This is pay, sort of...

In a Spanish proverb, "God says, 'Choose what you will and pay for it.'" And things generally work that way. Pay isn't always good, or a benefit, but when we think of work we think of money coming in, and generally see it as a benefit. I work. I get paid. Money. I have salary, insurance benefits, vacation time, and sick leave. Not all money, exactly, but still pay. It's all pay. All coming in. To me. It's good.

Normally we don't include medical and dental insurance, vacation time or sick leave in our thinking of "pay". But consider taking a job that doesn't offer any of these, if you can. Then think of an identical job that does offer them all and tell me which one you'd actually take.

Exactly. Because one pays more. No doubt about which hook to bite. Glad we got that out of the way.

Don't complain when you start seeing your two weeks off show up on your income tax statement as it will one day. I once worked at a place where you were entitled, after one year, to one week off without pay. You could wander off for a week and rest up, and they wouldn't replace you while you were gone. If you could afford to be gone. That was your vacation time. Being down there right at ground level puts things into perspective. No fooling.

Besides the basics some people get stock options, a company car, bonuses, and some non-monetary things like prizes or other material goods, framed certificates, or praise such as being named employee of the (fill-in-the-blank).

So that about wraps it up then, eh?

Nope, and you knew it didn't.

Even if you've never had "a job" you know better. Work is what someone else tells you to do. You have a boss. Usually several. In most places I've worked, we might have 50 people in the office, and five or six levels of supervisors. Talk about your wonderful life there.

"Supervisor" literally means one who views from above. "Overseer" is a direct synonym. Supervisors came into their own in 19th-century factories where the supervisor was actually a person who sat in a high chair and watched everyone work. Made sure that they worked. Oversaw the workers. You could tell that they were workers because they didn't speak, had their heads down, and kept their hands moving. Anyone who spoke, or looked up, or slowed down got clipped by the supervisor.

Which is a little like being told you're unprofessional because you haven't chosen to wear a suit to work. Professionals being the ones wearing the antique, expensive, and painful clothes. Like supervisors wear. Professional supervisors.

Being a supervisor hurts because it's so hard, and so godlike. A supervisor has to be all-knowing, and that is very difficult. Someone who evaluates the work of everyone else has to be all-knowing and infallible, and the wearing of painful clothing shrivels into absolute insignificance other than as a way of making it obvious who's boss. It's a way of intimidating others by proving that nothing, not even a noose around your neck all day, can intrude upon your consciousness, even a tiny bit.

And we all need a boss. Because if we didn't have bosses we wouldn't have people telling us what to do and how and when and how hard and how long. We would run wild in the streets, or maybe nap all day. Because we are not professionals and we do not have all-seeing knowledge and we are lazy and cannot possibly control ourselves.

The boss is not like that, wild in the streets and fun, but no one has ever been able to explain just why it is that the boss does not need supervision by another boss who is supervised by an infinite chain leading right up to, through, and infinitely beyond God. No one has ever explained why it's not supervisors all the way up. They just stop somewhere, and its them versus us. And we are seen as interchangeable and expendable parts and they are not, so limited in their numbers as they are. And to get us to do anything at all they have in one hand a stick, and in the other hand a carrot or a donut or maybe a dime.

Sticks have lately been deprecated in a public relations sort of way, so we hear a lot more about carrots, even from dictators. They've all got the PR religion now. It's always the "Democratic Republic" of somewhere and never Generalissimo Bob's Evil Hell Hole and Rotting Torture Cesspool, even if that's what it is.

And this attitude has infected business and the world of work.

They (the chain of bosses) have decided that a salary (including a few side benefits) is an unavoidable and necessary evil, but only a minimum. If you, Mr/Ms Expendable, want to make it on the job you have to show some flash and be able to snag a bonus. If you do you earn more but also avoid sinking into the bottom ten percent. You know, the ones who just get fired every year to keep the basement nice and clean, and because it's fun to fire people. Whoops! Looks like there's still a stick around after all.

But mostly it's reward time. Some kind of reward. Incentive pay. Gold stars to display at evaluation time. Real pay. Stuff you can use to keep your job.

And oddly enough, rewards don't work. They aren't real pay after all. We'll get to real pay next time, but right now let's talk about the kind of pay that rots your teeth and makes you hate your life and think longingly of how good that smooth, round, cold gun barrel would feel sliding in between your lips as your finger tightens on the trigger.

Hey, how crazy am I? Everyone knows that goosing someone with performance-based pay gets the juices flowing and turns a warehouse stuffed full of slackers into a lean, mean fighting machine. 'Cep'n 'taint so, love. 'Taint so.

To the best of my knowledge, no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule, the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more destructive its effects. (Alfie Kohn, Education Week, September 17, 2003)

He has a good web site (www.alfiekohn.org/) and he's been at it a long time. His book "Punished by Rewards" is also good.

