Economy   

How Can We Make an Economy that Promotes a New Bottom Line?

Changing the World of Work

There was one positive element in traditional societies when it came to work, namely a shared understanding that all work could have meaning as a contribution to the good of the society as a whole. When conducting our interviews, we repeatedly heard people complain about how meaningless their work was, because they could not see that it contributed in any way to a higher societal value. At first we thought we could support people to understand that their work really was making a valuable contribution, but increasingly as we listened to the details we came to understand that for many workplaces the only goal being served was to achieve higher and higher profits. Sometimes, as byproduct, some valuable societal goal was served. But all too often the goods that were being produced, we came to understand, were goods that would never be produced in a society that was sensitive to the needs of preserving the environment rather than depleting it of raw materials or filling it with chemicals that were toxic and products that were non-recyclable and adding to the global accumulation of non-disposable garbage.

Well, we thought that perhaps that would be less true in some service jobs. So we discussed this issue with the postal workers. We know that their jobs keep them working at very intense pace all day long, or in evening or night shifts that are truly exhausting — and yet we imagined that they would feel very proud of their work since they delivered a high quality service that was indispensable for the functioning of our society. Unfortunately, this was not how they experienced their days. First, they told us of the huge disrespect that they face from customers coming in to the workplace because there are long lines, necessitated by the decision of the Postal Service to keep costs lower for buying stamps by having fewer employees dealing with the customers. The public asked itself the question, ¨Why do I get better care and have shorter lines when I go to Federal Express or UPS? Must be these lazy postal workers who are getting cushy jobs in government subsidized operations.” But the truth is quite different. The fact is that the Postal Service could do the same thing as some private mail companies — it could only deliver mail that cost minimum $2 per letter, instead of $0.37 in 2005. But, that would end up hurting poorer people who´d have one less avenue for communication that they could afford, particularly those who had no money to have access to the internet. But there´s another element to why the postal workers get overworked and understaffed because so much of the huge amount of advertising and socilitations from businesses that can be done at very low cost through the mail. So postal workers often feel abused by the public, the good part of their story not known, but also unable to fully claim that part because they also know that some of their exhaustion is because they are providing a low cost of service to businesses in which they do not believe. As one postal worker put it to us, “So much wasted paper.”

So we realized that the first demand of a pro-family program must be: Re-organize workplaces so that they produce services and goods that are genuinely desirable and needed by the human race. We demand a workplace in which people can come home feeling good about what they´ve contributed to humanity rather than feeling de-energized and ripped off by having wasted time all day. Give working people real respect and real power to shape the decisions at work.

“But wait,” you might say. Not everyone can have work that contributes to the good of all. There are a certain number of professional jobs where we can expect people to feel good because they are using their smarts and intelligence in the world of work. But there are lots of jobs that are not going to give people that opportunity, and where they are certainly not going to get a sense of doing something for larger purpose.”

That sounds so sensible an objection, but actually all it is doing is restating the way things are now and acting as though it´s obvious that there´s no other way. But it´s not obvious.

What is obvious is that the way we organize work today we separate work into categories in which some people get to use their brains to the max and some people are given very little opportunity to do that. And similarly, some jobs are highly valued and respected, and others are treated as though they are next to useless.

I remember when a family member who had told his wife that he “worked for the City of Newark” was discovered to be employed as a bathroom cleaner for the city latrines. There were people in my family who were outraged that a good Jewish boy had failed to achieve a more honorable job for himself. As a pre-teen growing up in this society, I joined in the general family mockery. But when I was 22 and spent many months working on a kibbutz in Israel I learned to think very differently about all this. I got to attend a kibbutz buiness meeting and listened to the chairman of the meeting discuss some of the difficult issues facing the kibbutz. When I asked someone sitting next to me where he worked, I learned that he was the person who collected garbage and cleaned the latrines. On kibbutz it was obvious that this was as important work as any other. It was a given on kibbutz that every aspect of work that needed to be done in order to keep the whole venture functioning was equally valuable to every other. Similarly, though this man had no opportunity while collecting garbage to use some parts of his mind, the workplace was organized in such a way that the key economic decisions for the kibbutz were made in a community meeting in which everyone had to use their own highest capacities to share in decision making. For example, when the kibbutz discovered that it had a slight surplus of money for selling its products, it had to decide whether to use that money to send a particular person on the kibbutz to upgrade her skills for use in the kibbutz or whether instead to use the money to provide ice cream once a month for every kibbutz member. This was a difficult decision, and required people to think and talk about their goals for the enterprise as a whole and what would strengthen their community. But the main outcome was this: most people felt proud of what they were creating each day in the world of work. They came home tired, but often invigorated, certain that their work was contributing to higher purpose. It was only years later when television had infiltrated kibbutz and people began to be influenced by the constant indoctrination that told them that their ideals were outdated, that some of the kibbutz members agreed to take loans to expand housing and buy more updated technologies, loans that would soon turn into impossible burdens when the international marketplace changed and their goods could no longer be sold at the prices they had counted on to pay back the loans.

