“We are people, not slaves or robots!” Companies should honour the needs and desires of their workers or pay the price for not doing so!

If one wonders whatever circumstances started the Russian Revolution in 1917 – exactly hundred years ago – or roughly 130 years earlier the French Revolution, he should look at the lower class and middle class workers and impoverished people in his country. And first and foremost to the way they are treated by the wealthy people and (large) companies in this country. 

Then this person should realize that most revolutions start because these simple workers and the non-working poor are utterly fed up with their living circumstances and want to make a drastical change, even if that might cost them their life eventually.

If the lower class workers and the poor in a country are treated humanely and are given chances to work themselves up towards a better life, no revolution will ever break out. 

However, if such workers are treated like poor, talentless and useless people, who are only good for one thing – for which they are not appreciated at all and paid very poorly too – revolution could be looming when the humiliation reaches its peak.

To this respect it is good to look at the grim developments at one of the largest and most popular companies in the world: Amazon. This company is extremely successful in both sales of food and non-food articles to the general public and rendering cloud services (i.e. the rental of broad computer services) to companies. Its status in the digital world is iconic, just as the status of its founder, Jeff Bezos.

Yet, this company seems well on its way to become one of those companies that is hated and despised by their personnel for the inhumane treatment of their workers, if the following story is indeed true.

This story, which was based upon research done by a reporter of the British newspaper Daily Mirror, was printed in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad a few weeks ago:

Personnel of a British distribution centre of webgiant Amazon is severely underpaid for the long, long working days they have to make around the holidays. Some employees make working weeks of 55 hours for a minimum hourly wage of around UKP 8.20 (roughly € 9,16). This became clear from undercover research of British newspaper Daily Mirror.

Journalist Alan Selby worked five weeks for a distribution centre in Tilbury, where he saw that the personnel was treated as ‘live stock’ and became so tired that they fell asleep standing. Some workers had to be treated by ambulance personnel. “The personnel receives a wage that is lower than the average cost of livelihood. One of them asked: ‘Why is it not allowed to sit for a moment when it is not busy? We are people, not slaves or robots’”, according to Selby.

The journalist, who runs marathons in his leisure time, experienced that himself: “The only times that I did not stand up, was during my breaks.  My body ached, I felt dizzy and was afraid that I would topple over. One of my colleagues told me she overstretched her hamstrings, but had to continue anyway”. Selby saw the managers screaming at those who dared to rest.

Also the daily targets would lie too high. It is expected from the packaging personnel that they prepare for shipment 120 products per hour. Those who did not make that number, were fired...

When asked, Amazon did not exactly experience the urgency behind the cause for this article. Again the Algemeen Dagblad:

Amazon informed us in a reaction that they ‘offered a safe and positive working place’. “We are proud upon having created thousands and thousands of job in the past years. The targets have been based upon earlier results of our personnel”.

“Nothing to see her, folks. Everything is cool! Carry on, as you were!”

There are roughly three possibilities with respect to this story:

• a. Alan Selby is a stargazer and a liar who makes something out of nothing. Amazon personnel should simply shut up, enjoy their work and be glad that they have a job.
• b. Amazon is a cynical club that doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the wellbeing of their personnel and only hunts for impossible targets and yet more efficiency on the way towards full robotization of their workforce.
• c. Amazon is not aware of treating its personnel badly and truly believes that they offer a good job to their personnel. 

The first possibility of the three is not very plausible, as at the same time of the publication of this article in the UK, the personnel of Amazon in Germany and Italy was on strike to get improvement of their labour circumstances too.

Remain the two possibilities in which Amazon is either extremely naive or cynical...

Both possibilities are not favourable for the company. And looking at Amazon’s reaction when confronted with the news in the Daily Mirror (see red and bold text), I tend to think that Amazon is just extremely cynical.

Probably the company cannot wait for the moment that they can either move most of their operations to the low wage countries, where workers are less critical and too much strapped for cash to complain about labour circumstances, or fully robotize their operations so they don’t need human workers at all. 

Anyway, the result is shocking, to these eyes!

And unfortunately the situation around Amazon is not unique. A few weeks later, an article appeared in the Dutch online magazine The Correspondent, in which the situation for the workers at Schiphol airport had been put under scrutiny. 

Also this article was written by an investigative reporter, Dick Wittenberg, who spoke with workers in the lowest qualified jobs at Schiphol.

