Barbara Ehrenreich

Journalist and Author of the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

One of our most recognized and original social commentators, Barbara Ehrenreich has been a contributing writer for Time magazine since 1990.  Her articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times magazine, The Washington Post magazine, Ms., Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy and Mirabella, as well as in newspapers throughout the world.  Her bestseller Nickel and Dimed has been adapted for the theatre by Joan Holden and is opening in major cities across the United States.

Read Barbara Ehrenreich's guest commentary below on the real problem with bad bosses.

Bosses and Bossism

By Barbara Ehrenreich

The AFL-CIO's Working America project has launched a "bad boss" contest.  Unfortunately, the prize is only a free vacation, rather than the opportunity to see your nominee drawn and quartered after a lengthy and humiliating public trial.

I've heard so many bad boss stories, some of them on this website, that I'd hate to be one of the judges.  The boss who makes you work overtime without pay (which would include Wal-Mart unless they've cleaned up this practice)...the boss who expects little personal services, like back rubs or picking up his or her dry-cleaning...the boss who regards you as sexual chattel...the boss who likes to keep you in a state of constant anxiety about your employment status...the boss who throws tantrums, along with various heavy objects.

I've had a few bad bosses myself.  One of them, a restaurant manager I encountered while working as a waitress for Nickel and Dimed, caught me chatting with a dish washer (he was an immigrant trying to learn English) and harassed me for the rest of the shift.  And there was the housecleaning franchise owner who got 45 minutes a day of unpaid labor out of us, although at $6 and change an hour, you'd think he could have afforded to pay for our time.

Much as I'd like to see all these miscreants brought to justice--in something like the "thought reform" camps of the Chinese Cultural Revolution--I tend to think the emphasis on bad bosses is a little misguided.  The problem isn't particular bosses, but what I call "Bossism"--the hierarchical system that governs all known bureaucracies, both public and private.  Giving one person huge power over others is like giving a 3-year-old a hose: Not everyone will get soaked, but the chances of coming out dry are slender.

But, you may be wondering, how would anything get done without bosses and Bossism?  Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time, as I saw in my Nickel and Dimed jobs.  If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don't count on a manager to tell you what to do--if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance.  In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of "boss."  As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in--or get out of the way.

What I was witnessing was workplace democracy in action, or, more fancily put, what French sociologists call "autogestion," or workers' self-determination.  It may sound exotic, but it's not just an attribute of the rare anarchist collective.  In fact, it's a notion revered in contemporary corporate culture as the team.

The rhetoric of teams, employing some sort of equality among the players, is everywhere today.  You're not an employee of Whole Foods, you're a "team member."  You don't work for Wal-Mart, you're an "associate," theoretically as capable of making a creative contribution as the regional manager.  According to Wal-Mart folklore, for example, it was a lowly associate who came up with the brilliant idea of "people greeters."  (But whenever I, in my brief stint as a Wal-Mart associate, made a useful suggestion--like why stack so many of the women's plus-size clothes at floor level, where they were accessible only to the young and agile--I was always told that such decisions were made by the big bosses in Bentonville.)

When corporations uphold the idea of "teams," they're grasping for the kind of ingenuity and creativity people naturally bring to a challenging situation--if they're allowed to, i.e., if they're treated like participants instead of like servants or subordinates.  So why isn't the team rhetoric taken more seriously at all levels of bureaucratic endeavor?

Well, one thing a boss will tell you is that there's too much turnover among his or her subordinates to take them seriously.  Why should a mere "team member" have a role in decision-making when he or she could be gone tomorrow?  But that is circular reasoning:  It's the lack of real teamwork--along with a lack of respect and, often, decent pay and benefits--that leads to the turnover.  Which is another way of saying that Bossism is self-perpetuating, even when everyone knows it's not the best way of getting things done, or at least pays lip service to the notion of the "team."

So, yes, line the bad bosses up against the wall, but let's not forget that the real problem is Bossism, with all its nasty effects.  It's Bossism that generates arrogance among the bosses and learned passivity among the bossed, along with fatalism or corrosive resentment.  Everyone knows there's an alternative embodied in the idea of the team.  When are we going to start taking it seriously?

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