Each Wednesday, I review a French-related book. The subject varies, from culture to film to memoir to biography to whatever the heck I feel like reading that week and whatever strikes my fancy at the library or bookshop.
Well before French writer Corinne Maier threw a rock at the hornet’s nest that is corporate France, I learned very quickly the futility of work in corporate America.
After returning from a months-long backpacking tour of several continents, I threw myself into work at a Danish/German company that had recently entered the US market. I’m not sure why — perhaps it was the lengthy vacation of sorts, or maybe the desperate need to earn money after having stepped off the plane D/FW with no more than $50 in my banking account — but throw myself into it, I did. Within a week after I’d first been hired, I was literally pulling in all-nighters at the office and flying off to exotic destinations where I would represent the company at trade shows and workshops. You know, really exciting places like Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada, and Minot, North Dakota.
Exhausted from the travel and relentless pace of work (all for the privilege of $29,500/yr), I sought out and immediately landed a job with the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters chapter as a grant writer. It meant a $10k raise and a far more humane working schedule, not to mention a de facto promotion.
When I turned in my notice to my boss, however, he was shocked. I mean, shocked. The man almost cried, but I steeled my resolve and told him that I just wasn’t cut out for the job. He begged. I said no.
He offered me a small raise.
I said no.
I told him I’d already accepted the position, and that it was probably best for everyone, that he would undoubtedly find someone who would be much better suited for the position than I ever was.
He literally spent a minimum of one hour each day for a week trying to persuade me to stay, no mean feat considering that he was president of the US office and director of operations — the man was twice as busy as I ever was and traveled ten times more than I. Still, I was flattered and finally relented after a week of hard-selling. We agreed on a $5k raise — to be implemented over a period of six months, starting with an immediate $3k raise — and a promotion to sales and project management administration. I would learn a lot more about the company, make more money, and also be able to hire my replacement. Woo hoo!
No more than three months later, I and nearly everyone else in the US offices (save for my boss and two other execs) were laid off. The suits in Germany and Denmark decided to pull out of the American market after a particularly brutal fourth quarter. They offered no severance pay, and gave us only a two-day warning. My last day fell on my birthday.
And, oh, my wedding — which B. and I were financing entirely out of our own pockets — was less than three months away.
Reading Corinne Maier’s so-called manifesto against corporate exploitation of labor is much like reading my journals at the time of the layoff. Maier, of course, is the author of Bonjour, Laziness (original French title: Bonjour, paresse), which some critics have described as “the slacker’s new bible” and a “guide to subversive cubicle loathing. She became the darling of the cube-dwelling counterculture as well as the skeptical media when the book was originally released in 2004, and even more so when it hit these shores a year later. The idea that one should practice “active disengagement” at work as a response to the increasingly abstract and meaningless devolution of the corporate office struck a chord just at the time that layoffs were becoming the norm, wages were stagnating, benefits were being slashed, and unions were losing precious ground. It also unleashed a slew of essays and op-eds in various newspapers questioning its applicability in the United States (which, after all, doesn’t have the socialist heritage that France is seeing crumble before its very Gallic eyes), and whether or not the author is, well, just a big, whiny loon.
The funny thing is that, now having read the book, I question whether these critics read it themselves, or whether they just saw the title and wrote their reviews based on it alone. (At 137 pages, they could’ve read it in less than two hours. I did.) Indeed, the hardback English version’s subtitle is, Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder, but for whatever reason the subsequent paperback edition sported a different one: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Pay. Okay, so Maier does include “Ten Counterproposals” to the culture of work that pervades modern society. Consider the following gem from her list:
What you do is ultimately pointless. You could be replaced any day of the wek with the first moron who walks in the door. So work as little as possible, and spend a little time (not too much, though) “selling yourself” and “networking” so that you will have backup and will be untouchable (and untouched) the next time the company is restructured.
Now, I suppose if I were a middle-manager or corporate executive, I would read this and immediately have a heart attack if I thought that my subordinates were engaged in that kind of corporate sabotage. But as someone who’s done her share of toiling in the bowels of public- and private-sector work, I have to admit, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this behavior at all levels of the org chart, and trust me: more often than not, it actually works.
In other words, Maier isn’t proposing something revolutionary here. She’s not advocating a Marxist overthrow of corporate overlords or a revolution in the halls of IBM. (Although at one point, she does imagine what would happen if the strategies of the French Revolution were to be revived and CEO’s were subject to the guillotine. If only.) Rather, she’s describing what we already know happens in just about every company in America with a workforce of over two people, at every level of responsibility. It just so happens that, unlike Dilbert’s Scott Adams, Maier’s creed isn’t softened by the use of cartoon characters but instead is written as a serious polemic about the degrading and demoralizing nature of the modern workplace.
And therein lies the difference between what Maier’s critics sees and what the book is actually about. Her infamous and oft-quoted Ten Counterproposals take up a mere four small pages at the very end of the book. Instead, she reserves most of her ire and black humor at how corporations (and she includes the public sector in her analysis) employ a two-faced strategy when it comes to human resources: on the one hand, extol their “value” as the company’s most priceless “assets,” and on the other consider those same assets as expendable and childish.
Quoting everyone from Shakespeare to the novelist Rene Victor-Pilhes to the philosophers Rene Girard and Hannah Arendt to Joseph Goebbels and Fidel Castro, Maier fiercely and unabashedly skewers the means by which corporate management drones attempt to justify their existence through the generous use of obscure, invented jargon, reams of useless paperwork, endless reorganizations and restructurings, and possibly the most widely-abused means by which people pretend to work: meetings. She further writes of how companies try to foster a so-called “corporate culture” (which Maier considers an oxymoron) in which employees (mid-level managers and lowly clerks alike) are encouraged to take advantage of such “benefits” as coaches and retreats (and in many American offices, those loathsome Successories posters that make me want to cut off my own head whenever I see one), which ostensibly are there to guide you as you climb up the corporate ladder but which in reality a means by which the company inculcates you with its work-focused propaganda.
