When Did Our Jobs Turn into a Joke?

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Assistant (to the) regional manager Dwight isn’t mocked because he’s an insufferable suck-up; he’s ridiculed because he fails to recognize that it’s all a waste of energy.

When the cartoon strip Dilbert first appeared in 1989, it depicted employees who knew better than their buzzword-slinging managers. In that two-dimensional universe, the people making things inefficient were the ones who were portrayed as fools; the evolving workplace was problematic, but the work had potential for value. Now the work itself is what’s mocked, which, given the fact that most people spend a bulk of their lives at work, can’t help but threaten the collective psyche and further damage the domestic workplace.

White-collar workers already report more occupational stress than their blue-collar counterparts and suffer twice as much from severe depression. Job satisfaction is falling, dropping from 60 percent in the mid-’90s to about 50 percent in 2005, according to a report from the Conference Board, a business-research organization. Forty percent of workers feel disconnected from their employers, and a quarter admit to showing up just to collect a check. In other words, some 35 million workers are either content to not care or have bought into the idea that there’s no reason to. (Managers know it, too. Why else would they grit their teeth and bring in “fun” consultants who promise to boost sagging employee morale?)

This culturally sanctioned slacking that results from job insecurity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over the past few years, technology has made it possible for work once done in U.S. offices to be performed just as easily anywhere in the world. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition recently likened the current threat to white-collar jobs to steelworkers’ complaints of a generation past. “Fewer and fewer jobs are safe,” said Ethan Kapstein, a guest expert in international economic relations. “It means that all of us, people like myself as well, have to continually upscale, we have to continually invest in our skills to maintain our productivity levels.”

“What [white-collar workers] need is a new model of unionism that focuses on assuring their employability, mobility, and earning power rather than protecting specific jobs or compensation packages,” Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, writes in the January 2007 issue of the Democratic Strategist. He echoes Kapstein, arguing that if U.S. white-collar workers want to keep their jobs, they’ll have to focus on company productivity as much as on their own needs: “Modern labor associations . . . could operate, in short, like a back-to-the-future update on the old craft unions, which were defenders of quality workmanship as well as workers’ interests.”

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