Belonging2

The Army of the Dissatisfied

Total devotion to work risks being considered the most appropriate answer to the desire for happiness, but the obsessive careerist cuts out a piece of reality. Mario Sala talks about this

BY MARCO BISCELLA

We have to make people proud to belong to this company, to this brand.” How many times in a meeting with the department head, chatting with some “zealous” coworker, or at an internal seminar on the new company goals, have we heard these words? In effect, one of the outposts of life in which the word “belonging” plays a crucial role is right in the workplace. For Hannah Arendt, work was a coin with two sides: on one side, it was suffered as a constriction, and on the other it was lived as something constructive. Often, today, only the former aspect seems to prevail.
We spend many hours of the day on the job, and in order to work we sign a contract when we are hired. But is it right for someone to “belong” to the company where he works? A word has even been invented–“workaholic”–to describe a person who falls completely apart when he is not working. His “I” consists only of the things that someone else (his department head, his boss, his company’s mission statement passively absorbed on the job) has ordered him to do. And in America, the new frontier seems to be precisely this: work is everything.

Brutal career
“ Today, more and more,” says Mario Sala, a partner at Praxis Management, a management consulting firm, “the idea is emerging that one belongs to his job, like in the past it was said that one belonged to the organization. Thus, in the big multinational corporations, there is no mission statement that does not include a sense of belonging alongside other key concepts like quality, customer satisfaction, and team spirit. In this way, they unload all the expectations for self-fulfillment onto the job, as though work could, in and of itself, be the most appropriate answer to the desire for happiness.”
What are the practical consequences? Sala does not hesitate to list them: “From this comes the idea of the brutal career. People go crazy trying to climb up a rung on the ladder of success. This is a form of dependence, a total devotion dictated only by the need to hear someone say, ‘You’re good, I love you.’ But being loved for one’s ability to do something is truly the end. The person is reduced to a human resource.”
Nonetheless–as research by Manpower, the American firm active in the area of temporary employment, has shown–attachment to the corporation is growing, because professional loyalty on the part of employees is considered an element of success. This metamorphosis can be seen above all in young people who are looking for jobs. Today, their real obsession, their real mania is professional growth. “If you do not have a job that makes you grow professionally, if you do not have the myth of working for a big company, i.e., in a big organization,” Sala emphasizes, “you are considered a loser. Thus, the choice of employment becomes a drama.”

Without soft skills
Anyone who spends time visiting the websites that deal with human resources development will discover that the leitmotiv is a sort of happiness to be pursued: “You [the job-seeker] are unhappy because you are unsuccessful. And you are unsuccessful because you are not capable, you lack the soft skills (the ability to listen, engage in dialogue, get others involved and motivated, etc.). Come to us and you will learn better skills and thus be happier.” It’s simple, isn’t it? Not at all. And confirmation comes from a poll taken by International Survey Research, which reveals that people feel uninvolved, unmotivated, and stressed out in their jobs. They are an army of dissatisfied people who present themselves punctually at work every day but don’t bring their hearts with them.
"But the slacker and the person obsessed with work,” Sala adds, “are two sides of the same coin. Work is nothing, says one. Work is everything, replies the other. Both, however, are forced to cut out a piece of reality, to eliminate the search for meaning for themselves and their work."
For work, as Fr Giussani reminds us in The “I,” Power, and Works is a need. It involves the heart, i.e., the needs that make up a person. And the desires that are born in the heart, precisely because they make up the person, open wide onto the infinite; they aim at fulfilling the whole person. In short, as Sala says, “Today we need Péguy’s chair. That is, we need the idea of work as the expression of the person, the expression of a civilization.”
So let’s read Charles Péguy: “Once upon a time, workers were not serfs. They worked. They cultivated an honor that was absolute, as is proper to honor. A chair leg had to be well-made. It was natural, it was understood. It was a supreme value. It was not necessary that the chair leg be well-made for one’s salary or in proportion to one’s salary. It did not need to be well-made for the boss, connoisseurs, or the boss’s customers. It had to be well-made for itself, in itself, in its very nature. They demanded that the leg be well-made. And every part of the chair that was not visible was worked with the same perfection as the parts that could be seen, in accordance with the same principle by which cathedrals were built.”