Productivity in the workplace. Or is that satisfaction? I can't recall

Seeing as how I got to spend 14 hours of Saturday, 3 of Sunday, and then another 7 on today, Memorial Day, at work, it seems only appropriate to bump into this in today's Times. Lots of people lament about working and working conditions, and it seems as though the landmark cultural contributions involving the workplace have rollercoastered quite a bit [witness the plummet from 9 to 5, which was arguably more about sexism than working, to Office Space]. (For a dimestore cultural thinker like me, using movies as a benchmark to assess particular trends can be risky business. I haven't had anything to drink yet today, so forgive this sin.) So, is "Office Space" representative of the American working experience?

There have been lots of attempts to suggest that modern culture is killing us, and lots of them are mighty old. Think Modern Times or that bit in "The Grapes of Wrath" where the man on the tractor takes on an eerie, automaton quality that is described as inhuman [predictably, while looking for a quote of this, all I got were Cliffs Notes sites. Sigh]. These works suggest that humanity is stuck being cogs in some machine, as compared to some vague sense of free individualism and connectedness to the land or whatever. However, there are also usually some counterbalancing works that suggest things aren't all that bad or foster hope in some way. Which view is correct? Since there have always been movies or books criticizing the modernization of humanity [well, okay, at least since the Industrial Revolution], are we to ever really listen to their pleas? How can we tell if things are actually getting worse? Predictably, forays into the usual places won't even give you average hours worked per week, only % changes month-to-month. And examinations by other folk will suggest that there are few large-scale reported changes to the feds. So much for finding concrete evidence of work-related insanity. Be that what it may, you can find lots and lots of people point out that folks are working longer hours that are unaccounted for, only in their stress levels and neglected home lives. I'd toss out more, but this is all I get to go on today, having spent an hour wandering around the aforementioned Bureau of Labor Statistics site and found almost nothing to support my argument. Fortunately, we have lots of documentation on some of the trendsetters of American society, both in culture and management policies, to suggest I'm right. Given that the most competitive chains stoop to this sort of activity, ought we be surprised when everyone else does it? One can imagine capitalism as a microcosm of evolution: there's a lot of variation in the players, and natural selection on a subset of that variation [in the form of economic success]. Until government steps in, increasingly ruthless organizations will win out in the end. And, of course, are we to realistically expect that this government is going to do anything like that?

Of course not. Back to my 60-hour-a-week, $19,000-a-year-paying job.

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On a side note, this was actually the first time I'd ever blundered onto the RNC website. On the front page is an "amusing" game, Kerryopoly, which tries to suggest that the player can't hang with John Kerry's lifestyle on a $40,000-a-year budget. How exactly does the Republican Party think that it can align itself with working-class Americans? Their point man has spent about eight months of his presidency on vacation. Must be nice!

Not that I'm any huge fan of the Democrats, but I think Jimi Hendrix's dad said it best: "A black person voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."