Facing the Issues II

Last Monday, I posted a quasi stream of consciousness outline of issues facing our society–Western society in general and U.S. society specifically–and “threatened” a continuance of the post as a series of posts on individual issues. I listed, in no particular order, a non-exhaustive list of issues that I felt were ourgrowths of moral failiure on the part of our society. That list included:

The lack of a reasonable immigration/border control policy
Attacks on essential liberties/lies from the Left… and the Right
The growth of anarcho-tyranny (and the death-by-inches of justice)
Islamic Jihad/GWOT
Education, so-called
Abortion, or “murder by euphemism”
Science and pseudo-science (a materialistic approach to/denial of truth)
Energy, productivity and responsible management of resources
Work ethic… or lack thereof.

Today, I’m briefly addressing the last item in the list above. Briefly, because every person who reads this can supply multiple examples of poor work ethic from life experience, and because the issue is so intertwined with so many other issues that the fabric will have to be woven a thread at a time as some of the other issues listed above (and not listed) are mentioned later. But meanwhile, a few illustrative examples:

Woman Fired For Writing About Avoiding Work

“This typing thing seems to be doing the trick,” she wrote. “It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important…. I am only here for the money and, lately, for the printer access. I haven’t really accomplished anything in a long while … and I am still getting paid more than I ever have at a job before, with less to do than I have ever had before. It’s actually quite nice when I think of it that way. I can shop online, play games and read message boards and still get paid for it.”

That’s right. The woman had been told by a supervisor to stop “working” on her personal journal at work and do her job, so she started keeping her journal–which eventually reached over 300 single-spaced pages–on her work computer. Instead of doing her job. When fired, she filed for unemployment compensation, but in a rare case of judicial commonsense, her claim, taken to court, was denied, because

the journal demonstrated a refusal to work, as well as Bauer’s “amusement at getting away with it.”

At first glance, this may seem to some to be an extreme example of poor work ethics, but is it really all that much out of line with everyday slacking off? Sure, it might take two or three “normal” slackers to add up to this kind of behavior, but we can all come up with two or three slackers at any one job in our present or past, can’t we?

Teachers who are just marking time, going through the motions until that (relatively early) retirement. Repairmen who submit bills for NOT making repairs (I have more of those stories than I could possibly have room or time to relate). Supervisors who use their position to wander around (and wander off), slacking and goofing off and using company time and resources for personal use, employee (and frankly, employer–sometimes resulting in stupid damage to the company and “laying off” employees to falsely inflate the bottom line) pilfering. Government employees (though more often those in supervisory roles) wasting resources and placing roadblocks in the way of effective use of taxpayer funds.

Consider another bizarre case in which, strangely, inexplicably, the court system resulted in a commonsense result. Granted, Sandia National Lab is not a direct agency of the feddle gummint (it’s just that it’s totally funded and run under feddle meddle mandate). But it is regulated and run according to federal government rules of employment and management–most particularly security rules. And there’s the rub:

Reverse hacker wins $4.3M in suit against Sandia Labs

Shawn Carpenter, a network security analyst at Sandia National Laboratories who was fired in January 2005 for his independent probe of a network security breach at the agency, has been awarded $4.3 million by a New Mexico jury for wrongful termination.

Well, good on Shawn for doing his job, reporting his results to the appropriate law enforcement agencies involved (who were already attempting to address the same hacking probes by some Chinese hackers) and then sticking it to his employers for firing him for doing his job. Yeh, fired most likely for embarrassing his employers.

And that’s the other side of work ethic elliptically alluded to above. While workers are responsible–whether they’re held accountable or not–for doing the job they are hired to do, giving full and conscientious work for their pay (slacking off is theft, folks), so too employers are responsible for upholding their end, and that’s where oftentimes slackers in the workforce get ammunition to excuse (in their eyes) pilfering and slacking off. Employers who show no degree of good faith in the employer-employee relationship are demonstrating as poor a work ethic as employees who slack off.

From my own work history, I can probably come up with as many bad employers/supervisors as any reader. In my youth, I can recall a job digging ditches (literally by hand, on a fedgov testing ground while working for a plumbing contractor). Fed inspector came by and told me to “Lean on your shovel. You’re working to fast.” Oh. I thought I was supposed to do my job. Sorry. I’ll slack off, since it’s now an official part of the job… *sigh* Stealing from taxpayers. Or much later, a supervisor who spent most of two days a week in his office (one of those for a “staff meeting” nit-picking those who worked for a living) bringing me up for review actually “charging” me with working too hard… (because his supervisors, it turned out, had noticed I was doing much of his work).

You’ve known employers and supervisors like that. Dilbert, for example has made infamous use of such critters.

In an atmosphere where, more and more, it seems that workers and employers are losing a sense of faithful work and justly and loyally rewarding faithful, loyal work, the productivity of the American workforce is devolving back to relying on (metaphorical, for now) the whip and the chain. Labor unions are not a viable answer. Over the decades, labor unions have proven themselves as susceptible to Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy as our various government agencies have. All labor unions have ultimately become–overall–is a haven for feather-bedding and corruption.

Those ethical employers who remain and whomever embraces as an employee the responsibility to be a responsible employee: these are the only real hope for holding against the fall of night. Ethical employers who embrace their reponsibility to their faithful employees will also recongnize their reponsibility to their UNfaithful employees (to attempt to ameliorate their behavior and failing that to can their thieving carcasses, damn the consequences), WILL reap rewards. In fact, those I know do prosper, just perhaps not (financially) as quickly and spectacularly as unethical employers who treat employees as wage slaves.

And sometimes, sometimes, as demonstrated by the case of Shawn Carpenter cited above, conscientious employees who are abused by unscrupulous employers do prosper. One could only hope it were more often.

The deadly sins, moral failures, illustrated by poor work ethics? Greed and sloth, friends. Greed and sloth.

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Trackposted to Right Pundits, Stop the ACLU, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson’s Website, Mark My Words, DragonLady’s World, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Faultline USA, Allie Is Wired, stikNstein… has no mercy, Pirate’s Cove, Overtaken by Events, The Pink Flamingo, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.