My Troubled Relationship With The Boss

Lately I've read newspaper columns and have seen televised guest commentators on cable news stations expressing both consternation and incredulousness over a phenomenon called "quiet quitting". Quiet quitting is an idiomatic term bent to describe what happens when employees lose their faith in working for other people to the point that their sense of disenfranchisement, disenchantment and powerlessness leads them to check out so to speak and simply stop with the idiocies surrounding actual mandates to be productive, committed to the firm or company's bottom line and standards.

What? Commentators--well paid to express opinions likely requested by their bosses, the opinion editors of papers and cable news divisions--are aghast. How dare our employees emotionally check out like this?

Of course the editorialists and pundits are upset. They're paid to be upset. That's what they do. Pundits are often defamed as "hacks", meaning of course, they're like little opinion carts that have been saddled, haltered, bit in mouth, all designed to pull an editor or owner's preferences around the lot for the entertainment of strangers, rubberneckers, and gawkers over at the back-alley carnival. "Look! The man who made the hack do that thing must be really powerful! See what the hack did? The hack went in circles like it really really means something! Isn't that just amazing?" Meanwhile, in some cushy office somewhere, the owner of the paper or the network sits in air-conditioned comfort, dreaming of buying a $500,000,000 yacht or dropping $5 billion to spend five minutes in outer space. "See how powerful I am? I can make my hacks speak my opinions for me!"

Years ago, a coworker of mine who reviewed music for an alternative rag in his spare time, focusing mainly on the blues as if the blues is the most revolutionary music ever devised, used to look up from his desk and simply say, "Lackey." I got it. We were employees. We were doing the bidding of "the boss". We had no real skin in the game other than our take-home pay--which wasn't all that much. While the work actually did have some ethical content to it, and because at least I know I was committed to that ethic in civil service, none of my enthusiasm for serving the public detracted from the simple fact that I was involved, deeply involved, in drudge work. Noses to the grindstone, he and I used to contest to see who could make the most concise quip about life in general. "Ham", he'd say. "Gravy", I'd retort. "Biscuits". "Kibbles And Bits". And while I wore a nice pressed dress shirt and tie, he wore ratty blue jeans and cowboy boots, looking like, well, a bluesman, ragged briefcase of blues and all. Yep. His briefcase looked like a garage sale special. A thing one might find for maybe a dime at some old lady's estate sale. Chipped edges, peeling leather, a taped-up handle. He carried it everywhere. It was like a hollow editorial comment, and yes, as a music reviewer, he was a sort of pundit.

What was he after, anyway? One time, the pundit placed a single bullet on my desk. It sat like the Tower of Babel next to a card catalog and a PC. A threat? Or an editorial comment about authority, vigilantism, the violent impulse--or all of the above? I remember how I took it as a joke. I'd long ago purchased a disarmed M-60 cartridge shipped in from Vietnam at the Army Store, and as a kid, I would pull it out and admire it. A bigger bullet. I had a bigger one than my coworker had. So I took it and placed it on his desk. I guess as a gimpy joke, he told my boss. She lectured me. When I balefully crawled out of her office, he smirked and acted as if he was holding back a laugh. Tough guy routine. The representative bullet: The boss has power. The boss is about dominance. The boss is the one who makes someone else hold the gun in that ever-contentious "monopoly of the legal use of violence" libertarians accuse the government of abusing in attempts to coerce them.

Yup. The libertarians want to be the boss. Who's in charge? The boss is in charge. Who can make it hurt? The boss can make it hurt. Who has all the power at the office? The boss has all the power. And hence, it shouldn't be surprised that, once again, we are presented with a context where people who feel powerless at the hands of the boss decided to simply check out while sucking in a paycheck.

Pundits and their relationship with the boss in a way remind me of the old TV series, "Have Gun, Will Travel". . .

. . . even if the phrase HAVE OPINION, WILL TRAVEL takes all the fun out of pretending to be shooting people in defense of principle and the law. If the boss holds the principle of law and order in his hands, and if the boss is not required to demonstrate any political accountability at all as he manipulates government officials and legislators and even presidents as if all of them are his employees, the boss dominates the entire government. How is this done? The boss has the power of the purse, and the power of the purse is what drives all means to power. It has always been this way. Throughout history, the boss has been a real tyrant. In fact, the American revolution was an attempt to find an antidote to the boss--a way to give the boss's power to individual citizens and groups of them. Now the boss is moving to shut that down. We have been insubordinate. The boss does not reward insubordination.

