Work: A Power Struggle
We have the law to keep us from devolving into savages, but it’s a minimal code of conduct, not an all-inclusive guide to how we ought to treat one another.
The law is most needed where it should be least relevant: in the setting of limits upon the empowered in how they treat the disempowered. Those with the most power ought to be most acquainted with responsibility, and therefore its handmaidens: ethics, morality, and fair play.
But we know from our experiences, and have resigned ourselves to accept, that roughly the opposite is true. Those with the most power are the least ethical. Those with the most power are the least moral, and in fact came by their power serially eschewing morality. Those most fair have often played least fairly.
Employment is where we most often glimpse this grim reality. We spend a simple majority of our adult lives at work. Therefore, the values we live at work become our values. We internalize them. They become predominant in how we consider and describe our very lives. And yet, work is where the imbalance of power can most victimize some while inappropriately aggrandizing others.
One particularly pernicious problem arises from excessive power in an employer. He pays, she works, he commands, she complies. This can trigger a peculiar view of the employee, who is wrongly seen as property. The employer loses track of limits, making unreasonable demands. Work overtime without notice or fair pay. Accommodate unreasonable delays in compensation. Tolerate instability and uncertainty in the workplace without speaking your mind. These requests expect robotic, linear conduct from inherently curvilinear beings. They reflect a sickness in the heart of the employer that poisons the relationship.
The antidote is tough to swallow, but imperative. The employee must resist. Be willing to be a scab in an effort to become a martyr. Fight the corner. Push back. Expect fairness. Demand ethical conduct. It may result in termination, and it may even make the next job harder to secure. But given how much of life and liberty are expressed through work, it cannot be rightly swerved.
Raise a fist and expect basic fairness from the empowered. This is the only tactic capable of constraining power, which by nature grows unless checked. That growth is nurtured by grazing in the unguarded fields of the disempowered. Guard those fields. Balance the power.
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