The tendency in this article was very much akin to the situation at Amazon: long working hours without toilet breaks, poor payment and uncertain situations around the prolongation of contracts:

At Schiphol I stumble upon uncertain workers and working poor. Masses of workers are running around. Labour Union FNV estimates that at least a quarter of the 65,000 people, who work at the roughly 450 companies, does not have a steady job. At some companies or departments of companies, their share rises above 70 per cent.

They run from one temp job to another, or from one temporary contract to another. They hardly earn the minimum wage. A large share does hardly build up a pension or does not get paid at all during sickness. And in the meantime they can always be ‘written off’ and be exchanged for more productive workers.

Everything at Schiphol is aimed at keeping the tariffs for the aviation companies as low as possible. This means that insufficient demands are made towards the companies that work on Schiphol. And that goes at the expense of the personnel of these companies.

Take for instance the luggage and passenger handling companies. In the battle for the goodwill of the over hundred aviation companies that land on Schiphol, these companies feel forced to work as cheap as possible, according to a spokesman of the FNV union, Leen vander List. “This simply means more production with less personnel involved and - as a consequence of this modus operandi - also more poorly renumerated and very insecure labour contracts”. 

In order to prevend that now insecure workers can claim a fixed contract after having three sequential, temporary contracts within two years, companies at Schiphol use a trick, making use of temporary labour organizations. 

After a number of contracts at one company, the temp agency places the worker at another company for a certain amount of time. After a while, the temp worker starts again at square one at the first company. Annually, over 10,000 uncertain workers are pumped around this way. FNV spokesman Van der List calls this the ‘merry-go-round of uncertain workers’.  

Both articles are either based upon first-hand experiences of the journalist (in case of Alan Selby) or testimonies of direct witnesses at these companies in The United Kingdom and The Netherlands. However, the tendency of both articles is fiercely denied by the main corporate protagonists in it.

Hence, the credibility of both stories is based upon the credibility of the reporters in question, who state things that are 180 degrees opposite of the image that both involved companies Amazon and Schiphol want to spread to the general public: an image of happy and satisfied workers being part of one happy family at their respective companies.

I believe these aforementioned stories, however. Personally, I see a disturbing trend towards the further dehumanization of workers over the last number of years. These are workers, who increasingly have to act like robots, in their quest for their nearly impossible targets. 

People, who are denied the simplest things like toilet and smoke breaks and a few minutes to put their feet to rest, outside the bare minimum of work breaks they are granted. Because this could harm their ability to meet those aforementioned targets.

Besides that, people are suffering from (too) low wages and from lack of certainty in the form of fair contracts for a longer period of time or – even better – fixed contracts. Contracts, that build up a fair pension and fair sickness money.

The same has happened in health care and home care were nurses and other health care workers are fighting their impossible targets of having to give so much aide in only a few minutes per patient. No more room for talking with patients and giving aide beyond the bare minimum. They have to work like emotionless machines, if they want to meet their targets. Nothing else is possible.

Many healthcare and homecare workers are so sick and tired of these impossible targets and the accompanying pressure that they gave up their jobs, according to the local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad:

This is exactly where institutes for homecare warned for for a long time: it is simply impossible to take new clients in, irrespective of the urgency of the demand. They are seriously short-handed. There is no influx of new workers. To put it even stronger: healthcare and homecare workers are leaving their job by the dozen. Only in Brabant [i.e. Dutch province in the south] already 10,000 workers left their job this year [2017 - EL].

Also in the cleaning industry this development is underway, as cleaners have to clean a class room or an office in roughly five to ten minutes. This leaves them only enough time to do a poor job, as thoroughly cleaning a class room would take at least 30 minutes. 

No good job can be done in this minimum amount of time and thus no job satisfaction can be reached, due to a job well done. Everything is arranged for meeting the nearly impossible targets, to be able for their employer to offer the cheapest price at their principals.  

The biggest problem, to these eyes, is the ongoing dehumanization of workers. 

Workers are not seen as the living, intelligent, hardworking and curious people that they are, but as durable means of production that are only appreciated for their possibilities to meet their targets. Nothing else!

When the targets are not met, the appreciation for the workers is gone at the spot and the workers must be replaced by better, quicker and more successful workers. Their opinions, worries and ideas are not important for their employers; just their sheer output.