What I learned was that work could be constructed in ways that actually consulted workers about what was being done in the workplace. Imagine, if you would, a workplace in which management not only chose to, but was required to share all the important information about their own economic situation with their workers, and in which the workers themselves had an important voice in deciding management policies. Imagine how different would have been the lives of the works at Enron and World Com, tens of thousands of whose lives were devastated when the owners of the corporations lied to them and everyone else about the financial wellbeing of the enterprise. Obviously, I´m not talking about the kind of disclosures that come in indecipherable reports to investors who are encouraged to give their proxies to the existing members of the board of directors. If the goal was to empower working people so that they really knew what was happening, what decisions were facing the corporation, and were being expected to participate in those decisions, it wouldn´t take brain surgery expertise to figure out how to communicate this information so that most people could understand it.

People coming home from a workplace where they were being treated with respect, and in which the fundamental decisions were being made by them, would be in far better emotional shape to participate in family life.

Connected to that is the need to challenge the speed-ups in productivity at the world of work. There are many young professionals who can tell you about the heady experience of work in a world based on endlessly breaking new developments in technology. Whether it´s in business, finance, bio-tech, computers, electronics of all sorts, medicine, law, science — in almost every arena the deal for professionals is this: “work endless hours, be behind the curve in terms of all that is happening, work as intensely as possible, don´t stop to think about the ethical meaning or social consequences of the decisions you make (apart from the very narrowly framed restrictions of “professional ethics” that almost never touch upon the larger social meaning of the work that is being done), and we will reward you with lots of money and prestige.”

So a second part of a pro-family program at work is this: slow down the work pace in the following ways: Reduce the work week without reducing pay to four days a week, for nine hours a day. Make one hour each day dedicated to staff reflection on the moral and social value of the work that is being done, and that hour be immediately after lunch (so that it not get stuck at the end of the day when people are too exhausted to think of anything but getting home). Let that additional day off be Family day — a day in which all stores are closed and in which families just get to hang out with each other using all the available recreational activities they have available as long as no one has to work to provide them.

The most important changes in the workplace, however, will be those necessitated when we begin to implement a New Bottom Line. This kind of change is central to the task of building a society that is safe for love and intimacy. As long as people are learning that their value in the world is how to contribute to the Old Bottom Line, there is little chance that they will be able to offset the ethos of selfishness and materialism that they are learning and relearning hour by hour.

But describing in detail what a society with a New Bottom Line would look like is probably beyond the scope of this book. What we can say here is this: a prophetic politics would make the answer to that question a central part of its political activity in the coming decades.

So here is what that would look like. Imagine if the Democratic Party, the Greens, or some yet-to-be-created Spiritual Party were to ask its members to meet once a month in groupings with others who did similar kinds of work. The task of each such group was to envision the changes in their own workplace, profession, union, or business that would be necessary if there was in fact a New Bottom Line.

The discussion would be governed by only one rule: keep out the Reality Police. The Reality Police are all the voices in our heads that tell us that all this is quite impossible, that no one is ever going to let there be a new bottom line, and so all the changes that a New Bottom Line will necessitate are fanciful and we are wasting our time by asking what it would look like.

Eventually, these groups would hook up with others around the country and a picture of a society based on a New Bottom Line would emerge. And from that picture would also emerge concrete struggles to implement a New Bottom Line in many workplaces and professions.