No, this is not a screed declaiming Bruce Springsteen, the famous rock performer who has been dubbed “The Boss”. Yes, he's dominant on stage. He postures. He demands social justice for the working class and the poor. But as usual, the real boss might be tapping his feet, or privately misinterpreting Springsteen's song lyrics the way Reagan did when he cited Springsteen's "Born In The USA" as the patriotic song it wasn't, but in reality, the boss is watching even Bruce. So Bruce refrains from insubordination. Or to ensure Bruce becomes one of the bosses by virtue of the power his walled wields.

Nor is this about how Ticketmaster, a business that runs ticketing for The Boss and for the bosses in the music industry, and its farcical public choice to “let the market scalp” the living daylights out of fans eager to see the longstanding musical champion of the common man.  That's right. Ticketmaster decided to "let the market decide" ticket prices. If demand to see a concert is high, Ticketmaster would raise ticket prices. If demand was low, Ticketmaster would go easy on the consumers of concerts. But when Ticketmaster tried to use "the market" as an excuse to wage a money war in competition with people who only wanted to see a Taylor Swift concert by exacting $1,500 for a single ticket, people didn't merely "quietly quit", they walked away. If you're a music fan, how do you fire the boss by the name of Ticketmaster?

Wait. Maybe this is about Ticketmaster in a small way. Who dominates via "market forces"? Of course. The boss does. Sometimes this is called supply-side economics. Why bother about what the demand side wants? You're the supply side. Our concerns as supply-siders are all about you, the "job creator", the one who "is the tide that lifts all boats", most of them yachts like that of Jeff Bezos, the libertarian yacht owner who thinks all shall approve of his exorbitant obsession with excessive luxury.

In terms of political science, the boss rules, but the people govern. The latter is called "the political". If the boss has all the power, politics does not occur because the all-powerful is not allowing those with no power to even relate to his decisions. We hear a lot about fairness in the political miasma these days, mainly because today the boss is called an ideology. If one is serving the ideology, one is not serving the people. It doesn't work that way. Ideology is more than merely a political approach or predominant principle; it is a rigid, intractable and narrow set of precepts the departure of which is verboten. Absolute power to the ideology anyone? Not on my watch. . . Actually, this essay is about my job at a law firm.  And my relationship, if it can be called that, with the boss. Regardless of all the libertarian cant about government being nothing but a top-down, one-size-fits-all hierarchy, the real hierarchy, based on status, elitism, professional dominance and worse, is the business world. If anyone wants to see central planning in action, go see the boss. All companies centrally plan. Because otherwise the boss, who needs to calculate numerous things that occur outside the pricing gradient, has to. And since he's "the decider" just like George W. Bush called himself in the early part of the 21st Century, the boss decides what goes where and who does what.

That is not freedom. I repeat. Not. Freedom.

I left public service--actual public service, not "public service subsequent to profits"--in 1987.  While working for the City, I enjoyed being committed to serving the citizenry and to putting my own self-interest secondary to the public interest. But what would anyone have thought? The cost of living was rising, especially the rent. Suddenly, because public service's ethic suggests the individual not be on the take in a profit-obsessive/compulsive kind of way, I'd had to sacrifice. Suddenly, I couldn't. Ethic of self-sacrifice was about to sacrifice me. But no, that's not quite correct: "The market" was sacrificing my sense of self-sacrifice on the Altar of Market Baal. While I had enjoyed some prestige in public service--this was a library--I could not make financial ends meet. Perhaps this is how "the market" defeats governments. Raise the cost of everything, capitalize on financial dissatisfaction, move to bankrupt the government, and then take over. All market forces all the time.

Not exactly paradise. Maybe it is paradise for the boss. The boss gets to concoct social power just because. The boss gets a lot of money. The boss can terminate my employment for almost any reason. The boss gets it all. Should I give it all up to make the boss happy?

Since I needed more money simply to stay alive, I began to yearn for the good deal a friend of mine had. He worked in the mailroom of a law firm. It was a prominent local one downtown. All he really had to do was put little envelopes into pigeonholes, then plow around all the secretarial desks to drop off the little envelopes. Sometimes, he'd get a big responsibility to go to a copy machine and make copies to deliver to some high muckety muck in the firm. Whoa. And he made almost twice as much as I did for less than half the work. A drunkard's dream, right? Easy Street was suddenly the way to a modicum of luxury compared to the measly pittance I'd gained from public service. But a disclaimer: Suggesting public service from a financial point of view is a pittance ignores all the wonderful things imparted to me in serving the public in an unselfish way.