One reinforcing effect to their misfortune is that workers, when not sufficiently unionized and represented on higher levels in society, are often extremely poor represented in the political arenas. The large, successful companies and the rich citizens on the other hand are overly represented there, because of their money and (thus) their influence on the leading politicians.

This means that the needs of the lower class workers and the poor are often neglected, in favour of measures that are aimed at the rich people and the large companies: lowering taxes and rising subsidies for investments. And preparing more building ground for expensive owner-occupied housing than cheap rental housing for the lower and middle classes. 

These groups have the money and the influence to “buy” their opinion and their interests into the political arenas.

Perhaps, the United States political arena is the most blatant example of this phenomenon, due to the nearly unlimited amounts of payments that can be made to the political parties and their representatives, as well as the extremely costly election campaigns that cause that all parties and all representatives are strapped for cash with respect to their (re-)elections. 

Paying money in The United States means buying direct influence, via the carrot (the money) and the stick (no more money for the next re-elections) clause.

Nevertheless, my gutfeeling says that the emotions of the lower class workers could come to a boiling point within a few years, when the working circumstances do not further improve and serious payment rises are made for everybody in the company, instead of the top management alone.

The only problem is, that a lot of the current, lower class anger in society is now aimed at immigrants and (religious) minority groups, instead of at the people who are behind their financial backwardedness and disdain for their position. This is expressed in the misunderstanding and sometimes sheer hatred against the religious minorities and the immigrants from Africa and Asia, that are looking for a safe refuge. This is a dangerous development, that has led to extremely bloody wars in the last century.

When this will turn around, however, and the anger of the lower classes and poor people WILL be aimed at the leading classes and the companies who treated them poorly, these leading politicians, (large) companies and rich citizens could be in for a rough ride, just like it happened more often in the past.

I personally hope it will not come this far, but the signs are not exactly promising, given the aforementioned widespread examples of antisocial, corporate behaviour.

Nevertheless, the recipe to solve this issue is fairly simple: forget the impossible targets and forget the fairytale that the robots are ready to take over most jobs. 

Start to give the workers in the simpler, but nevertheless extremely important jobs the respect and the remuneration that they deserve. Make sure that their targets are feasible and that they have enough backup to do their job in a normal way. 

Make also sure they live in decent houses in decent areas and make sure they enjoy their jobs and get satisfied by it. Don't take their efforts simply for granted, as if they are slaves or robots.

Frits Philips, one of the leading entrepreneurs behind the expansion of the now world-famous Philips brand, understood this lesson very well and he acted accordingly. He built and bought good houses for his workers and gave them sports and leisure time and the means to do so. By doing so, he earned their eternal respect and gratitude.

I wonder if Jeff Bezos of Amazon has this grandness in himself or that he is one of the infamous American entrepreneurs that treats people like slaves… or robots, as a matter of fact. 

Even robots need some maintenance every now and then; just like people do!

Employees should have the right to be just very good in their job, without having to show further ambitions and they should get a better payment for it too.

My youngest son Roger is a 9-year old powerhouse at chess: he is extremely ambitious, a genuine fighter from the trenches of the game and always hungry for more training and more information about the noble game of chess. And perhaps most important: he somewhat lacks the power of self-relativization.

This capacity for self-relativization is a capacity which would make him a more easy human being to live with, but would probably hamper him in his possibilities to become a professional sportsman in chess. Although a world or even European championship in chess will probably not be achieveable for him, he is nevertheless definitely striving for it and he is very much willing to walk the extra mile for his goals regarding chess. No limits, no boundaries…

His older brother Edmond, a very adorable person who is perhaps somewhat softer and more empathic than his little brother, also likes to play chess and in his own right he is very good at it. However, in comparison with his younger brother his own achievements pale.  

As this is amateur sports and not real life in which both would have to live from their hobby, this is not a very big problem. “As long as they have fun while doing it”, is in our family (and in many other families) the creed guiding us in the way that we look at the sportive achievements of our children.

However, when it comes to common labour and especially the middle-class jobs for higher educated and trained personnel, it seems that this way of thinking is not viable anymore. Many companies in challenging fields of labour, like the financial and commercial services industry or the manufacturing industry and the government demand nothing less than absolutely first class achievements from their personnel: all day every day!

