The Decision To Exit
Albert Hirshman | RTO Creep | Factoids | The Good Old Days
Quote of the Moment
The ultimate in unhappiness and paradoxical loyalist behavior, occurs when the public evil produced by the organization promises to accelerate or to reach some intolerable level as the organization deteriorates; then, in line with the reasoning just presented, the decision to exit will become ever more difficult the longer one fails to exit. The conviction that one has to stay on to prevent the worst grows stronger all the time.
| Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States
Hirshman is the researcher who defined the three-part model for employee loyalty. An employee who is disgruntled may either stay out of loyalty (perhaps misplaced), give voice to their concerns (hoping the company will listen), or exit (when they believe that the company won’t listen, or has proven it won’t).
A great teeing up for the first topic: RTO Creep.
RTO Creep
The actions of major corporations demonstrate, once again, that their attestations that ‘our people are our greatest asset’ and their fake earnesty about caring about their staff is baloney. Consider the mass layoffs in recent months, supposedly anticipating a slowdown in the economy or an outright recession which have failed to materialize, but boosted profits. And now, they are acting in a cartel-like synchronized fashion to clawback another day per week of working from home.
Jo Constanz reports on this dark pattern:
A small but growing list of big-name companies like BlackRock Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. are taking their return-to-office mandates up a notch, calling employees back to their desks four days a week.
It's a form of RTO creep, as companies test what has emerged as the post-pandemic norm of two to three days in the office and fan the debate over remote work. It's also a sign of employers gaining more power in the labor market as layoffs mount and a potential recession looms.
As the Great Resignation took hold, quit rates soared and staffing shortages hamstrung businesses, companies were forced to embrace flexibility to keep workers. Now a cooling labor market has emboldened executives determined to get back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy. But these moves could backfire among employees who've grown fiercely protective of the work-life balance that remote work affords.
There has been a closing in the gap between workers’ desire to work from home three days a week and employers demanding at least two, as shown in this chart:
But these companies’ leaders could care less about people’s desires, even when people have made great changes in their lives, like relocating farther from the office, or childcare arrangements (which is a national blight).
Personally, this is an argument for knowledge workers unionizing in order to demand some standard for working from home. Each individual having to make their own one-off deal with their management is the wrong way to push for these — let’s call it what it is — employee rights.
Workers demanded a 40-hour work week back in the 1920s, leading Henry Ford to adopt it in 1926, and the International Labor Organization adopting it in 1936. The United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, officially establishing the 40-hour work week across all industries, setting a minimum wage, and making child labor illegal.
It’s inconceivable that the US could come together to establish laws regarding working from home as a right. Likewise, given the low level of unionization in the US today, I’d say that resistance might never find enough solidarity to come together, alas.
Factoids
Black lawyers make up only 2.2 percent of law firm partners, according to a 2021 National Association of Law Placement report, with Black and Latino women at less than 1 percent. | Shira A. Scheindlin
Close to 900 million acres -- more than half of the contiguous United States — are devoted to agricultural production of one sort or another. Agriculture is responsible for about one-tenth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly methane from the digestive systems of animals as well as nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas, from lavish use of synthetic fertilizer. That’s smaller than the emissions from transportation (28 percent), electric power (25 percent) and industry (23 percent). But agricultural emissions are hard to measure and are almost certainly underestimated. | Robert B. Semple Jr.
About 80 percent of Colorado River water delivered to Arizona and California goes to irrigating alfalfa, grain for animal feed, and winter vegetables. [And the majority of those products are shipped out of those states, as far away as Saudi Arabia and China. A desert-like region shipping its water away.]
The median age in the US in 2020 was 38.8, an increase of 0.4 years over the last decade as the share of residents 65 or older grew by more than a third from 2010 to 2020. | Dense Discovery
The Good Old Days
In Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse, Adam Mastroianni of Columbia University has uncovered a bug in the wiring of the human mind that leads us to believe — erroneously — that there has been a decline in morality in the recent past.
He draws attention to political slogans that build on this fallacy, like these, and the foundational problem [emphasis mine]:
Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.
What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.
But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened.
Mastroianni and his colleague Daniel T. Gilbert conducted research to test if human cognitive biases collude to make people believe that some earlier time was a golden age from which we have fallen. And?
While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.
It turns out to be a universal — and false — opinion.
They collected 235 surveys with more than 574,000 responses. The result:
Overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: the golden age of human kindness is long gone.
But the evidence shows this is wrong:
We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?”, “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”, “How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
So, while the answers that would indicate growing incivility don’t, people still think there is a decline when looking back, even when human cooperation has increased 8 percent over the past 60 years.
The researchers offered some cognitive biases at work, they believe.
Biased Exposure: people will naturally pay more attention to negative information about others, and spread it more readily.
Biased Memory: negative information fades more quickly than positive information. ‘Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.’
The combination of these two effects lead to the ‘fallen from grace’ illusion:
Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
And that’s the trap we play on ourselves, both individually and societally. At the microcosmic scale of the individual, we can imagine someone nursing an erroneous feeling that things were so much better back in the day. But at the cultural level, these erroneous beliefs become a touchstone of shared perceptions, and when coupled with political sloganeering, they can lead to the flaring of political passions, based on groundless but widely accepted grounds.
‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’, wrote Walt Kelly in the 1970s, but it is timeless and true.
We’re running around with our shoelaces tied together, cognitively.
Corporate Loyalty is overrated! Exploit the corporations like they exploit you!