As Bob Dylan once sang, the money wasn't only talking, the money was literally shrieking at me to leave unselfishness by the side of the road and "get with the program of the Ronnie Reagan revolution."

I searched for a suitable law firm position for six months before I found one just before Christmas Day, 1987. The human resources assistant was pretty friendly. "You're almost overqualified for this job. You have a college degree. You won't be in the same status as the other men in the mail room. We'd like to put your typing skills to work. Would you like to work in a job at the Federal Express package tracking desk? You'd work in the mailroom from noon until five, and then at five you would move to the desk and work until 7:30 each night. The money?

It shrieked yes, yes, yes at me like the best whore in town.

From the start of the job, I didn't have any emotional connection to the work I performed. Perform. You know: a clown of God. I had to purchase a new wardrobe: Nice dress clothes, pressed shirts, dress shoes that didn't look like they'd been drowned in a flood. Expenses already. It seemed odd to me that I was a glorified mail clerk in a prestigious law firm but forced to dress like a Philadelphia lawyer "simply for appearances". After all, working in a law firm, I learned, is about image. The image of success. Financial success. Can't have mail room clerks dressing like Medieval serfs trudging around the hallways when wealthy clients are already looking down their noses at everyone but the moneybags.

No, to me, this was only another job.  Nothing more than a job, really, but also nothing less than a job.  A job is not a career. A job means you work for the boss, but that the boss isn't really working with your interests in mind at all other than bringing in the money he or she will use to pay you your scrip. The clothes? I found a men's discount store and began laying out the dinero--all to make the boss happy that I was "with the program" of making the boss look good to millionaires. I had no “professional aspirations” for myself as a denizen of the legal field.  Really. I didn't. I wanted the money. Then I wanted to go home and live a life outside the realm of the boss. You know: a place where the boss couldn't get the boss's grubby hands all over me. Nope. I was anything but all-in with what the boss had in store for me as the boss's employee. As for the clothing, I had a lot to learn. I remember I'd bought a pair of some of the creepiest dress pants humanly possible. Black with white dots all over it. Yes. I looked like a clown. Performing. Doing a little dance for the boss.

I did get to sit inside a lovely mahogany carrel. I did get to cavort on the job with some amazingly pretty secretaries. But I wasn't really part of the direct operations of the law firm. I had a role, a very restricted role. I was a non-professional support staff employee. From noon to five p.m., I'd put little envelopes into pigeonholes and then wheel a cart around the office, picking up and delivering mail and memoranda. Then after five, I'd type like the wind as I accurately placed package tracking numbers into a database and labeled the packages. I was fast. One of the fastest Fed X trackers in the US at the time. I once took a typing test in the human resources office for grins: I was hitting 110 wpm. Amazingly fast. Especially for a male typist. And I was dead-on accurate. For the first time in my life, my job was all about, and only about, the money. 

Interestingly, before becoming a Fed X tracker, I'd worked in information services. I'd learned a great deal about information, knowledge, and wisdom. I'd learned how to research. I'd learned about research resources. I'd helped students at Southern Methodist University learn to research for their term papers, and even had to argue with a few of them who seemed to expect me to write their papers for them. Spoiled brats. Like "The Children of the Corn," those kids were "the Children of the Boss". You know: delegate what you're too lazy to do yourself.

If one has the proper information, one can quantify, qualify, and categorize knowledge, and then, if you use your knowledge well and accurately, over time you learn some wisdom. This is a line of reasoning that is quite accurate. Wisdom doesn't come by revelation or prior to information. This is something I suspect many memberships of the boss have yet to learn. As in, never will learn, ever.

I suppose this is where I need to insert one of those punditry fabrications in order to shortcut my way into offering some information contradictory to what seems to be a bias in spin against the boss: Don't get me wrong. . .

Feel better? No one has ever been born wise.