Job vacancy descriptions – even for the simplest jobs – nowadays show lines like:

• Ample ambition to grow both as a worker and a person;
• A genuine passion for their work;
• An agile attitude, enabling applicants to adapt to constant change and to achieve continuous improvement;
• No ‘nine to five mentality’, but a ‘getting the job done’ attitude: during working time and when the situation requires it beyond;
• Ambitions for life long learning to stay ahead of the game;
• To be up or be out; 

And to make things worse for the modern-day workers, there is always Damocles’ sword, represented by at one hand the still enormous influx of cheap labour from Eastern and Southern Europe or India and on the other hand the ubiquitously mounting automation and robotization of their daily work and jobs. These circumstances combined put their job and in fact their sheer future on the line.

If such workers are not good enough or cannot live with the pace of modern businesses, they are doomed to lose their job and sole source of income to either the cheaper workers from abroad or to the computers and robots of modern day life. This circumstance turns a normal daily job in a kind of top sports achievement with fierce competition, a lot of pressure and enormous challenges on a daily basis.

And as professional sports require a “killer” mentality to become the best in the game at the expense of the competition, it goes without saying that for every “winner” there are countless losers who simply aren’t good enough to fix the job and win the medals.

However, in normal jobs it is often much better when people cooperate intensively and when they trust and help each other fully in order to make the company as a whole benefit from the fruits of their labour. Where the topsports mentality leads to successes for a few persons, the rest feels victimized by it and loses confidence in their own abilities and in their mutual goals and dreams that drive the company as a whole. This could be devastating for the success of this company.

And there is more. Where the winners of the company – the executive board and the upper management levels of the company – celebrate their own achievements with extremely high and ever rising remunerations in a so-called remuneration race with other CEO’s and leading managers all around the globe, the salaries and wages of the normal workers remain at a very stable level. As a matter of fact, in many cases their annual payment rises are close to nought [when adjusted for inflation – EL].

For older workers (i.e. well above fifty) there is nowadays even the looming danger of ‘demotion’, in which they get an easier job (i.e. less requiring), but against a lower annual payment. It is not really a pretty prospect when you have three children in high school or at the university, when a substantial part of your paycheck may vanish in thin air, due to a lower remuneration.

The future for lower and middle class workers became more and more uncertain in general, as fixed jobs with lay off-protection became a luxury good, exclusively reserved for the higher echelons within the company. And former ‘lifetime’ jobs have been replaced for the uncertainty of an existence as either freelancer (i.e. ZZP’er in The Netherlands) or as a worker with only temporary contracts or zero hour contracts for a substantial number of  years in a row. The latter is now especially true for younger workers below their mid thirties, but also older workers, who were so unfortunate to lose their fixed job, have to deal with this situation more and more often.

And the labour unions – earlier strongholds of workers’ rights, fair remuneration and labour protection – are standing more and more offside in the labour negotiations as a consequence of the changing mentality among workers and employers. This is mainly caused by the union’s excessive focus on their ageing, 50+ member base and – on top of that – the changing labour contracts leaving less room for union membership. This led to a perfect catch 22-situation in which the youngsters didn’t feel represented by the unions anymore and as a consequence refused to become members of these labour unions.

You could say that the labour unions managed to squander their worker’s confidence and goodwill, as many younger workers now think that they don’t need them anymore and the unions are useless for their own labour situation. These workers are probably wrong, but it is quite understandable why they think so.

The waning popularity of the unions is exploited by the employers’ organizations, who seemingly take their chances to humiliate the unions during the (typical Dutch) general negotiations (i.e. ‘the polderoverleg’), in which the union’s and employers’ demands (including the government as large employer) for the coming years are negotiated.

The following snippets come from the Dutch newspaper Trouw:

The labour unions reacted furiously. That there were a lot of hurt feelings from the past, became clear in the reaction of FNV [i.e. largest Dutch labour union- EL] chairman Han Busker: “Now they do it again. First they continue with shifting all risks to their workers and making uncertain labour the standard modus operandi. After that the attack started against lay off-protection. And now they kick the can down the road with respect to the mutually made agreements from the Social Agreement (i.e. the Dutch society-wide general agreement between employers, workers and the government) of 2015. This is pure unwillingnesss. This is aiming for prolonged uncertainty”.

