David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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The Dogs That Bind

September 8, 2013 By David Griesing 4 Comments

What connects us to other people is often as simple as a dog.

By the time Rudy died in April, I had lost touch with a whole new generation of dogs and the humans who’d be tagging along with them. By this time a year ago, Rudy’s “walks” were down to a slow amble from the back to the front of our house, so there were many times when his shorter paths crossed no one else’s at all.  As the web of sniffing and barking and “how was your day” gets smaller, a whole slice of giving and taking is reduced to almost nothing.

Rudy 2013

A new puppy changes all of that.

Like a gift that everyone wants to share, Wally has quickly taken his place in the webbing that knits these streets together. Being new and alive–always happy to just be here–he’s like a walking magnet as the evening shifts into its lower gears or the next morning starts to rev up. Every conversation is easier with Wally breaking the ice.

Wally 2013

When it comes to words, what a puppy initiates is not so different from what’s depicted in that classic scene from 1001 Dalmatians. You remember. It’s where the alarm goes out from one to a whole chain of barking dogs that something (in this case “something very bad”) is about to happen. The message that’s telegraphed:  Can’t one of you dogs out there mobilize your human “to do something” before it’s too late!

It’s been a gorgeous September in East Falls. While the dogs nip, lunge and roll on their backs, they’ve gotten their humans to find things to talk about, helping to shore up life and make it a home on this little hill next to one of Philadelphia’s great rivers.  In a big American city with many demands but little spontaneous conversation, this is no small thing.

“So hello Fritz, Otto, Jack, Dakota, Chase, Ajax, Coco, Lola, Peg. . . this is Wally.

It’s good to see you.”

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: community, companionship, conversation, dogs, network, ties that bind, worklifereward

How “Everyday Low Prices” Hurt Us All

June 4, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Our expectation that we’ll always pay less for consumer products has an impact on the people in the supply chain who bring us those products—and it’s not a good one.

I’m talking about those who mine the metals in your cell phone, pick the cotton in your socks, process the rubber in your running shoes. It’s the workers in places like Indonesia or Peru who put your toaster together, stick the pins in your dress shirt so it looks good in its package, or pack the parts you’ll assemble into an IKEA bookcase. Finally, it’s the American sales clerks, service managers, stock boys and checkout girls who get the final product into your hands.

To bring you “everyday low prices,” the people in these supply chains are paid “as little as their labor markets will bear” so that the factory owners, shippers and ultimately the stores you shop in can make a profit when you open up your wallet. With fewer dollars to go around and cutthroat competition between the on-line and bricks&mortar stores, every link in the consumer product supply chain is squeezed. This includes workers along the arc of production—including those in America.

How is our addiction to cheap stuff making the work that many of our neighbors do everyday a losing proposition—and why should we care?

 

At one level, this is how capitalism is supposed to operate. Workers trade their labor for wages, and the owners figure out how to make a profit after the labor and other costs of doing business are covered. In competitive markets, this means that there is constant pressure to produce as cheaply as possible. Manufacturers flee the US for cheaper labor in Mexico or Bangladesh, and as wages rise in those places, to even poorer countries with “surplus workers” for hire.  American factories close because it costs so much less to make your shirt or toaster somewhere else.

But millions of Americans still staff the big box stores where you’ll likely buy that shirt or toaster this year. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to “the cheap foreign labor dividend” that enables us to pay less and less when we go shopping for consumer products. But there are only so many savings to be realized from cheap labor abroad.  At some point, full-time American workers in this supply chain also get squeezed, often to the point where they can no longer live on the money they earn.

There are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” efficiencies in capitalism.

For example, you can’t make shoddy merchandise because it won’t sell in most markets.  Child labor, sweatshops, safety and health risks, damage to the environment are also unacceptable (at least when it comes to making something in the U.S.). But what happens when all of the “acceptable” efficiencies have been obtained, and only “unacceptable” ones remain?