Kohn has found that

1. Rewards punish. It turns out that rewards and punishment are two sides of the same coin, and that both are naked attempts at manipulation. Rewards don't usually hurt quite as much, though they can be just as humiliating as punishment can be.
   
   
2. Rewards disrupt relationships. Rewards create winners and losers (usually one winner and a roomful of happy losers). Rewards foster enmity. Rewards discourage those who do well but not exactly quite well enough, according to some standard or other, which may be arbitrary. Rewards create pettiness. Rewards encourage people to work separately and not as a team. After all, why in hell should I help you when you're just going to screw me by winning?
   
   Some say that none of us alone is as stupid as all of us together, but unless you're the boss, or wearing a suit today, none of us alone is as smart as all of us. Can't be. So rewards make the business more stupid. And less competitive. (Irony alert!)
   
   
3. Rewards ignore root causes. Got someone who's not quite doing well enough lately? Whack him with a stick, or if you're feeling really ornery, dangle a shiny trinket in front of his nose.
   
   Don't ask if his mother died, his kid is now a crack addict, or his wife just ran off with the babysitter. That shiny, twirling thingy will do the trick. And if it doesn't you can always fire his sorry ass. Who cares if he's done a great job for the past 10 years and knows the business better than you ever will?
   
   Rewards are blunt instruments, do not analyze causes or other messy things, and are simpleminded, and that's what we want, right?
   
   
4. Rewards discourage taking risks. No one wants to screw up the possibility of getting that reward.
   
   So people will wait to hear what the ground rules are. They will want to be told what to do. And exactly no one will do something completely unexpected. You know, the kind of thing that could move their company into the next century like, oh, 50 years ahead of everyone else.
   
   Short-term goals, that's the ticket. And with a reward system in place, every activity becomes only another obstacle. There are no longer any opportunities, only hurdles to kick out of the way while you shove your way to the front.
   
   
5. Rewards kill enthusiasm, even for things that people would do just for the fun of it.
   
   One group of children, told that they had to play with chalk before they could get to the felt markers began to hate drawing with chalk. The other group, told the opposite, began to hate felt markers. Children told nothing at all go nuts having fun with either one, or both at once.
   
   Any activity seen as a means to a reward becomes distasteful, strange as it sounds. Researchers keep finding this result over and over again, no matter how hard they try to find that rewards work.
   
   Rewards come to be seen as controlling, and everyone hates being controlled. People feel threatened, watched, constantly judged. As though they're forced to work only to meet deadlines, to be ordered around, and to be competitive toward others when really they want the opposite.

So

The best amount of competition in your company is none at all...competition itself -- which simply means requiring one person or group to fail in order that another can succeed -- is inherently counterproductive. Similarly, I’m not offering a 'soft' argument against competition, basing my objection solely on its destructiveness to us as human beings. I'm saying that competition also makes no sense from the perspective of the bottom line. It holds people back from doing their best. (Alfie Kohn www.alfiekohn.org/managing/nocontest.htm)

Yikes.

Money and goods are only one form of pay. Call it "official" or "external" pay. This is a baseline, a minimum-level compensation that comes with a job. Money is compensation for giving up part of your life and doing what you don't especially want to, what isn't inherently meaningful to you, or for doing things that aren't intrinsically rewarding, or for what is too hard or too frustrating to bother with otherwise.

When people are asked what's most important to them, financial concerns show up well behind such factors as interesting work or good people to work with. For example, in a large survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute, "salary/wage" ranked 16th on a list of 20 reasons for taking a job. (Alfie Kohn www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm)

But there is another form of pay. Call it "unofficial" or "internal" pay. We'll look at this next time. This kind of pay is what you get for doing what is worthwhile. To you. As a real person. And not as an office machine.

Work, part 2: What is pay?

Do you do it for money?

Some say that if you do, that makes you a pro. Some say that being a pro means you do things that are right, even if doing them costs you money. In other words, it's your integrity that's important, not your bank account.

But what is integrity good for? It gets you more business and a higher rate of return. Customers will come to you because they know that they can trust you, and that you will do for them what they can't do for themselves. And they will pay more for your goods or services than for those from someone else because they have a sort of guarantee.

Your integrity removes one more variable from the process. You provide dependability and that can be important, because it means preventing a whole bunch of things.

It means preventing a whole bunch of things from suddenly rising out of the ground like the evil spirits of the dead in one of those horror films. The ones where a nice suburban house has been built on a graveyard by unethical developers. And then the dead get irritated. And then get even. Customers don't like it when they have to deal with armies of the angry dead.

So, because you provide dependability, you also provide simplicity.

Your extra thought, and work, and integrity heads off a lot of bad things and removes the possibility that they can happen. This removes you from competing as a commodity provider. You are no longer working on the basis of providing the lowest price.

