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Employers & Human Assets by Constance Lavender The American employer these days is not someone whom we as a nation may be proud. There was a time in this country when a person could find dignity and satisfaction in the American workplace. These days those kinds of sentiments seem quaint, and very, very old.
Even the size of the company agency, business, or company seems
unimportant to the relative degree of job satisfaction and worth.
Once, at least small businesses seemed to still be conscientious
employers, but those days too are long gone.
Far from valuing employees and workers today the average employer
merely manipulates them.
Management has evolved into a level of control with little
administrative experience and even less wisdom. Employee satisfaction
is an outdated term. Its all about exploitation, cutting costs,
productivity, docile obedience, management by fear, and an utter lack
of loyalty and duty. The Lou Grants and Marcus Welbys of yesterday
have regressed to the Gradgrinds and Scrooges of an even more distant
past.
In the an age of Facility Management, Outsourcing, Out-tasking,
Downsizing, Rightsizing, Core business, One-stop shopping, Value
added, Process re-engineering , and Internal Customers employers seem
to have forgotten their most important, fundamental resource: human
assets, or employees. Its unclear if employers even want human assets
today, they sometimes act as if they would be more pleased with automatons
rather than humanoids.
Rather than rewarding proactive measures, employers condemn such activity
as raising "problems," choosing instead to blindly react to
"situations" only after they arise and often too late to
take any really meaningful, problem-solving actions.
Such incompetence and indifference on the part of employers is not
only unwise, it is also extremely shortsighted. Hollow gestures, empty
promises, misleading statements, meaningless policies, mission
statements that do not square with reality: all of these disturbing
business and management trends point towards the dumbing down of the
American worker. Unless something changes, and changes drastically and
soon, the labor market in the United States will be hit with
insufferable blows from which it may not recover.
As less Americans are valued for their ability, competence, and work,
the nation will slide towards an unsustainable economy that will bind
us to hopeless dependence on other countries. This is a terribly
dangerous situation.
If we act now, perhaps we can achieve the kind of labor and workforce
reforms necessary to sustain our economy and way of life. In order to
do that we must tell agencies, businesses, and companies of all sizes
and in all sectors that they can no longer dodge taxes, outsource jobs
depriving Americans of work without consequences; they can no longer
neglect and thumb their noses at their civic duty and responsibilities
to be good neighbors. That to be an employer requires fairness,
evenhandedness, honesty, and paying workers a living wage with
adequate benefits. That its not about how much you can get away with,
but how much you have to offer that determines substance and value.
Human assets count.
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