You're Not a Cog...Don't Act Like One

Amazon, Verizon and Target recently cut thousands of corporate jobs with a common refrain. They claimed to want fewer corporate layers between their customers and they would reduce the layers by investing in AI.

To paraphrase - better customer service by getting rid of the humans involved.

Let’s pick on Amazon 'cause picking on Target will get me canceled in MN.

It’s more likely Amazon hired too many people during the COVID cash influx. And the recent downturn caused the world’s online thrift store, to reduce head count and hide it behind a narrative related to artificial intelligence (AI). Wall Street loves itself some AI puffery.

Remember, its not a lie if THEY believe it. Just once, I’d like someone to hire Otter and Bluto from “Animal House” to announce lay-offs with the truth:

“You screwed (😊) up, you trusted us!”

Amazon even calls these layoffs “unregretted attrition (UA).” Think about that phrase – are you comfortable with it?

If so, you might be a sociopath or someone who lives outside the real world. And yet, this is how many corporations view their employees.

UA even has its own KPI… UAR (unregretted attrition rate). UAR sounds a bit like measuring ECU or electric chair utilization as a bonus opportunity for a prison warden.

To bear no responsibility when you are laying people off is akin to treating people as an indentured servant...it puts the "d" in dehumanizing. It’s grounded in believing that employee relationships are transactional…we pay, you work.

How was your day, dear? “Okay, we got rid of a lot of the crap we overbought from China...oh yeah, and 14,000 extra people…but no regrets. Let's go out to eat!”

But some old guy scolding large corporations doesn’t work…never will.

Unsurprisingly, the current generation of workers has responded by treating their relationship with their employer as transaction based. I work – wherever I want to work, whenever I want to work and...Corporate pays me.

If they think you’re a cog, be a cog.

Big picture – if corporations view employees as transactional and employees reciprocate, work will generally seem like drudgery. And that is NOT how it is meant to be.

Let me crawl up on my soap box and call this out as a spiritual issue - not on the side of Big Business, because corporations have no soul. Instead, it is a problem for us as workers.

Listen, I know this might not be popular but if you believe there is a God who created this world, then you can find a purpose to your work. I fear we've lost that understanding. We bear the image of a productive Creator and in that regard, we are created to work and do "good" work.

Let me quote Dorothy Day,: "Work is not what we do to live, but it is what we live to do." God is productive, so we are called to be productive and work is a major part of finding spiritual, mental and physical satisfaction...but I digress.

Having worked in small, medium and big businesses in a variety of roles, I’ve come to a place in which I believe what GK Chesterton wrote in 1922. “Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike…”

In the case of either a big business or a socialist society, the worker becomes a propertyless, dependent individual who lacks autonomy, creativity, and a connection to the full fruits of their labor. No one rejoices in your success and no one regrets your failure.

Don’t settle for being a cog – find a small(er) business in which you can flourish…even if you start your own. It might become the only path forward.