The Servitude Language of Corporations and Managers

I was reading Don’t Let Employees Pick Their WFH Days and, like so many other articles of this kind, am struck by the use of “servitude” language when speaking of employees. Or, to use the more politically incorrect term, “master/slave” language. As Merriam-Webster defines servitude: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one’s course of action or way of life.

Examples:

How much choice should workers have in the matter?

When someone curtails the freedom of choice of another, that is control, and in the workplace, servitude.

On the one hand, many managers are passionate that their employees should determine their own schedule.

While that sentence sounds rather positive, the subtle message here is that managers have control over their employees schedule.

after talking to hundreds of organizations over the last year, have led me to change my advice from supporting to being against employees’ choosing their own WFH days.

“against employees’ choosing” – servitude.

So I have changed my mind and started advising firms that managers should decide which days their team should WFH. For example, if the manager picks WFH on Wednesday and Friday

Just amazing to me, the idea that someone else can have such control over my life.

Thankfully, there is this manager:

One manager told me “I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work, as long as they get their jobs done.”

An employer/employee relationship is an agreement that among other things usually includes an expectation of work hours. Where the work is done can be explicitly stated (and often the work must be done in “the office”, but it is also frequently ill-defined. However, in many cases, particularly in the tech industry, the requirement to work at the office is entirely arbitrary. It is often prejudiced, with managers having more flexibility to work from home than the non-manager employees. It is often arbitrary, where one manager in the organization is very flexible regarding work-from-home and another manager is a militant about his team working in the office.

I have been lured into employment in the past with a stated “very flexible work from home schedule” during the interview, only to find myself “managed” by a militant dictator who doesn’t allow any work from home.

I have worked successfully as a contractor for 20 years, where it is illegal to require the contractor to work on premise unless required by the work itself.

And I have worked for companies where the response to working from home is “no problem!”

During the pandemic, I have had the luxury (many do not) of being able to work from home. This has dramatically and ironically improved the quality of my life. I live in a very rural, artistic, community. Working from home has afforded me the luxury of meeting with people in my pod with much greater flexibility. This includes artistic presentations, outdoor gatherings, and so forth, that I would have missed if I were in the office from 8 to 5 (all of course following the guidelines of the CDC.) And simple things as well, like running an errand during lunchtime or even when I just need to take a break and think about a problem away from the computer screen.

At the other extreme, 21% tell us they never want to spend another day working from home. These are often young single employees or empty nesters in city center apartments.

Corporations and their managers need to embrace diversity, as everyone’s individual needs are different.

They [managers] often confided that home-based employees in their teams get passed over on promotions because they are out of touch with the office … given the evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can be highly damaging to your career.

This isn’t the responsibility of the employee to fix. It is the responsibility of the company and the managers.

While we have laws against slavery, in many ways working for corporate America is a silent, permissible, accepted form of servitude, and like slavery, does not recognize the free human being. While often we have little or no choice regarding the employer for which we work, that does not mean that the employer should treat us with any less human dignity.

To conclude, Merriam-Webster has this to say:

Servitude is slavery or anything resembling it. The entire black population of colonial America lived in permanent servitude. And millions of the whites who populated this country arrived in “indentured servitude”, obliged to pay off the cost of their journey with several years of labor. Servitude comes in many forms, of course: in the bad old days of the British navy, it was said that the difference between going to sea and going to jail was that you were less likely to drown in jail.

So I ask, why are we so willing to pay off the cost of “our journey through life” in servitude, rather than the antonyms of servitude. freedom, liberty? What are managers so afraid of?

Is Emerson’s Self-Reliance a Cosmic Joke on the Rest of us?

Really. Is Emerson not laughing in his grave?

Emerson begins (thereabouts) with:

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

And yet, here we are, in some circles quoting Emerson the bard, Emerson the sage, and do we not feel shame in taking our opinion from him rather than our own genius? He must be laughing in his grave.

Who actually has the time to wade through all this eloquence? How, if it all, does it apply to our world, 180 years later, where social media, news media, politicians, doctors, scientists — the entire plethora of so-called “experts” — is constant bombarding us with “this is how and what you should think.” Where 180 years have gone by and scientific, medical, social and economic advancement has occurred because thinking has been built upon other thinking rather than each person going off on their own direction willy-nilly and progressing no further than the threshold of their own personal cave.

Emerson concludes with:

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

As John of Salisbury wrote almost 1000 (yes, one thousand!!!) years ago (in 1159): “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.” The phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” has become a metaphor which means “Using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress.” (wikipedia)

No, my dear Emerson, not our feet, not our head, but rather standing on the shoulder of giants.

So, if you read Emerson’s Self-Reliance, read it with the idea that, if you think he was a giant, you are standing on his shoulders and will make your own moral and intellectual progress. Just try not to be so long-winded about it.

The COVID-19 Spike Protein and Vascular Disease and the mRNA Vaccine

The CDC says this about the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine¹:

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines give instructions for our cells to make a harmless piece of what is called the “spike protein.” The spike protein is found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID-19.

In a paper published 4/30/2021 in Circulation Research, summarized by SciTechDaily², we read:

Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that they also play a key role in the disease itself…

…the paper provides clear confirmation and a detailed explanation of the mechanism through which the protein damages vascular cells for the first time...

…In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls.

From those excerpts, and the parts that I underlined, it would seem to be a logical conclusion that the mRNA vaccine also causes vascular disease. How could it not? Doesn’t the vaccine cause the cells in your body to manufacture the same spike protein that the Salk researchers found to be the cause of vascular disease?

What am I missing? It’s confusing to read “…classic crown of spike proteins…” (plural) but then “…that the spike protein alone…” (singular), as the question is, well, is one or all of the spike proteins that cause vascular disease, and if it’s only one, then is it the same protein that the mRNA vaccine causes your cells to produce?

If anything, this is why we need open disclosure – what spike protein does the mRNA vaccine produce, and what spike protein (or proteins) did the Salk researches work with?

If anyone who reads this post knows, please leave a comment, and with your sources!

Sources

¹ – https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html

² – https://scitechdaily.com/covid-19-is-a-vascular-disease-coronavirus-spike-protein-attacks-vascular-system-on-a-cellular-level/