When it comes to many of our consumer products, we have already crossed that divide today—and our expectations as consumers have a lot to do with it.

Wal-Mart was a revolutionary company because it mastered the art of selling products to consumers more efficiently than they had ever been sold before. As discussed in a recent Atlantic article by Jordan Weissmann, it paid its workers so little that they had no alternative but to shop at discount stores. . .  like Wal-Mart.  However, it didn’t end there. Many full-time jobs at Wal-Mart and other big box stores barely take a family of three over the federal poverty line. These retailers are simply not paying most of their workers enough to live on, what we call “a living wage.”

Ultimately, this all comes back to consumers. We are the ones who choose where to take our business. And for the most part, Americans have chosen cheap.

 

It’s hard to blame middle class families for making that decision—not a lot of people have the extra cash to make a political statement out of where they buy paper towels and diapers. But it’s led to cycle of [worker] impoverishment….

Economists have considered what it would cost to break this cycle, and it turns out that the cost to us would come pretty cheap. Weissmann cites a study by UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education suggesting that it would cost the average shopper only $12.49 more a year if Wal-Mart paid its workers a living wage.

So the questions remain: what’s to be done about the human cost of everyday low prices? And why should any of us care?

Most of us will voice our opposition to merchants paying full-time American workers less than a living wage, but our abstract moral concerns are trumped—almost every single time—by the consumer product we want and the low price we want to pay for it. So even if a wave of the wand could make it happen, would our behavior change if the trade offs were more explicit to us as consumers?

  • Such as a sign you see before entering the big box store that says: “Be willing to pay a little more so that the workers here can get a paycheck they can live on.”
  • The checkout girl wearing a badge that says: “Your addiction to everyday low prices means I can’t support my family.”
  • Would realizing that the person harmed is standing in front of you be enough to get you to shop at the mom & pop store that charges more so it can pay its employees fairly?
  • Would coming face-to-face with the social cost of consumer economics lead you to add a few bucks to your checkout bill, like a “tip,” for the “Big Box Employee Living Wage Fund”?

At the very least, the realities of our addiction to low prices and its human costs need to become more personal as close to the point of purchase as possible. That said, while there is always hope that the situation could change someday, there’s hardly cause for optimism if the consciousness raising goes no further than this.

What’s also needed is an understanding of why changing this value proposition in our consumer driven economy is important to you and the value of your work?

When some workers in your community are treated like property, it is easier for your employer to treat you that way—an economic instead of a human resource, little more than a cog in a wheel. As more and more full time, middle class jobs are lost to “the knowledge economy,” and more work is assigned on a part-time, piecemeal basis, it will become harder for any of us to make a living wage. Self-interest may lead us to start demanding that every single full time worker in America is making enough to live on.

It is also about community. The consumer product workforce is comprised of your family members and neighbors and people you see all the time. They don’t or can’t “move on” to better jobs, because increasingly those “better” jobs are unavailable. As an increasingly permanent part of our way of life, they are connected to you and to me, and have a face.

As we put our economy back together, there is an opportunity to rebuild our communities around the work that each and every person in it does. But communities where every worker is appropriately valued will never be possible until we confront our addiction to consumer prices that are lower than they have to be.

 

A version of this post also appeared on Marc Gunther’s Business & Sustainability Blog, where it  provoked a range of comments.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: community, consumer, consumption, living wage, OUR Wal-Mart, supply chain

Habits of Living

April 21, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To have been thrust, as we’ve been over the past seven days, onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Boston, is to be reminded of the web of interconnections that make up a community. We all have that web, which we’ve taken from our earliest memories and experiences into the work we do and the lives we live. It’s the web we find ourselves leaning back into and relying upon during a week like this.

These “ways of seeing the world” or “habits of living” put startling events into a meaningful context so that we can begin to understand them. They tell us when we can count on the authorities trying to protect us. They bring us out to the street to applaud and cheer them because of our relief and their success.

