Short Story or Fictionalized Journal based on Workforce Experience Assignment | Online Assignment

Start this assignment by composing several journal entries about workplace experiences you have had, or have heard about, focusing on people or events you may have found entertaining or disturbing. MAKE SURE YOU ARE WRITING THE EXPERIENCE IN TORONTO!!!! read the notes and THE CIRCUIT. follow the instructions carefully

Unit 4 Notes: Confusion in the Workplace

You can print the complete Unit Notes or individual Unit Notes by clicking on the “Print book” or “Print chapter” options located under the “Administration” block.

Reading

Boswell, S. (2012, May 12). Honest work: A look at the role of our work and our employers in our lives. [Review of the book The working life: The promise and betrayal of modern work, by J. Ciulla]. Baltimore Post-Examiner. Retrieved fromhttp://baltimorepostexaminer.com/honest-work-a-look-at-the-role-of-our-work-and-our-employers-in-our-lives/2012/05/10

Published taped monologue by an airline stewardess, Terry Mason (Terkel 2011 anthology)

Key Learning Points

In other units in this course, students have looked at problems associated with different kinds of work as expressed by fiction writers and journalists. But scholars, researchers, and university professors have also analysed workplace and have also pointed to texts that dramatize the meaning of work in people’s lives. Social and cultural historians have summed up the theme of alienation in modern work, partially caused by the dislocation between emotional wellbeing in private life and unnatural control of emotions at work.

In a book called The working life: The promise and betrayal of modern work, Joanne Ciulla, a management studies expert, states “We have gone beyond the work ethic, which endowed work with moral value, and now dangerously depend on our jobs to be the primary source of our identity, the mainspring of individual self-esteem and happiness” (p. xi). Moreover, corporations define individuals’ sense of identity: “Work was a place where corporations molded employees into corporate citizens. Corporations battled alienation between work and life and sometimes won by making work a larger part of one’s life” (p. 108). She asks readers to consider if “the man at work became the man at home” (p. 110).

To rest from meaningless work, in the 1970s blue collar workers turned to television sitcoms for relaxation, but there they found echoes of the same social reality. Fiction also (for example: the novel called The man in the gray flannel suit) shows white collar workers struggling to be themselves even as they have to conform at work. When the U.S. set up studies of workplace, the results were disturbing; workers felt that corporations treated them like “replaceable machine parts” (p. 119). Some also said that “they become frustrated and angry when management makes stupid strategic decisions” (p. 122).

Perhaps the hardest act of private management, however, is the control of emotions. Reacting to others we work with can lead to a sort of hell! Some managers think they can act and speak out of anger but soon discover their promotions do not give that privilege. Experts speak of transforming emotions into “commodities that have market value” (p. 124). If people do not produce the product they are selling, the may feel they do not have the intellect to take ownership and they do not want to continue showing good cheer and friendliness in serving others. Individuals do not feel connected to the likeability aspects of their work. For instance, “flight attendants, who sell a variety of feelings such as security and comfort, and bill collectors, who specialize in producing fear and intimidation” speak of the toll that this role playing takes on them (p. 125).

In the case of Terry Mason, employee in the airline industry, the social mobility of international travel and glamorous life styles are matched by the rudeness of customers and exploitation on the job. Of course, since the 1970s when this interview was published in the Terkel book on workers, gender roles have altered substantially, with a name change of job from stewardess to flight attendant and unions that demand reasonable work shifts. In reading her account, you can see other ways in which her job changed from her early days in training to work as a married woman on aircraft.  She reveals also the ways in which she learned to resist oppression and to achieve personal empowerment when she was threatened by male customers who saw her as a prostitute. Overall, she seems to have kept her job partly because her sisters and other family admired her success.

Things to Work On

• Make a list of ways in which you believed you have learned and developed at work; compose a second list of ways in which you have been disempowered in various jobs.
• A second task might lead to a self-inventory of past and present situations at work in your life and in the lives of other family members. Overall, all people more empowered in their jobs than they were in the past? Have changes in women’s lives contributed to that shift or had the reverse effect?
• Free writing on ways to improve customer service can also be thought provoking. What might lead customers to feel their needs are being met could, at the same time, undermine the integrity (or wholeness and wellness) of employees.
• Consider other studies on workplace, especially those that focus on the topics of multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, and “take your soul to work.” Some workplaces provide space also for spiritual activities.

Reference

Ciulla, J. B. (2000). The working life: The promise and betrayal of modern work. New York, NY: Times Books.