Impossible to imagine? But that is exactly what just happened on a global level in the past 40 years with the women´s movement. There was an issue that seemed just as intractable as the ethos of materialism and selfishness, namely 10,000 years of patriarchal society. Starting with a small group of women, and then growing at first quite slowly, and then more quickly, and then eventually at unbelievable levels of explosion of energy, small groups of women met with each other and envisioned what it might be like to be a woman without a patriarchal society outside and without themselves having internalized the expectations and desires of male authority. The experience of having those thoughts, allowing oneself to take them seriously, was so empowering and exciting that it energized a global transformation in less than forty years.

A spiritually-oriented political party that saw itself as fully committed to making the world safe for love and intimacy would seek to spur this development. It would do so not in the name of freedom and self-determinination, but in the name of love and kindness and generosity, in the name of building a world in which loving relationships could be strengthened. Its point would be powerful and hard to stop: If you want to have strong loving relationships, build an economic and social world in which love is what is rewarded and not simply money and power.

The Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

One obvious objection to this plan is that those in power in the corporations are not going to let a new bottom line to be established, even if they were to be convinced that doing so would strengthen loving relationships in family life. Their point: “We have a fiduciary responsibility to our investors to maximize their investments, and we can´t do that if we are going to allow maximizing love and caring or ecological and ethical considerations or awe and wonder at creation to displace profit-making as the bottom line when we actually sit in our boardroom and make decisions.”

That´s precisely why we need the Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA),
The SRA says the following: “Every corporation with incomes above $50 million a year must get a new corporate charter once every ten years, and that new charter will only be granted to corporations that can prove a satisfactory history of social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. No branch of government shall make any treaties or enter into international agreements that limit the right of the United States to insist on corporate social responsibility and ecologically sustainable behavior. Any such treaties already concluded, or any parts of this constitution deemed to conflict with this amendment, and any legislation on state or national level that have the effect of protecting companies or corporations from ethical and ecological responsibility, are hereby declared null and void.”

The SRA will speak to the part of many morally grounded business people who actually would love to live in a world in which their corporation was being more socially responsible, only they fear that doing so would be irresponsible to the investors and risky to their own futures. The SRA handles that by providing them with a powerful incentive to make their corporations more socially responsible: the concern that if they fail to do so, they will risk their investors´ entire investment.

To aid the jury in this process, a spiritually sensitive party will begin a process now of developing its own ideas of an Ethical Impact Report to use as guidelines for corporations and communities as they prepare their own testimony to the jury assessing a given corporation. The jury might ask corporate leaders, non-management workers, members of the communities in which the corporation does business or sells or advertises its products, and corporate investors to fill in an Ethical Impact Report that would ask respondents to rate how much the corporation:

1. gives global and local environmental concerns a high priority in making investment and production decisions.
2. produces socially valuable products.
3. provides mechanisms of accountability for corporate executives and members of the board of directors.
4. provides workers with a decent living and adequate opportunities to organize themselves and participate in decision making.
5. promotes the value of truth-telling and personal integrity in the day-to-day operations and in its presentation of itself and its products to the public.
6. rewards cooperative behavior.
7. encourages workers to use their intelligence and creativity at work.
8. shows loyalty to its employees and avoids discrimination in hiring and promotions.
9. creates time for workers to have short periods each day for emotional and spiritual renewal.
10. rewards an openhearted attitude toward the world and each other.
11. encourages workers to develop a sense of awe and wonder at the glory of the universe, while simultaneously avoiding any spiritual coercion or any message that there is one appropriate religious or spiritual path, and while demonstrating non-discrimination in regard to religious and spiritual practices when considering hiring or promotion.
12. advertises its products or services in ways that avoid sexist manipulations.
13. provides adequate attention to the family needs of its workers.
14. makes information about its operations freely available to the public and relevant community organizations.

Well, you can probably think of others to fill in here, and it is likely that competing groups will come up with their own sets of Ethical Impact Reports, but it will be up to each individual jury to adopt a report form that it chooses or to shape its own criteria in consultation with management, workers, community organizations and investors.
There are some who will believe that the intent of the SRA can be achieved without an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, through state licensing requirements. That should certainly be tried, though the threat of corporations ready to move their operations to other parts of the world might prevent some state legislatures from being willing to take on this challenge. There are others who will argue that the SRA can never be passed given the difficulties of passing constitutional amendments, and the dangers of opening up that process. That may be. The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed. But the struggle for the ERA had a powerful impact in advancing the consciousness of women´s equality, and the struggle for the SRA is likely to have a powerful effect on making workplaces and our economy more family-friendly.