In my last post I attempted to come to terms with my frustrations with the seemingly inane culture wars going on currently. I mentioned I hadn't quite made the point in the way I had intended and that I would return to the topic, and I've spent the past few days continuing to brood over it. This is a second attempt.
One of the things I've noticed now that I've started paying attention, is that the issue of culture has pervaded more levels of our society than I had originally realized. I've had a fairly rough year so far, as I'm sure many people have. My wife and I suffered a heartbreaking setback in mid-March, then literally the very next week the lock downs started. With the lock downs came the economic consequences, and suddenly I was being required to take mandatory unpaid leave from work multiple times in the second quarter. Opportunities that I had presented themselves to me fell away, and my attitude at work seemed to fall with them.
It was around this time that I started to notice that my attitude was not the only one adversely affected by recent events. In fact, I have been taking notes on a series of sweeping culture changes at my place of employment, and none of them have been positive.
I've been listening a lot lately, trying to figure out what the overarching problem(s) is/are. I've listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts since March, outlining as many different perspectives on the issue of the pandemic as I can bare to listen to. I've talked to dozens of employees of different levels across my organization. I've spoken with friends and family. What I've found is that the culture war going on in the political landscape currently, which I expressed such distaste for in my last post, is likely just a symptom of a much larger culture shift taking place in our society right now. At the very least, it is interlinked with other concerns that are outside the traditional political landscape.
Life this year has been radically altered by a pandemic. I am of the belief that many of the changes were long in the making, and that the pandemic has only accelerated them. Few of them have been positive changes for the vast majority of the people I've listened to. The biggest change appears to be a gigantic shift in perceived power. Let me explain the best way I know how: anecdote.
I work for a company that employs roughly three hundred fifty persons at our facility at any time. The vast majority of these, generally around three hundred, are production employees who work for an hourly wage. They are represented by a union, and, while this is not the first union shop I've worked for, this is the first time I've paid enough attention to see the animosity that exists between the union employees and the salary employees. Honestly, it feels as if those who are a part of the union have a different employer than those who are not, even though the same company appears on all the pay stubs.
Now, don't get me wrong, I expect a certain level of adversarial attitudes between employees and their supervisors. Even I cannot help but disagree with my superiors from time to time and feel put off when I essentially have to do as I'm told even though I don't agree with a particular course of action. However, this divide goes beyond that. I am a salary employee, but I have no authority over any of the hourly employees. There are more salary employees like me who are just there to help facilitate production than there are managers and supervisors, but the hourly employees have a tendency to treat all salary employees as overseers and look upon us with distaste. It's an attitude I have yet to fully flesh out because I've never been one to look for reasons to hate someone before I even know them.
Lately, though, I've noticed a return of the animosity from the salary employees toward the hourly employees. You see, as those of us who take a salary were required to take time off without pay, the decision was made to bring hour employees in for overtime and double time to increase production, which only made the jobs of those of us who facilitate that production more difficult. Blame has not always been placed where it belongs, and I find that many of the support staff like myself are angry with the hourly employees for making extra money while we are making less, all while making extra work for us.
Where does this bring me? Well, after another opportunity appears to be drying up, I find myself in a position where I, like probably many of the people I work with, feel completely powerless. This has lead me to complain. A lot. I actually hate myself sometimes for how much complaining I do. I really dislike listening to people complain, but some days literally the only interaction I have with my coworkers is a mutual session of vitriolic bitching. We're all tired. We're all overworked. Most importantly, we're all feeling completely powerless.
Honestly, it's been so negative and my mood has been so adversely effected that I've had to start avoiding people I know are going to complain to me about work. I've also started trying to avoid conversations that I know will lead to me complaining. Most importantly, I've tried to start focusing on the things I can control, and forgoing the things I can't as much as possible.
This is the real shift I want to talk about. I think our entire culture wars are about people who don't feel like they have any control looking for something to make a stand on or complain about. We're all searching for something we think we have some level of control over, or searching for some feeling of control that we get when we complain or take a side on some political matter or other. We feel better about ourselves when we can put others down because it feels like we have power over them, and we don't feel like we have power over much these days.
Somewhere in the past week I heard or read "focus on solution, not on the problem." When people are focusing on the negative and can't see anything but problems, we have a tendency to cast blame and ignore the things we can actually do to solve the problems. I'm sure everyone here has some experience where all it felt like everyone in a situation was so busy pointing fingers at who was wrong that no one took any time to address how to correct the issue. It happens every day where I work, and was a regular occurrence at my last company as well.
So, what's the solution? Well, let's stop blaming someone else. Let's stop worrying about blame at all. Let's actually look at our lives and find the things in them that we can fix, and start fixing them. Let's work with others instead of screaming at them. Pass on best practices so others can learn from what we've already done. Listen to others when they suggest best practices for something we have no experience with. Most importantly, we need to stop paying so much attention to the things we have no control over.
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