Owning Irrelevance
A funny thing happened on the way to the barricades.
Witnessing last week’s labor news event helped me recall an awkward moment during a corporate department meeting, circa 1981. Our department chief was instructed to read to our department at a weekly meeting a memo from HR breaking down how much each employee cost the company — in payroll taxes, insurance and other corporate benefits, space occupied per square foot, various risk allowances, travel allowances… you get the picture.
Turned out the annual cost of employment per employee was north of 14K. My comment was swift and for me, an aging worker bee, surprisingly ‘existential.’
Then, why, I blurted, if we cost the corporation so much per employee are we in business? What is our business? Why do we come to work?
I recall several throat clearings and a “let’s move on, shall we?” I wasn’t looking for a pay raise. I was looking for the company’s estimation of our work value and job security. I was blatantly attempting to uncover that they are linked.
The more salubrious news event of which I speak, an equally throat clearing ‘work value’ moment occurred on a picket line in front of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Courtesy of Vaughn Hillyard, on-the-street correspondent for MSNBC, we heard from a smiling, cheery, young nurse explain why she was picketing Mount Sinai,
“I am here ’cause I love nursing.”
Hillyard did not have a follow-up question.
The nurse obliged. Seems that the major grievance was Mt. Sinai and Montefiore, two large NYC hospitals had refused the nurses’ demand to hire 1200 ‘additional’ nurses. When the hospital’s governing boards offered the nurses a 19% pay increase, the nurses stayed on the picket line. Did the Boards not get it? It’s not about money; it’s about work value. With a dearth of nurses, the current nurses could not do their jobs.
I asked myself, where are the doctors? Despite their absence, the nurses prevailed. Within 72 hours, the governing boards agreed to hire the 1200 nurses and grant the 19% pay increase.
The cheery nurse conveyed brilliantly her cause, “work value.” She knows why she goes to work — to claim relevance.
Last week’s labor event was not just another workers’ strike but a ‘working class’ strike.
On Capitol Hill last week, a different moment in “owning irrelevance” occurred. This time equally existential but not salubrious.
Behind closed doors, reports the Washington Post (1) Republican House leadership has been plotting when to introduce cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits as a demand for keeping the government funded. This, as horrible as it sounds, was not a new Republican stratagem for securing power and neither was it occurring only in the US. Similar discussions regarding a ‘fix’ to the health care crisis in the UK are going on with the new Conservative Party Prime Minister. (2)
The usual pushback to these attempts is the bromide ‘but they are stealing our money… money that we put in over the course of our labor years.’
Unfortunately, it’s a tad worse than that. We, as a governing class, are being scuttled, for the folks we elected to represent us are rejecting our existence. ‘They’ — to force a metaphor — are claiming ‘we’ — to force another metaphor — don’t matter.
‘We’ own irrelevance.
(break)
A friend commented to me on the morning after the 2016 elections, when Hillary Clinton conceded her loss to Donald J. Trump, “well, I didn’t vote for him…”
It’s a tad worse than that.
January 24
Notes
1-https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2023/01/24/gop-social-security-medicare-debt-limit/
See also, p. 391, Fiona Hill, There is Nothing for You Here (2021)
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