And CNV [second largest labour union - EL] chairman Maurice Limmen was also enraged: “Employers are busy with demolishing the polder. We had ironclad agreements with these employers that we would repair the unemployment benefit [for older workers – EL]. What are deals with employers worth now?! We had some concrete arrangements to start from. But now the employers are frustrating these deals. This is not how it works. Older employees and workers really deserve this security. When things continue like this, it makes no sense to continue the negotiations regarding the other urgent problems on the Dutch labour market.”

This news message is symptomatic for the waning influence of the labour unions and the abuse of this circumstance by the employer’s organizations, but also for the unhealthy focus of the labour unions on the older workers, as their almost exclusive grassroots. The younger workers feel not represented anymore by the labour unions, but by waving their union membership they make sure that they indeed are not represented by the labour unions anymore.  This is a very unhealthy situation.

Perhaps all these deteriorating circumstances form a good way to activate the top sports mentality and ‘killer approach’ among the workers, but in the end it will prove to be bad for the workers AND the companies themselves: I am actually quite certain about that.

The labour market as ‘survival of the fittest’ seems to be the favorite dream of many ambitious companies and management consultancy firms. The ‘World of LinkedIn, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, PWC and the Boston Consulting Group’ focuses solely on these “top sporters” and successful company sharks with skyhigh ambitions and no patience for less fortunate workers and in fact stimulates them in their “erratic” behaviour.

According to me, this leads to ubiquitous distrust and envy among workers and it rewards a ‘dog eat dog’ behaviour between people, who should in fact all be fighting for the same just cause, but often fail to do so, as they consider it not to be in their own interests.

I consider that counterproductive...

Not everybody is fit to be a ‘top sporter’ in his labour achievements and nobody should be forced to behave like one, unless it is his ultimate desire to become one. Perhaps in the end those companies are most successful that give their workers the security they need and the chance to be themselves and to improve themselves in a slow evolutionary way that feels natural and safe for them.

These are companies where doing the best you can is good enough, as long as you fit in the team and make the company as a whole better. No sports team can exist without the ‘water carriers’ who simply do their job well and require little attention and only the slightest compliment from their coaches.

And no company can either... For instance rowing on the Thames with only captains, helmsmen and lone rangers in the team and no ordinary rowers and teamplayers is no guarantee for success. To the contrary… And football teams with only stars and primadonna’s bring seldomly the success that their coaches and fans aim at.

I would advocate companies where good workers have the chance to excel in their jobs and just be good (or excellent) at it, without needing to have ambitions to reach higher and higher annually. When these workers want to grow, they should have all the chances, but if they don’t want to and they like their own job most, why should they always feel the obligation to grow?!

Even though that might seem counterproductive and even a catalyst for stagnation and (worse) decline of the company, it might be the contrary: happy and motivated workers will probably produce more and better products than unmotivated and scared workers, who constantly worry about their personal growth and their chances of being fired at the spot.

And there is more: please be so smart to pay workers for the increased productivity that they achieved in their hard hours of labour. In a country as The Netherlands, the wage development is nowhere near the productivity rise during the last fifteen years, as the following table shows. In this table I compared the general productivity increase in The Netherlands with the wage increase during the last 15 years.

Net wage development vs productivity growth 2001-2015
Data courtesy of Statline (powered by the
Central Bureau of Statistics: www.cbs.nl)
Click to enlarge

When one does not take the inflation into consideration, he could think that the wages increased much more than the productivity in The Netherlands. However, when the inflation (i.e. based upon the consumer price index) is taken into consideration, the total net wage increase between 2001 and 2015 was little more than 2.5%, against a productivity increase of 15.5%. This shows the substantial void between what employees produce and for what they are paid nowadays.

Due to wage restraint and job flexibilization, the wages of lower and middle  class workers have virtually stood still during the last fifteen years, while their productivity and thus the profits of their employers grew steady, by in average 1% per year.

Therefore it is time to pay the workers their share of this productivity increase, instead of focusing on shareholder value alone or on new and more modern computer systems and even robots to totally replace these employees within a few years. This should be a reward for their loyalty and for their will to give the best of themselves on a daily basis.

Motivated workers can still work wonders in a company, while computers and robots are very complex and therefore are often extremely hard to implement in an existing working situation. One could say that computers are in fact not always the best solution, in spite of the current state of technology.

And those top sporters among your personnel?! They are always extremely hard to keep within your company and their loyalty lies often with the person that pays the highest paycheck. There is no guarantee that it always will be you and your company...