Plug-and-play employees
A woman I’ve known professionally for several years emailed me today to let me know how she’s doing. She’s been hospitalized with stress-related illnesses created by a boss who seems to have no idea how to deal with other people. My friend thinks that Monday may be her last day on the job over an issue that is a case of one woman’s word against another’s.
My friend is a professional with years of experience and a wealth of talent, but that doesn’t seem to matter in today’s workplace. Another older professional whom I’ve known for years is job-searching and was recently interviewed for a position creating a new program, which is her specialty. The job pays $26,000, or $12.50 an hour. The sister of a good friend was forced to leave her job after more than 30 years to make way for younger talent. She’s hoping she’ll get a position that, as her sister said, would earn her “just slightly above Chuck E. Cheese wages.”
What is going on in America’s workplaces? Older employees are being forced out because their wages and their benefits can be had cheaper if their replacements are younger and healthier. Working in an industry or a job for years where you went the extra mile, thought outside the box and fulfilled every other cliche your boss wanted you to has no value when the alternative is to increase the bottom line.
As one of my job-search mentors put it, we’re all flash drives–those little chewing-gum-pack-sized computer drives that store data and pop in and out as needed. “All of us are now plug-and-play,” as he put it. No one is a hard drive in today’s employment world.
The friend who thinks she’s losing her job on Monday has started a new home-based business doing something she’s very good at. I wished her much success with her new venture. It used to be that home businesses were risky and corporate jobs safe; now it seems the other way around.
As more companies look to the bottom line and forget their scruples, they either force out better-paid employees who are usually older to hire cheaper labor or they move jobs out of the country for good. Either way, it’s a breaking of the pact that many of my friends and I made with our employers: we thought that hard work mattered. That’s how we were raised.
For seven years, I worked at a job where I put off surgery because I didn’t want to inconvenience my bosses or my co-workers. I didn’t take vacation days because there was so much to do. I sometimes didn’t eat or stayed late to finish what my bosses said was absolutely crucial. I did everything I was told, and more, and yet none of it counts now. My old job is gone.
The day after my doctor decided I couldn’t put off surgery any more, I was told I’d lost my job. I still haven’t had the surgery and now I’m one of those 47 million Americans who are uninsured. It might be years before I’m insured again and can stockpile sick time to take about a month off to recover from surgery; most likely, I’ll never have it until I’m much older.
I can think of all the school events I missed when my four kids were growing up because I had to work, the vacations I didn’t take because I was needed at the office and the unpleasant tasks I did just because someone told me to do them. Even though I had an allegiance to my employers, they didn’t have to reciprocate.
Unfortunately, that’s what work in America has become. It’s a cutthroat, me-first, profits-above-all morass, not at all the quality-driven, customer-first, people-are-our-most-important-resource nirvana that employers insist it is in their promotional materials. I know because my job often involved writing all those pretty promotional materials about the importance of teamwork and innovative thinking on the job.
My friends who are older and have lost jobs are sometimes taking on home businesses or contracts as consultants. They have an incredible stockpile of knowledge and skills, but no one seems to want to pay them what they’re worth. Today’s workplace is all about getting a live body at the cheapest price you can, much like a slave market.
There are untold numbers of 50-plus displaced workers who are under- or unemployed today. America is shortchanging itself when all that talent is treated like a flash drive that can be pulled out on a whim. When a better paid older worker is replaced by a younger worker who accepts a much lower salary, the institutional knowledge the older person had is gone.
Today’s younger workers should prepare for a future when they, too, will be just another resource traded away for the sake of higher profits.
