Over the Edge + April 13, 2011 opinion 3 No Free Lunch A short story PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR Bill felt the ray from the monitor as he walked on Second Avenue from Brunswick Street to Quebec Street. He had failed to put fifty cents in a small ticket dispenser mounted on the wall of the Sazarac Ranch cabaret. Two weeks later he received a ticket in the mail from Baronial Sidewalk Corporation. Sidewalks had been privatized at the start of the current fiscal year. Bill wrote his MLA to protest. His MLA brought up his problem during Question Period in the legislative assembly. Finance Minister I.M. Wright, MLA for Punchaw Lake, responded, “Investors put a lot of money into Prince George to buy these sidewalks and maintain them. They didn’t do this so some lazy ne’er-do-well could saunter down the street for free without paying the required fifty-cents-per-block fee for using these sidewalks. “If your constituent doesn’t like privatized sidewalks, he should work harder, earn more money and buy the sidewalks himself instead of whining about them.” Bill wrote an op-ed piece on his situation and filed it to the Dome Creek Times. In a few weeks he received a bill for thirty-four dollars from Ducal Word Corporation for having used the word “the” sixty-eight times in his opinion piece for the paper. The company had registered the direct article as its trademark and copyrighted it as well. It had monitoring programs that kept track of the use of the word on all computers. “Lazy, shiftless people — such as welfare recipients, aimless students and over- privileged baby-boomers — object to the privatization of the word ‘the’,” said Literature Minister Clara Straightnarrow, MLA for Mount Fitzwilliam. They seem to want to be able to use the words of our language for free. “These people have to be reminded there’s no such thing as a free lunch in this world. “You have to earn the money required to pay for the privilege of using the language.” POWER An opinion piece PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR Power is a phenomenon that is good or bad depending on context. Too often it is misused, but it can be appropriate in some circumstances. Sometimes a wise, older provincial court judge who is not a careerist will, in the light of his experience, see all the facts in a case and render a judgment that is completely fair to all parties concerned. In some cases a kindly librarian or museum administrator will provide a safe haven for a quiet but diligent person and also seek to promote and develop the careers of all their employees. With the advent of widespread and endlessly continuing mass layoffs in the late 1980s, however, reasonable employers became a rare breed. A joke began circulating that went something like this: “‘What is a fair and caring manager?’ Answer: ‘An unemployed manager.” In the 1990s the head of a corporate organization, explaining his philosophy of power, told his subordinate managers, “You aren’t being a good manager unless your employees have fear in their eyes when you speak to them.” It would seem that only a minority of confrontations between a supervisor and an employee is based on actual misdeeds by the employee, such as misusing office supplies or making unauthorized public statements on behalf of an organization that go against its mission statement or core beliefs. Most of the time conflicts arise because the supervisor is an insecure person or an authoritarian personality who wants to prove he is in charge. Assertive employees with fresh or different ideas are to be discouraged because their questions are a challenge to his authority, in his view. Other supervisors make a practice of shouting at an employee, often using a range of ‘vocabulary’, in front of other employees. Why do so many bullies and dictators get important supervisory positions? One reason is the North American uncritical praise of “self-confidence” as an unalloyed virtue. The question is: “Self-confidence to do what?” People with self-confidence can use that self-confidence to do good or evil, depending on their motives. Some are good, considerate leaders, others are just bullies. In 1929 the magazine American Mercury praised Benito Mussolini, then dictator of Italy, as “a man of boundless self-confidence.” The American historian Gordon Craig wrote that Hitler won over crowds because of his unshakeable self-confidence. Sometimes there are self-confident people who have good ideas to bring to a company, academic institution or government agency, and they will seek and respect the opinions of others before making major decisions affecting their work lives. Too often, however, hiring authorities mistake a bully for someone with self-confidence, and the consequence is considerable damage to employee morale and to relations with members of the public who contact the bully with a legitimate concern. The uncritical faith in self-confidence in our society is often seriously misplaced. Needlessly authoritarian approaches to supervision of employees have major impacts on their health. A Swedish study conducted between 1992 to 2005 showed that men who suppress their anger after such unfair treatment are two to five times more likely to suffer a heart attack or die from heart disease than other workers, according to a MedContent Nothing is Free. Media article published on Nov. 30, 2009. Other studies conducted in Japan, England and the United States indicate that twenty to twenty-five per cent of heart attacks occur Monday mornings on the way to work. Why should some people have so much power over others that they can cause great medical harm, even death? The writer Kirkpatrick Sale, while he was erroneous in his analysis of some issues, correctly observed it is an unacceptable anomaly in a democracy that liberal values such as free speech have to be checked at the door of most workplaces in North America. Sometimes layoffs are required because of technological change or a sharp economic downturn. However, even in these cases, every attempt should be made to retrain people before laying them off. Management should also consider work-sharing or a general reduction of hours in order to keep as many people on staff as possible until economic conditions improve. The Kellogg breakfast-cereal corporation chose the latter alternative during the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the past quarter century, the policy of constantly laying off thousands of employees for ulterior reasons -- either to receive a favourable response from investors in the stock markets, to discipline the work force or treasonously outsource their jobs to overseas dictatorships -- has brought many bullies and dictatorial personalities into the ranks of senior management. The policy is a gross, immoral, wicked misuse of power. Future generations will look back on the implementation of such a policy as only slightly less serious a violation of human rights than Stalin’s purges. Some may consider this comparison to be unfair, and | see their point. However, Andy Kroll’s article in the January-February issue of Utne Reader magazine, “Doing the Limbo”, and the book, The Disposable i, by Louis Uchitelle, give some substance to this comparison. The article and the book both argue that the public health impacts of mass layoffs include a much greater rate of suicide and heart attacks than before the announcement of the downsizing action. “The damage from this loss of self-esteem and identity, multiplied millions of times, undermines public health,” Uchitelle observes. In his article, Kroll cited one study in Pennsylvania of male workers with high seniority that experienced a 50 to 100 per cent spike in mortality rate in the first year after job loss. Maybe a better comparison would be with the enclosure of common fields in England and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which forced small tenant farmers and herdsmen into poverty and eventually emigration to North American colonies. However, in the early twenty-first century there are no overseas continents that those who have been permanently laid off can easily move to. The current policy of calculated downsizing and mass-scale layoffs is eroding parliamentary democracy and is a major violation of human rights. It is destructive of the health of the workers affected and the wider public. The people responsible should not be praised as far- sighted corporate leaders but should be on trial in the court of public opinion. The late Irving Howe, the social democratic critic and historian who wrote for Dissent magazine, said workers should “demand their rights as free, autonomous men and women,” and some should form cooperatives.