No one is spared Maier’s harsh pen. Not the CEO who is rewarded handsomely for laying off thousands of workers. Not the middle manager whom Maier describes as a culture-free, thought-free automaton who doesn’t really manage so much as manipulates the people who report to him. Not the engineers who want everyone to work as efficiently as machines. Not the salespeople whose very job is to subvert the work of the engineer. Not the consultants, whose mission is to make sure everyone in the building falls into line with the company mission. And certainly not your co-workers, who are further subdivided into the categories of the “Useless,” the “Submissive,” and the “Goof-offs.”
It’s clear to anyone with half an intellect that Maier does not intend for her book to stand alone as a sort of David-like response to the Goliath nature of The Corporation. Rather, she presents this book as an opening salvo to a conversation she feels the modern workplace seriously needs to have about the very value of work itself as it’s currently being practiced. Written as a very, very biting satire with plenty of blood shed on both sides, the book does more than merely propose that people turn off at the office and “work just hard enough not to get fired.” (Quick! Name that film!) Maier examines the very idea of labor-management relations, the nature of the pay and reward system, the actual inefficiencies that such a distorted culture breeds. When she exhorts her fellow paper-pushers to shut down and do the bare minimum, she’s doing so not because she thinks that work itself is useless but because work as it’s currently defined by the modern corporation has become so abstract, so far removed from the actual mission of the company (any company), that there really is no reason for anyone to do more than is necessary for them to avoid termination.
Maier herself worked as a part-time (2-1/2 days a week) economist for the French utility EDF at the time this book was written. She also holds a doctorate in psychoanalysis and practices part-time in that field as well. In this book, she expertly blends her experiences on both sides, delving into the nature of the corporate “psyche” while at the same time mining her own background in the bureaucratic trenches for much of her material. Despite stellar academic credentials, she manages to pull off a very thoughtful book examining labor and work in a way that will appeal to the mainstream reader and possibly even engage her in some critical thinking of her own about her place in her corporate culture. As I mentioned above, it’s a very quick read and can be easily finished in half a day of leisurely reading.
Probably the only disappointing outcome of this book (IMHO) is that it didn’t spark an avalanche of similar books further examining modern corporations and their relationships with labor. Instead, it appears to have been a mere blip on the bestseller radar before disappearing fairly soon after its notoriety hit its peak. Too bad, because for all its tongue-in-cheek calls for a cubicle revolution, the book does have some very valid points that should become part of the public dialogue about what work means in a world where so much of it seems to disappear so quickly, only to reappear again — in cheaper, younger, more easily-exploitable forms in developing countries.
Maier herself has moved on to yet another controversial book called No Kid: Forty Reasons For Not Having Children, yet another jab at a treasured French institution: the family. The workplace, however, could use more of her wit and sharp insight. As it stands, half of my very hard-working friends and family members have experienced a painful layoff at least once in their lives that disrupted families, dreams, and ambitions, not to mention finances. And the way the economy is stumbling along now, we can expect more to come. Perhaps then, Maier will be persuaded to issue another intelligent diatribe against the ruthless forces at work that undermine and undervalue the laborer’s contribution. Until that happens, though, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with this funny little book that sparked corporate outrage and served as inspiration for a lot of hapless cube drones.
p.s. I know I said that I would review La Dame d’Esprit, but pressing deadlines this week prevented me from finishing this very lengthy book. Stay tuned next Wednesday! Merci for your patience!
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Oh man, I must read this book. Granted, I’m very lucky in that my job, though with its cubicle aspects, isn’t horrid – I can dress essentially how I want and don’t spend most of my time in meetings synergizing paradigms and such, but we all know plenty who do – such as you used to – and this is PRECISELY why corporations need mucho checks and balances.
What is capitalism? Maximum profit at minimum cost. By definition, nearly everything is expendable in its service of the bottom line. Well guess what? A lot of that everything is a human being. Make a buck, but dammit, don’t be a fucking evil bastard about it. I just cannot wrap my brain around that mindset. I’d make a bad manager.
I’ve read this book and it isn’t bad. However, being a person that experiences corporate America on a regular basis, I try not to ‘poke the bear’. Also I must say that I HATE corporate speak and everything to do with corporate culture. Love the paycheck but there’s got to be a balance of evils (working remotely will take care of most of it). I shiver everytime I hear the words high level, deliverables, let’s have a meeting….*groan*
Randal, you know, I actually did think of you when I read this book. I’d be surprised if your library didn’t have it. It’s a very small book!
I’ve tried management a few times, but meetings bore me. I mean, they bore me. You should read the part in the book about those “innovations” in the mid-90s with offices trying to encourage “creativity” and “collaboration” by doing away with traditional offices. Naturally, the human tendency to hoard and settle couldn’t be overcome, which made for a very chaotic and resentful workplace.
Of course, where would we be without bureaucracy and management? They sign my paychecks, of course. So I comply. Still, I wonder how they can stand doing what they do, realizing that we all march to the same fate: worm feed.
Colleen, yeah, I actually just interviewed for a corporate job yesterday. I have to admit, there’s something very funny about being told that an office is “familial.” I mean, I’m sorry, was I looking for another family? I’m just here for the paycheck, thanks.
Are we being subversive and condescending or what?
Salut,
Marjorie
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