AU’s ergo program symptomatic of organizational dysfunction

Almost 100% of staff at Athabasca University (AU) work from home, at least part of the time. This is up from about 50% prior to COVID. The shift to permanent home offices was partially motivated by the cost savings associated with shifting operating costs (e.g., office space and equipment, utilities) onto workers.

The sudden move to working at home in March of 2020 due to COVID resulted in significant concerns among workers about both the financial and ergonomic implications of home work. Three years later, AU has launched new, online ergonomic training for staff.

Essentially, staff have been told to take online training and figure out how to adjust their home workplaces to be ergonomically adequate by April 30th. A key question is whether AU will fund any necessary purchases to make a home office ergonomically adequate? The answer is, of course, no.

Will there be additional funding to support any needs identified as a result of this assessment?
No. All home-office-based team members have been provided with Home Office Support Funding. This included $1,000 in 2020 and another $1,000 in 2022. Team members will be provided with an additional $800 Evergreening Fund every 6 years.

It was certainly appropriate for AU to respond to shifting operating costs onto workers in 2020 with a small, taxable payment (which might have bought a desk and chair and lamp). The taxable 2022 payment of $1000 (or $800) was negotiated in lieu of a wage increase so was essentially self-funding by workers.

In both cases, that money has already been spent by most workers. For this reason, it is not available to resolve any current ergonomic issues. (This reflects that AU rolled out the training and payment in the wrong order.)

Overall, this initiative is pretty typical of AU:

• A long-standing problem is addressed belatedly and inadequately.
• The workers are made responsible for solving the employer’s problem (i.e., unsafe workplaces).
• The employer gaslights the workers about it, in this case by referencing financial assistance that is only available if you have a time machine.

So what are AU workers likely going to do? Some staff will take the training, either because they are rule followers or because they are being explicitly paid to do so (e.g., tutors). I expect the rest of staff won’t bother to take it or will take it but not implement many of the recommended changes because it will require them to spend their own money to solve an institutional problem.

This program (which is, at least superficially, a good idea) is a microcosm of how AU operates. Essentially, the administration “talks away” problems instead of addressing them and staff learn to tune out or superficially comply. The result is widespread distrust of leaders and staff disengagement.

The aftermath of the 2022 staff engagement survey results (released two weeks ago) pretty much mirrors this. Staff disengagement has been identified as such an issue it was added to the institutional threat register at last week's Board of Governor's meeting. That doesn't mean anything is being done to fix it, though.

Senior executives are heavily messaging that the results are “sobering” but not actually doing anything about it. This is the performative “talking away” of problems that fixes nothing. Staff are, of course, onto this strategy, with only 30% believing senior leaders will do anything, because successive executives have talked away problems for years and years:



Middle managers seem to be taking two approaches to the results. Some are earnestly (I think) asking for staff feedback. This ask is basically flopping because of the long-standing “big bosses who cried wolf” dynamic to problems. For example, in my meeting of people who are basically lead hands, there was just dead silence in response to the ask for feedback. Others middle managers are framing the results as a consequence of inadequate communications.

It is true that gaslighting and victim blaming are communications strategies that are inadequate. But, since this approach has gone on for most of a decade and intensified over time, it is likely this is an intentional strategy, not some sort of oopsie. Last week’s framing of engagement by the HR director as “good” because it encourages staff to work harder is essentially an admission that the employer doesn’t care about staff except as the means to an end.

For staff, disengagement (whether active or passive) is a very sensible response to a traumatizing workplace. The other response I’m seeing is people over-engaging, which is leading to burn out. This is pretty hard to watch, but perhaps some people need to hit rock bottom before they’ll change their behaviour. I know that I did.

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca U staff engagement results are predictably terrible

This morning, Athabasca University released some of the results from its Autumn 2022 staff survey. The survey was about staff engagement, engagement means how willing staff are to put in discretionary effort to benefit the organization. AU framing its interest in workers as entirely instrumental was unexpected honest and went over poorly.

The basic talking points of the presenters were

• The data is four months old (i.e., things may not be as bad as the results suggest!).
• There is high trust among co-workers.
• All staff need to work hard and take responsibility for reversing these poor results.