These ways of seeing the world shaped our initial reactions to the carnage that turned a finish line into a triage unit. “Repugnance” a word that Leon Kass has used to describe this kind of disregard for life and community, springs from “a sort of deep moral intuition.” What is acceptable as well as what offends us at the most basic levels, comes from how we saw our parents and cousins, neighbors and teachers respond to what they thought the world should and shouldn’t look like all those years ago. We learned from what we saw them do.

It is where conscience and character first come alive.

So I paid attention to novelist Denis Lehane (who wrote so beautifully about Boston in Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) when he spoke about how he was trapped at home while the streets outside his home were a blur of sirens and mobilzations. He talked about trying to protect his 4-year old daughter who was alarmed every time she heard the “pop, pop, pop” from that endlessly replayed gun battle from the night before. So while the storyteller in Lehane needed to know what was happening, he kept turning off the screens and squawk boxes to protect her. One of his habits of living was to guard his child from the realities of the world while he still could, despite all the things he so desperately needed to know.

Philadelphia Mural Arts

These habits were evident in those who went from on-lookers of the Boston Marathon to rushing towards the explosions to see if they could help. They were evident in the cups of coffee and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches thrust into the hands of responders who hadn’t taken a minute to think about how tired and hungry they were.

These habits were evident in the capabilities that were shared at the most critical moments (“he needs a tourniquet”) or from the journalism teacher who found himself tweeting in the middle of the Watertown shootout and later said “I kept stopping myself, because the world just didn’t need to know about that.”  These habits are about discretion and propriety too.

All of us are embarrassed by the smallness of the towns where we grew up, of the communities that looked out for us, or over our shoulders, back then. When we leave our nests thinking we’ve escaped, we bring the ways of making sense of the world and the role we need to play in it along with us. They help us to reach back to our most basic decencies in times that are troubling as well as in all those other times. These habits of living give rise to the responsibilities we all share for the world we inhabit.

As the cameras rolled past the row houses of Watertown, with all their green trash cans out and the trees beginning to bud, we found ourselves thrust into a web of mutual responsibilities. It is where what’s best and truest about life can usually be found.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Heroes & Other Role Models Tagged With: character, community, conscience, habits of living, moral intuition, repugnance, responsibility

Cross-training for Work and for Life

October 26, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Figuring out whether its time to look for another job is about more than how you’re treated as an employee and whether you’re acquiring valuable skills. Being appreciated and becoming more capable are important, but they’re not the whole story.

Whether your work is “the right fit for you” is also about whether the product or service your work is producing is making life better for those you care about. It’s whether your work gives you the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from making the kind of difference in the world that you want to make.

If your work isn’t providing that, it’s not giving you enough.

Too many of us park our values at the door when we go to work. By doing so, we never access the deep-seated motivation that comes from contributing (even in a small way) to something larger than ourselves. This kind of positive energy not only carries us over the humps in the workday, it also produces an afterglow that extends into our lives after work.

Spend some time today thinking about the work you do. If it’s providing something you feel is making a positive difference, tap into that value chain more deeply so that your sense of accomplishment is enhanced. Talk to satisfied customers, find ways to collaborate with valued suppliers or company partners in your community. Join fellow workers who are doing the same thing. Expand both your inputs and outputs to experience how the work you’re doing is having an impact in ways that are important to you. However much your company will benefit from this, you will benefit more.

On the other hand, when you look critically at your work, it may be impossible to find “the value proposition.” Our 24/7 consuming economy produces an endless stream of products and services with no thought about whether they actually improve anyone’s life. If you’re taking no more than a paycheck from your work on what amounts to a deadening production line, it’s time for you to find a job that’s also energizing and life affirming.

There are lots of ways to start doing so.

It’s not just thinking about what you’ll be doing tomorrow, but also what you want for yourself long term. (I Am (not) My Job). It’s taking your thoughts and grounding them in concrete plans to get the work that you want to be doing. (Vocational Training).  Because we spend much of our waking lives on the job, it’s about getting the most out of our work everyday by preparing for it beforehand and then digesting what happened once the workday is done. (Get Ready for the Work of Your Life Everyday). If your line of work doesn’t justify this kind of time and attention, you should probably be doing something else.