Thinking about professionalism just brings us back to pay. But no matter what, pro or no pro, you need to be paid. Money in the business world is like food for an organism. No food, no life. No income, no business.

A business needs to eat, and so do the people who make up the business. You can say that there are two levels of need here, one for the business, which has to make a profit, and one for the employees, each of whom has to earn a living. Profit goes to the business owners, and pay goes to the staff.

Thinking a little deeper you can see it involving three entities: the business, the staff, and the owners of the business, each with their own needs. And customers on the outside looking in.

But it's even a bit more complicated than that.

There is really no business. A business is an abstraction. If we stop thinking about it, it goes away, because a business exists only in our minds.

The reality is that there are just people, and the business is an idea that all of them agree to hold in their minds. The reality is that there are just lots of people linked by relationships to one another, and all of them want something from the relationships that they are in.

A person I once worked with told me that the purpose of business was to provide jobs for people. Not everyone would agree with that. I didn't, at the time. There is a common understanding that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and there have been many legal rulings that poked at this issue. *

But the more I've thought about what my colleague said the more I agree with it. Not fully, since there are more people involved in any business than just the employees, but taking a broader view, it makes more sense.

The two fundamental ideas to keep in mind are that any business is solely human relationships, and that no one ever makes a profit.

Human relationships: Without humans, there is no business. Of any kind, by any name. The sole value of any business lies in the people who work at it (not just those who "own" it, not just those who "run" it, and not just those who are "employed by" it).

Remove the people and there is nothing left whatsoever. Don't think that you can fire all the staff and keep it going with different "hires". We're talking about permanently removing all the people. It is much clearer when you think of it that way. Remove the people and there is no residue. Only emptiness.

Profit: (A) Everyone dies. (B) You can't take it with you. (C) End of story.

Passing along wealth to others, again, does not count because you no longer exist, therefore you have no profit. Inherit money or other property, or just find a box of hundred dollar bills in an alley, and it may be fun, interesting, confusing or something else entirely, but you still make no profit. As Homer Simpson once said about beer, you can only rent it.

Everything is temporary. This means your profit too.

And this means you.

So that kind of makes money or other property look a little strange. And business as well.

What is pay, after all, then?


* See "The cyclical transformations of the corporate form: A historical perspective on corporate social responsibility" for some background http://www.law.umich.edu/centersandprograms/olin/abstracts/discussionpapers/2005/05-003aviyonah.pdf

Work, part 1: What is it?

What is work?

It seemed so easy in physics class. Maybe that's one reason that I majored in physics, after assuming that my first, English degree was not quite the right thing.

"Work: a transfer of energy from one object to another by applying a force over a distance."

Oh, so sweet and simple. And understandable. And quantifiable. Even amenable to use on multiple-choice tests, or to probing by means of electronic calculator. Define the problem using a couple of variables, enter the numbers and get a result. Check your work, and then write down the answer. Problem solved.

There is a lot of discussion every day about what work actually is, for the rest of us, we who have moved outside the classroom and have had it hit us in the face. Some say things like "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." (Aristotle)

That's one point of view, perennially espoused, sagely followed up by another thought: "When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'". (Don Marquis) We've barely gotten started here and we can already cut the cynicism with a knife. Even worse, we have to carry that knife in self-defense.

But soon we begin to drift, if we keep listening, keep thinking, toward sentiments like "Getting fired is nature's way to telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place". (Hal Lancaster, in The Wall Street Journal) Then this: "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else". (James M. Barrie) Both of these sentiments are also familiar to everyone.

But it goes beyond that.

"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it". (Henry David Thoreau)

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work". (Richard Bach)

And one more, out of another famous life: "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing". (Theodore Roosevelt)

And summed up by "Whenever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupation which he should like to do anyhow, even if he did not need the money". (William Lyon Phelps)

So what is work? We still don't agree. It can be agreeable or not, for pay or not, long, short or in between. It's something or other, but seems to divisible into two entities, sort of related, like second cousins who barely know each other.

One kind of work is forced onto a person's life and the other kind grows out of it. Let's assume that both types are compensated in some way. We can assume that all work is compensated in some way, even if it's only a payment in food and shelter and a cessation of the beatings.

Let's also assume that work is a more or less directed activity that has a tangible result.

Hammer a horseshoe out of a lump of red hot iron and you have a horseshoe. No disagreement there, it's tangible.

But so is a poem, even if unwritten. You know it's been produced because you can encounter it: it's either written or recited.

So work is more than just thought, more than daydreaming, more than idle planning. Albert Einstein produced magnificent thought experiments but they weren't done until he had shared them, and at that point they joined the body of his life's work.

So work has a result, and it generates some kind of compensation.

(Quotations found at http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/work/)