Money. Big money. Some people believe their money--capital and property--means they actually mean something: superiority, social respect, even culture. But aren't those concepts that aren't necessarily tied to having money? The attachment to money as a mode of who you are is actually the nature of capitalism. More importantly, this attitude has been described--both for better or worse--as bourgeois. The bourgeoisie imposed itself on traditional aristocracies in Europe beginning gin the late 18th Century. People put all their security in money. But their boorishness shocked those who actually did have culture. I already knew all this in 1987, but there I was living in a place I called "the bomb shelter", a tattered one bedroom only footsteps from the city's major thoroughfare.

My rent had just risen to $350/mo.  While that seems a pittance today, for me at the time, me and my resources, it meant financial difficulties. Prior to my tenure (if it can be called such), I had been earning around $800/mo. Struggles. Sometimes unwise spending. Suddenly, I was going to be paid around $1,100 a month. A fortune.   

Believe me: I was really in for that as a law firm's “non-professional support staffer”.  As a library employee, I had access to books, and thus I was able to teach myself a few things at the hands of figures like Jean Jacques Rousseau, the famed French philosopher who helped to develop the concept of the social contract.  Also, a guy chased out of France for even suggesting governance rather than rulership by divine right.  Rousseau inveighed against luxury as a hindrance to the spirit of democratic governance.

Apparently nobody listened.

At the law firm, I had no illusions of glory anyway.  I had a great social life. I wasn't going to be a dependent on a business for even my spare time. I was an inhabitant of the city's counterculture--the punk and New Wave music community, the local arts community, and most important to me, the local poetry community. But with a little extra money, I could live a little more loudly than I had before.

This is when the crisis in employment hit me, and hit me hard.  The boss had demands I perform for the boss. The law firm had clients in nearly all walks of life, and most of those clients were large businesses, especially corporations.  When a package bound for Washington DC hit my desk with a thud, I noted that it was a package due to be received by the firm’s DC office as part of its defense of Union Carbide the people of Bhopal, India sued the daylights out of it.

Readers may remember that a pesticide plant in Bhopal released highly toxic methyl isocyanate in December 1984, exposing an estimated 500,000 human beings to toxic waste, a true “airborne toxic event” a la Don DeLillo’s novel, “White Noise”.  Two thousand two hundred and fifty-nine people died instantly in Bhopal due to the accident.  Three-thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed, the disaster injuring 574.366 victims.  

Horrible.  Sadly, many of the criminal and civil cases against Union Carbide and others were eventually dismissed.  

And there I was, with a crucial package of pro-Union Carbide litigation in my hands.  

That seems easy, right?  If I didn’t like supporting a legal defense of a company trying to wriggle out of public responsibility, I could just quit.  This, of course, would engender all kinds of personal consequences in my private life.  I’d lose my wages, and my financial support, and nope, I wouldn’t get unemployment insurance for acting on principle.  Worse, compromising my wages, I'd be compromising my ability to pay my rent, to buy food, and keep the lights on. These aren't always easy to replace when an economy is as tight as it was in 1988. In fact, when the oil crisis of 1987 hit that year, I recall, the big socialites of Highland Park, a tiny little berg in the middle of the city, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Western hemisphere, were in a total freak-out. Suddenly, or so they said, they had to cut a few corners. Dating one young woman who sported a baby blue Cadillac, I learned from her that she and her father, important oil refining parts suppliers, were in hard times. "Why didn't you diversify when you had the chance?"

"The money was too good."

Right. Time to dial up the definition of bourgeoisie.

Should I have hung in there at a law firm backing a horrific polluter that was actively resisting its public responsibility to the people of Bhopal, India?  That really confused me. How could a company resist helping that community out after an accident for which it was responsible? At the time, that seemed incomprehensible. I suppose that, at 34, I was still under the illusion that corporations were my big friend. I was wrong. Corporations pretend to be your big friends--as long as you're the source of some money or your labor. Other than that, you don't exist to them.

Package in hand, to be honest, I was troubled.  At the time, I didn’t quite understand how to separate my private “biases” from professional behavior and choices.  Sometimes, that takes a truly steely will.  In addition, I was too legally naive to really grasp the necessity of even giving a company I saw as a negligent perpetrator of death and injury a legal defense.  I wanted to doff the entire thing.  Chuck the package. Tell Union Carbide to get lost and just lump it. The way Union Carbide was telling the people of Bhopal, India, to do.

I actually thought about doing something to express my principle via a “mistakes were made” kind of way.  After all, only a year or so earlier, Oliver North of Iran/Contra fame stood up with big Boy Scout eyes and claimed exactly that.  Ignorant Americans hell-bent on sentimentality saw a stolid soldier standing there with his hands up to swear to tell the truth naturally assumed he would. Even when he didn't tell the truth, even when he shifted the blame, they still believed Oliver North. Never underestimate the silly stereotypes that drive sentimentality into saccharine obliviousness.