This framing elides that staff fundamentally do not trust AU senior leaders (see below), who play a pretty important role in creating the circumstances in which staff might (or might not) be able to work effectively. Anyhow, onto the results (apologies for the poor resolution; you can click on them for larger images). There was a 70% response rate, which is higher than sector norms.



Overall, about half of staff appear engaged. The biggest thing to note are the ~20% drop in that numbers since 2020. There was no explanation offered for this change but key events during that time include COVID (massive workload increases), forced relocation to home offices, efforts to bust the faculty association and deprive people of pensions, terrible wage settlements after a near strike, and using staff as hostages in a fight with the government. Given this, it is not surprising that many staff are just throwing up their hands and checking out.

Scores were broken out by different dimensions of engagement. Basically, people have good feelings about their coworkers and immediate managers. They have bad feelings about the senior leadership and how well the organization lives its values, focuses on learners, and innovates. Again, the drops really tell the tale of the deterioration since 2020.



Only about half of staff believe the institution lives its i-CARE values. There have been 11- to 18-point drops since 2020. Honestly, I’m surprised the drops have not been larger.

These results show pretty clearly that the staff see the gaps between values and actions as occurring primarily at the leadership levels.

In terms of organizational culture, these are some worrying results about caring, safety, and consultation. Again, it’s the leadership of the organization that primarily controls these aspects of the organization. The idea that staff can change the culture through some sort of personal-responsibility magic is just gaslight.



The innovation results are also quite negative. Again, look at the drops over time. I would say this manifests itself organizational in a sense that people are just giving up trying to solve problems and improve processes because it is just hopeless. Instead, some people are giving up and others are working themselves sick trying to protect students from the impact (which is not a sustainable option).

This is probably the most important slide. The assessment of senior leadership is terrible. Naturally, these results got less than a minute of discussion. On almost every dimension, the ratings are net negative (positive < negative) and, where there is historical data, it again shows profound drops over time. In many cases, AU’s executive is scoring at close to half of the sector average.

This is pretty clear evidence that staff see profound leadership failure. Only 29% agree that senior leaders inspire employees, and only 32% think senior leaders effectively establish priorities, do what they say they will do, and are adequately visible. This is a clear call for a housecleaning in the executive suite.

Only 30% think senior leadership will act on the issues identified in this survey. This was almost immediately shown to be true when, after the results were presented, the president, the VPA and the acting chief human resources officer all leaned hard on the message that the issue was a communications problem and the staff need to pull up our socks and work harder to help stem the bleeding of enrollments. While there was some lip service to the results as “sobering”and "removing barriers" to staff increasing discretionary effort, there was no real plan to address the problems or any sense that the executive was owning the results.

This is pretty consistent with AU’s past engagement surveys (2020 and 2019). The time between surveys was increased to two years to allow for a meaningful consideration and response by the executive. There was, predictably, none. And today’s presentation suggests AU’s executive are going to continue just try to “talk away” bad news instead of changing their behaviours.

That doesn’t sound like a very effective strategy to me. The staff reactions I've heard so far include anger at the victim blaming, disappointment at the vapid sloganeering, and regret for the hour of time we all wasted listening to the results.

-- Bob Barnetson

AU sacks its president, but problems continue

Yesterday, Athabasca University terminated the employment of its president, Peter Scott, and appointed the dean of health disciplines as its fourth president in three years (cough, cough). The university has declined to explain why it chose to pay Scott half a year’s salary to go way. According to the Board chair’s content-free and nearly incoherent statement:

Dr. Scott did his part in the puzzle and we're moving forward with Dr. Clark just to continue to grow the university.

Internally, this is seen as political payback (likely orchestrated by the UCP government) for Scott’s opposition to the UCP’s demands that the university locate jobs in the university’s home town of Athabasca. Among the people I have talked to, there are several themes emerging.

First, the timing of the announcement (weeks after Scott’s wife died) is rightly seen as cruel and heartless, which is pretty much on brand for the UCP. The Board chair attempted to explain the timing to the CBC:

Scott's firing by the board comes nearly three weeks after his wife died of cancer. She had just been diagnosed in early December.

