Ronald Zemke
Senior Editor, Training Magazine

There is growing tension in the workplace. It simmers just below the surface of common civility.

Nominally, it is about the uncertainty and insecurity that characterizes labor relations and employment in the 1990s. In a deeper, more fundamental way, it comes from a difference in beliefs between those who see profits as the sole purpose of business and those who view private enterprise as justified only by the jobs it creates and the salaries it pays out. They are world views on a collision course.

Most of us are aware of our lack of entitlement in the workplace; we know we serve at the pleasure and whims of our unpredictable employers. Granted, certain labor contacts and federal and state laws make it more difficult and costly to give some of us the boot, but those are exceptions of dispatch, not outcome. To have been outsourced or downsized is now a badge of distinction as common as divorce.

The "new employment contract" as it is being called, is no contract at all -- simply an extended day labor agreement. That fact of working life is accentuated and crystallized in Judith M. Bardwick's Danger in the Comfort Zone: From the Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit that's Killing American Business (AMACOM, 1991) and glorified in, Albert J. Dunlap's smug and self-congratulating, Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great (Times Books, 1996).

Bardwick's message: Job security is a thing of the past. Consider yourself a subcontractor, working from project to project. Dunlap, the CEO of Sunbeam Corp., and a seasoned slash and burn corporate turnaround artist, presents a less abstract -- and less appetizing -- reality: "If your company is getting Dunlapped, the last thing you want to be is invisible. It's very refreshing when someone comes in and says, "Al, I want to be on your team." If you make the team, you'll never find a better job or a more appreciative boss." Translation: Merit and performance are -- if not irrelevant -- at least of only tangential consequence to outsourcers and downsizers. Rather, providing a calculated and proper toadying demeanor is the key to gaining the hope of predictable, successive pay stubs in the extreme, laisze faire, at-my-pleasure, philosophy Dunlap seems to embody.

Scarce as hens' teeth today, are companies like Nucor Corp. of Charlotte, NC and Lincoln Electric Co. of Cleveland that guarantee employees a certain number of hours of work -- regardless. Or that fight to keep seasoned employees on the payroll even in tough times, knowing the value that skill and experience base creates when fortunes change.

There are, of course, voices raising opposition and protest to the mostly hard edged approach to our era. The predictable voices being heard from -- Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Robert Reich, a myriad of labor leaders -- drum a different beat and sensibility. One lesser known, but persistent voice belongs to Marjorie Kelly, co-founder and publisher of Business Ethics magazine, a monthly dedicated to "socially responsible business." Kelly regularly rails against CEOs with 8 figure salaries, companies that profit from endeavors of which she does not approve -- tobacco, gambling, usury et al -- and most recently corporations that invest profits in infrastructure, development and marketing instead of -- in her view -- needed salary increases.

In a crisp, well focused, syndicated editorial published Labor Day last, she made her case in highly quotable bites:

· "To cut to the chase: Economic gains are going to stockholders, not to workers -- even though stockholders didn't contribute a heck of a lot to make those gains."

· "It is work, in short, that gives the right to ownership. But we have lost sight of this. It is they (workers) who cultivate the 'land' of the corporation, and they who have a right to its fruits."

· "If I were drafting legislation to address inequities in wealth, that's where I'd start: Those who help create profits should get a piece of them -- as a right, not the occasional gift when management feels generous."

Where you or I position ourselves, personally, among the views in this debate is professionally irrelevant. Our professional commitment, I believe, must be something else -- to the skills and abilities, to the honing of excellence -- if you will -- in the workers whose labors are in debate. And to motivating those who are tempted to justify slackness or a lackluster performance because of the debate.

Our best course, I believe, is to promote pride in performance and mastery and eschew taking sides -- publicly -- in the discussion of rewards and justification and ownership philosophies.

Our message to those we train must be clear and unequivocal: "Do these things, do them well, and you will be skillful and able beyond any 'job.' You will have at the very least the beginnings of a portable craft and a trade, a career regardless of whatever else happens to or for you in this organization."

Our mission in this new age: To make valuable every employee we come in contact with. Valuable to the organization and valuable to themselves.

Ronald Zemke is the Senior Editor of Training Magazine and President of Performance Research Associates, Inc.

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