, like Katherine Pomfret. We don't have to dedicate our whole souls to our work. "Work that makes us happy" seems to barely exist and many jobs that should be considered "good jobs" barely pay the bills anymore.
So instead it's "work that affords us a decent living and we're going to do the work, for 8 hours (thank you, labor activists) and go home." Work is a means to an end.
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