Why couldn’t I just send the package to, say, Alaska, and then beg incompetence?  

Had I done that, I’d have definitely lost my job.  But there was more lurking in my troubled psychology that evening.  As a mere package tracking clerk, I had no power.  Nope.  The vaunted “market” definitely did not have my values as part of its “consideration package”. I was a sort of “hired gun”.  It was go along to get along; or don’t go along, then get along–as in get along down the sidewalk, kid. 

How many people who are employed also feel powerless to change the serious wrongdoing they sometimes see with the eyes of a wide-eyed slave? What does that powerlessness do to people when they try to translate what they've been conditioned to see in the world into political agency? If your power is taken away from you, your rights go down the drain too.

I really could “access” some veto power in my lowly position.  Sometimes, quandaries of powerlessness are seemingly solved by a power grab.  Would I have been righteous in sending that package to Antarctica?  Indeed, that would be cold.  

I remember telling friends later that I almost exercised what I called "trickle up economics". You know: sending shit up the plumbing line to land on the desk of the boss. Even a lowly employee does have the power to refuse, to slow down, to resist. Even if collective bargaining rights have been outlawed in many places. Can't give the boss too much trouble, can we.

An interesting story. Once at the public library, I had a chat with the janitor. "You've got one thing to learn about working in a bureaucracy," he told me. "You have more power than you think you have." Puzzled, I asked him to explain his ideas to me. "Look at me. The work I do. If I decided not to clean the toilets, this place would be in chaos. This is my power."

Quiet quitting.

Ultimately, I opted to go ahead and send the Fed X to the proper location.  I placed my own values behind the values of something much larger and vastly more powerful than I.  And to be honest, it felt lousy to be a participant.  I decided not to make trouble for myself. Had I been insubordinate, this would mean that I had refused to subordinate myself to the boss. Servility and the service industry: all about serving the boss.

I bring all this up not as a troublemaker, but to illustrate what employees sometimes face in trying to live lives where they can safely exercise their values.  In the US, we’re told, the citizen-individual has very real political agency in the public sphere.  But in the private sector, there seems to be the long-familiar Kings X clause: You’re paid to forsake your values.  But at least you get enough money to get by.  You leave your freedom to dissent at the door. You can't call the boss names while at work. Like any form of speech in a totalitarian state, well yes, you can sully the boss in private--as long as no one with access to the boss hears you and decides to turn you in. Is a corporation's hierarchical structure not similar to the weird pyramidal structure of a totalitarian state? I'd definitely say so. Sometimes I view the commercial world as an archipelago of miniature totalitarian states.

What’s especially weird is that only a few years before the Bhopal disaster, to help my mother clear the house’s backyard of nasty fleas gathered because of the presence of two Irish Setters, I’d mixed up a big batch of Sevin, a.k.a. the same chemical that killed thousands in Bhopal.  I dropped a jug of it, the Sevin spilled all over my feet, and I had to hurriedly scrub my legs lest I “self-poison”.  

Lesson?  Play with poison.  You’ll get paid.  Plus, you can wash your hands of “the difficulties”.  You can shift the blame and pass the buck by keeping all the profits no matter what the hell you've done for the boss. Eichmann comes to mind: I was only doing my job.

This sort of servility is not necessarily the only lesson I learned at the hands of Union Carbide. Being an instrument of the legal defense of a large corporation often calls for objectivity, clarity, and if not the exercise of principle as an employee, a commitment to the political agency of even corporations.  Which is OK, I suppose. Even Union Carbide deserves a legal defense. This is the exact spot where the private law firms intersect with the public good. Lawyers have to walk a borderline between public and private--all with an eye on the public good. At least ideally. And many lawyers are committed to that principle. Others aren't. Others are, well, obsessed with self-interest, the very bane of democratic governance.

And me? The wide-eyed slave. My ambivalence was not part of any attorney-client time sheet. I didn't get hazard pay for putting my values on the back burner. I felt terrible. I had wanted to do the right thing. I had wanted to demonstrate some power, some political agency on the job. But I had to keep it all to myself.

That night, after sending the package to the correct destination, I went home and got drunk.  No integrity for me.