I came across an article listing the year's best employees and lo and behold, a company that I had just resigned from was featured near the top. I didn't resign because I saw a brilliant opportunity somewhere else but because I genuine believe that my work was making the world a worse place and being in a position where I did not have overriding financial obligations my moral obligation made it necessary for me to leave. This may have been a mistake and I may have to rejoin the corporate machine at some point and writing this piece may severely hinder my chances of being able to get a job back there but I thought it good to share my thoughts on what corporate jobs are all about.
Note that I was in one of the better ones.
1. Work sucks I know - moving from university to work one of the major complaints I've heard from several peers and experienced first hand is that your self-worth drops significantly. Decisions you were free to make are no longer yours (waking hours, skipping lectures hours, dress code) and more significantly your time is no longer yours. You can no longer spend a week reading into a new topic because being a grown up means doing grown up things. Working from 8 to 5, coming home exhausted, looking forward to an hour of television (gym if you're enthusiastic) and some supper table conversation before you get to bed in order to wake up earlier than you'd want to for yet another day. Trying to socialise or seek stimulation outside of work during the week will mean low energy and performance levels at work the next day getting you the looks you don't want from your superiors and colleagues (social manipulation). Weekend's are always too short and there's usually something from work you thought you'd be able to finish up over the weekend that ends up taking longer than you thought and further dampening the little bit of fun/stimulation the weekend was supposed to provide. This insight is not new at all. Everyone's experienced it, everyone complains about it.
2. The insignificance of it all. If you end up at a large multi-national corporate (the one's we're supposed to want to work for because they offer the best salaries, packages, travel opportunities) the decisions in your office aren't yours to make. Even the top boss in your office isn't making many real decisions. His (usually a he) job is merely to execute whatever plan has been developed on the other side of the world by analysts who've looked at the models and past case studies and reasoned that this course of action will be best. Their work would seem equally meaningless as they never see any of their plans being executed, just reams of paper passed on for approval and a performance evaluation congratulating them on the paper used. You become a tiny cog in a big, big machine. Sometimes your efficient spinning makes a little bit of a difference - when you just start out, whether you spin or not is pretty inconsequential...they make sure of that, too much risk attached. The multi-nationals got so big for a reason. They don't let mess-ups happen. Everything is well-reasoned by those with experience. Your job is to execute, not to think, just execute. If you have some insight feel free to pass it up along the chain until it reaches someone (usually your immediate supervisor) who will tell you (nicely) that they had the exact same idea when they started but it won;t work because of x,y and z.
3. The work is genuinely evil. This is the crux of it. We know that their is inequality in the world. We know that inequality is increasing. Inequality and not poverty is the root cause of unhappiness, and crime so it affects those on both sides of the divide. We also all aspire to get corporate jobs - jobs that deepen inequality. The big picture became clear to me when I was selling a new washing powder in an informal settlement out of a Shoprite store to whom I can only affectionately call a Mama. The new washing powder brings competition into the previously monopolized industry, great because it means lower prices but this is the smallest band-aid over the largest bullet hole of what is going on. The band-aid does more damage than good because everyone applying it doesn't look past it at the bigger picture and only focuses on the "good" they're doing. The Mama's money will go to the corporate. Seems fair enough but there's a book well worth reading called 23 Things They Don;t Tell You About Capitalism and one of the things is the decision making within corporates.
The corporations profits are reinvested or given to shareholders, seems fair because they each own a share of the company but if we look at who your typical shareholder is it's quickly apparent how inequality is being deepened on a daily level and how we contribute to it every time we make a purchase and especially when we get jobs making corporations more efficient and making profits. Shareholders are people with money. The Mama's money is not going back into her community to improve her life, the life of her family and friends, it is going to middle and upper-class shareholders who sit very far away and use that money to improve their lives. What did the shareholders do for their lives to deserve being bettered over that of the Mama's? Basically they had more money first - legacies of colonialism, years of racism, slave-trade, it all fits in.
So when you get offered a job at one of the year's best employees it's best to check the criteria of best-ness. Best for me because I am trained to narrowly perceive my life in terms of how much money I make to buy nice cars, homes and clothes, go on nice holidays and impress potential in-laws; best for the Mama who I will work hard to more efficiently take as much money from her as possible (nicely termed as up-selling or increasing the basket size of her purchase); best for the corporates who get the best of university students to work for them to improve how much profit they can take from the poor and give to the rich; best for my soul to be accountable before God of all my life's actions?