"It's terrible," Nelson said. "We have given him some time to deal with that before today."

"Unfortunately, the business of the world, including the business of Athabasca University, goes forward," he said.

"This was a step we had to make. I will continue to treat Dr. Scott with all the respect that he deserves and he does deserve respect in this time."

This reads like "we had a plan to sack him awhile ago, but when his wife died, so we had to wait until the heat was off." This is grossly indecent behaviour and is a real "mask-off" moment.

Second, none of the workers seem particularly upset by Scott getting the boot. The “highlights” of Scott’s time at AU include signing a lockout notice to help the government drive rollbacks during a sham round of collective bargaining and then turning around and stupidly fighting a stupid fight with the same government over the jobs in Athabasca issue. There is, indeed, a palpable level of glee watching a boss get treated as badly as he treated the staff and calls for more bosses to get the boot.

Drawing on (I presume) beauty-pageant conventions, the Board then appointed a runner-up from the last competition as the new president. The latest president faces a lot of big problems.

Enrollment is falling which means the university, after implementing every saving and revenue-generation strategy it could come up with, is still $5m short going into the next fiscal year. There appears to be no coherent explanation for this decline and, consequently, no real plan.

Last week, program directors were told that they would need to review hundreds of invalid and unreliable student evaluations and then use this garbage data to make changes to their courses. Presumably, the logic was that enrollment declines are, at least in part, the fault of faculty course design choices.

Then the next day that plan was scrubbed. That example is part of a consistent pattern of spastic and ill-thought out management decision-making, where staff are basically treated like rental cars (i.e., pin the gas, hammer the brakes, slam it into the curb, who cares about the damage). Years of this kind of shoddy leadership plus the demands of COVID have result is catastrophically low morale, deep cynicism, and burnout.

The university has not yet released the results of its staff survey in the fall (gee, I wonder why…?) but evidence of how bad the results are all around us. Some staff are burning themselves out trying to keep pace with the relentless demand. Some staff are outright quitting. I would say the largest number are just quiet quitting and doing the minimum. I don't know how you turn that kind of deep disengagement around. 

The university’s biggest initiative is the Integrated Learning Environment (ILE). This is basically a software system (called Brightspace), which is supposed to replace our current teaching platform (called Moodle) and other IT systems. AU runs 800+ courses and all were supposed to be migrated to Brightspace by the end of March.

As of last week, about 20 courses had been successfully migrated. From what I can tell, these are all very simple, low-enrollment courses (like one or two students). Another 250 are underway, but about 50 of these are “on hold”, which seems to be code for “oh shit, Brightspace can’t do what we need it to and we don’t know how to fix it.”

This failure to launch seems to reflect that the bosses didn’t do a good job of selecting the new software or grasping the difficulty the migration entails (because they don’t really know how the place works and they don’t trust the staff who do). I am hearing talk that it may take up to two more years to complete this transition.

The new president could make some major gains in credibility by just admitting the ILE project failed and firing the execs in charge of the mess. This might also save the university enough money that it could avoid what is increasingly looking like layoffs. I don’t hold much hope of that because the sunk-cost fallacy is basically AU’s operational mantra.

-- Bob Barnetson

Athabasca U survey reveals lack of trust in senior executive

Earlier this spring, Athabasca University undertook an external survey of staff engagement. The results are below the industry average and entail significant skepticism about the trustworthiness of AU’s senior leadership. For those who didn’t attend the presentations in mid-July and don’t have an hour to spend watching the video, here is a quick summary.

The consultant making the presentation took pains to note that engagement differs from satisfaction. Engagement is intended to heightened workers’ emotional and intellectual connection with the employer in order to increase employees’ discretionary effort. I’m not sure openly seeking to manipulate workers’ behaviour is super motivating, but, hey, at least the consultant was honest about the intent.

The response rate was 55% (610 responses), which missed the goal of 80% and was lower than the 2014 response rate of 68%. The response rate does match the industry benchmark (public and private colleges and universities) of 54%. The consultant asserted that 45% non-response was likely not significant because the non-respondents’ answers likely mirror the respondents’ answers.

