There is something deeply problematic about the nonprofit, as it parades as a beneficent, moral institution that fulfills and satisfies some mission but does so at the cost of its workers. I say this without the proper literary substantiation, a project that may come from this. But speaking from personal experience, administrators and managers use the mission statement as an excuse or perhaps as a tool to under-compensate employees. Exploiting a downturned market and reduced prospects for continuing or graduating students, the program systematically undervalues them by undercompensating.
Undervaluing is itself a phenomenon worth examining, as it has myriad psychological and physical effects, all of which are infinitely prominent in our own society. In undercompensating individuals, a company shows their lack of appreciation for their services, based on some kind of market calculation of what is in demand and what is available.
This is where the Market serves little purpose but to justify the efficiency-seeking denigration of workers. Similarly, a hierarchical command structure, expressed in management decision-making and supervisorial relationships, basically justifies autocratic attitudes and the predispositions of individuals to control others. In my own experience, this translates into passive-aggressive behavior where outright conflict is thought to lay in wait or has already occurred.
We need a whole new way of organizing that is liberated from the constraints of efficiency and from the chronic and seriously devastating undercompensation of workers. A part of this fight will be subverting the very theories that underpin such management practices. Another will be a radical reorganization of earning flows.
It is surprising, for all of the harmful effects crushing debt and recurrent bullying have had on the financial woes of citizens around the globe and our nations high school students, that private industry remains so uncompromisingly tied to a structure that is so psychologically damaging and spiritually effacing, too.
These are no empty claims either. Self-actualization, a Rogerian concept, is virtually impossible in said management structure, the likes of which predominates in the United States. How may we be able to find ourselves if we are constantly being ordered and directed to do this and that project? How can we really separate work and post-work? This aspect of the work world seems so essential to it as to make it possibly definitive of it.
As I write this, I’m reminded of a story a starbuck’s employee friend told me. A dissatisfied customer, after having left the store and nearly consumed their drink, decided it appropriate to call starbucks and complain their inability to reach, with a straw, the last few drops of coffee remaining. they proceeded to castigate whomever they reached, using the opportunity likely to vent frustrations accrued from so many other places, aggression that is understandable and rational but misplaced. It likely even derived from problematic work relationships, as I see it.
I’m sure there are myriad and easily explicable examples to be found everywhere, and yet it continues and often with the rationalization that it was only single individuals, populating managerial spots and inhabit the system itself that deformed and misapplied its mandate, but I argue a different position. The very notion of hierarchy and reduction of the power of decision-making is itself problematic. In the work place, for human beings to be treated as human beings, we must struggle to proliferate these spaces, creating new hopes for direction organizations in different directions and even for a self-setting of the environmental conditions.
And yet, we are forced to maintain our participation here, as we must work to survive, to achieve subsistence and some modicum of autonomy over ourselves and our progress. Here is the binding constraint that prevents all movement.
Bearer of Pity 