It’s identifying working people you admire, because of what you can learn from them about work. (Neil Armstrong on Work).  It’s about surrounding yourself with a supportive community that shares your work ethic (Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself) and having wise people who truly care about you when you’re swamped by your limitations and need guidance. (Can There Be Redemption in the Lance Armstrong Tragedy?)  As important as anything, it’s about improving your value awareness so you never lose sight of what’s most important to you, either at work or in life. (The presidential candidates provide Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference).

This conversation is about cross-training for work and for life. Your worklifereward will come when each one is continuously energizing the other.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work, Daily Preparation Tagged With: community, energizing, life affirming, mentors, personal business plan, preparation, role models, self-definition, values

On Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself

October 7, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

For your work to be fulfilling, it should further goals that mean something to you.

Of course, goals that are important to you have everything to do with your values.  Do you want to be more generous to others, more productive, more creative?  Is your work goal to become richer, improve your status, give your family a better life, or heal the world?

You may want all of these things, but some of them you want more than others.  Personal ethics ranks what is most important to you, so that you are able make decisions with real consequences even when your values are competing with one another.

In several posts, I’ve argued that it’s essential to develop your ethical decision-making skills before you have to use them (e.g., posts on preparation for life and work in school and how to respond to child abuse). It’s far more difficult to learn how to weigh your values and act upon them when you’re facing hard choices, under pressure.

One way is to have conversations that reproduce what some families used to have around the dinner table: regular talk about morally ambiguous situations that arise everyday, and how your personal values would lead you to respond to them.

For some, religion also provided a regular framework for considering how values should play out in our lives, although for many of us this is no longer true.  But the line between being religious and non-religious is rarely a bright one.  Some of us believe more during the holidays, around birth, illness, or death, or during transitions in our lives.  Looking at it this way, many of us are still tied (at least somewhat) to a community of shared values that enables our decision-making.

On the other hand, when you cut your ties to a believing community altogether, where does that leave you?

This past week, there was an extraordinary article by Hanna Pylvainen, reacting to a new reality show about a group of Amish young people “as they forgo horses and buggies for New York City’s taxis and subways.”  The show follows in the wake of earlier programs like “Jesus Camp” and “Sister Wives” that aimed to shock, mock, and entertain a “more enlightened” audience about the oppression of religion. The article’s aim was not to provide grist for that mill, but to give voice to what these young people had given up when they left a community of shared values.

The author herself had left a fundamentalist community. As a child, she chaffed against its rules and when she could leave, she did so.  She’s now recalling the “comfort” she had once gained from being  “unshakably tied” to “these people.”

In leaving the church when I was in college, I soon saw I had not stepped into anything else. My admittance into a dubious form of atheism merited no special membership.  Atheism seemed, if anything, a community that eschewed community, that strove to preserve the strength of the individual. Thus I clung to anything that might provide stability—a boyfriend, school friends, professors.  But these relationships, good as some were, were largely transient—friendships that swelled and faded in response to the changing mileage between us.

This isn’t to say the world has not been kind to me in its own fashion, that I have not found my own freedom valuable—but it is a lonely place, bound to nothing but what I bind myself to. And I find myself worrying, always, that these ties will not be lasting enough. (emphasis added)

To put it simply, Hannah Pylvainen’s experience made her sad for the Amish boys and girls in the new TV show.

Communities where there are shared values about what to do and how to live come in different colors and flavors, in religious as well as non-religious versions. At their best, they are extensions of those dinner table conversations described above.

When you bring your values into your work, the support of a community that shares your values where you work, play and give thanks can mean—quite simply—everything.

If you are still connected to a community like this, appreciate what it is giving you.

If you are not, think seriously about building one around the values that you have brought into your work.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself Tagged With: community, how to live, practical ethics, preparation, religion, support, values

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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