Dialogue: Workplace key to healing society

I am not at all surprised at the positive, enthusiastic and continuing response to "the jobs challenge" thrown out by the Herald a couple of weeks ago. Because of our heritage, the work ethic is deeply ingrained in most of us.

With a few exceptions, we Kiwis want to work, we like to work, we are imaginative, creative, inventive, conscientious and determined, and take satisfaction, pride even, from a job well done.

Well, that's how it used to be. Just when the rot set in I'm not sure, but it has accelerated in the past 15 years, since Roger Douglas dropped his economic bombshell.

There was a time when everyone, employer and worker alike, understood without being told that work was not just an economic contract but a social contract as well, not just a means of making profits for the bosses but of providing workers and their families with a lifestyle of their choice and a chance to improve it.

Employers and their personnel departments, with odd exceptions, understood that the better you treated workers, both in wages and conditions, the more loyal and productive they were.

Many firms - be they in the primary, secondary, retail or service industries - were like extended families. They had active, well-subsidised social and sporting clubs, non-profit credit unions, subsidised superannuation schemes, from which whole families benefited.

And the boss or his personnel manager was always available to discuss personal matters such as deaths or sickness in the family, sudden tragedies or emergencies, financial problems, even mortgage needs.

Granted, there was competition in the job market - that wonderful situation where jobs outnumbered people - and employers, who understood the fundamental business principle that their staffs were their greatest assets, had a vested interest in keeping good workers happy and settled.

I suppose the cracks in that idyllic situation started in the 1960s when militant unions, to which all workers were forced to belong, began to make more and more outrageous demands and the employers got brassed off and said, "Stuff you lot."

People like me, who never wanted to and didn't need to be a member of a union - I knew my worth as a journalist - had to play along or be ostracised and out of a job. And the bosses also had to put up with control-freak governments mandating general wage orders every year, based not on productivity but on the rate of inflation.

Then along came laissez-faire capitalism à la Douglas and that put the final nail in the coffin of the social-contract dimension of the employer-worker relationship.

Among its most sinister auguries, personnel departments became passé and took on that inhuman title of "human resources." Thus did the far right meet the far left and workers began to be seen not as people but as what Karl Marx defined as "economic units."

And it's been all downhill since then until today, when in many if not most workplaces workers are seen simply as bums on seats with a mind and a pair of hands to make the boss richer, and the soulless bean-counters and number-crunchers list staff as a liability.

I am convinced that the breaking of the social contract between employer and worker has been one of the biggest contributors to the more general breakdown of the structures of society - marriage, family, neighbourhood, community.

But I detect - and the response to the Herald's jobs challenge tends to confirm it - that the tide is turning again.

There have been firms - all of which remained highly successful and profitable - that have never broken the social contract. A few weeks ago we learned that there are a number of businesses, Woolworths among them, which have gone to great lengths to restore it.

And this week and last a number of contributors of jobs challenge articles on this page, and writers of letters to the editor, have gone past emphasis on those tired old ideologies of the free market - profits, overseas investment, exports, imports, knowledge economies et al - and have written in terms that make me believe that the employer-worker relationship is on the way to being restored to its rightful place in society at large.

It will be a two-way street. On the part of workers, be they represented by a union or not, there will be no room for slackers, thieves, liars or incompetents. On the part of employers, be they indigenous or invaders, there will be no room for deceit or exploitation of any sort.

I am convinced that revival of a social contract in the workplace would not only go a long way towards meeting the jobs challenge but would help considerably to mend many of the fractures in our beleaguered society.

garth_george@herald.co.nz