I suspect there is likely a systematic difference between those who filled out the survey and those who didn’t. And it probably centres on the respondents’ level of engagement. Surely such a difference that would be surely germane to the results of… an engagement survey. I suspect that a complete picture would add to the negative side of the ledger.

Overall, AU scored consistently below industry benchmarks on all dimensions of engagement. The bottom half of the figure below shows significant problems with communication, student focus, teamwork, and senior leadership. (Orange is bad throughout the figures.)

The consultant largely dismissed these negative scores as common issues (despite the deviation from the benchmarks) and not particularly relevant to driving engagement (key dimensions being professional growth, organizational vision and senior leadership). Setting aside the issue of whether engagement is a valid concept, from a common-sense perspective, these scores are bad news.

Questions specific to AU’s I-CARE values were asked. (Apologies for the murkiness of the screen grab.) The most interesting finding is that only 46% of respondents believe that AU executive behave in way that is consistent with the values that the executive created as part of its Imagine-ary strategic plan.

When asked about senior leadership (basically the university’s executive), only 39% of respondents believe that senior leaders act consistently (i.e., do as they say). This is 13% below the benchmark. And only 43% of staff have trust and confidence in the exec’s ability to achieve the goals of Athabasca University, 15% below benchmark.

Only half of respondents agreed the executive clearly communicates their goals, 5% below benchmark. Only 48% believed executive set ambitious but realistic goals, 10% below benchmark. The open-ended comments provided by respondents will not be shared with staff (even though historically such comments were shared). The consultant did note that a key demand expressed in the comments was for communication that was not so highly torqued by spin.

An example of this is the president’s bi-weekly email (“Neil’s Notes”), which is clichéd, saccharine, studiously avoids commenting on contentious (i.e., internally important) issues at the university, and sometimes borders on incomprehensible. After a year of trying to see value in it, Neil's Notes now goes directly to my junk folder.

Despite the endless communication from the university, there remain communication problems. For example, only 43% of respondents understand what needs to be done for AU to succeed in the long term. This is 10% below benchmark. 

There also appear to be issues around innovation. Only 40% of respondents agreed that there was a culture of innovation at AU, 16% below benchmark. Only 43% agreed that AU systematically adopts new and improved ways to work (17% below benchmark). 

Respondents also flagged concerns about limited professional growth opportunities. According to the consultant, low scores here often indicate disengagement (but not a 45% non-response rate?).

There are apparently significant differences between groups at AU but these differences will also not be provided to all staff. The results for the IT unit were presented to IT staff last Wednesday and were notably worse than the institutional average. This is surprising given that 20% of the unit comprises new hires who should not be jaded so soon.

The consultant confirmed that the recent and unpleasant round of faculty collective bargaining was on the minds of some respondents and likely contributed to the poor results.

Only the president and HR director get to see the written comments. The irony of telling staff to trust the senior exec to correctly interpret and act on comments collected on a survey where staff indicated they demonstrably don't trust the senior exec has not been lost on the staff I’ve spoken to about this. The father-knows-best vibe is playing poorly among workers, who are used to drawing their own conclusions about what information means.

This survey does help quantify the morale problem that is clearly evident to anyone who works inside AU. Given the effort made to improve AU’s culture by the current executive (which at this point seem to have degenerated to sloganeering about some imaginary “oneAU” and calling staff “AU team members”), this survey demonstrates the executive’s approach is not effective. 

A question that was not asked in the presentations was why the Board re-appointed the president before the Board received these results (or, indeed, even had the survey conducted)? When this was asked last fall, the answer was the president’s review had to be done quickly to meet government mandate for a new contract. Whether or not it is true, that explanation is being greeted with eye rolls and disbelief. This level of cynicism is the organizational equivalent of cancer.

Perhaps a rethink by the executive of their approach is in order over the summer? With all three unions likely in collective bargaining in the next 18 months and the slow drain of jobs from the Athabasca area continuing, morale and organizational effectiveness are unlikely to improve with a status quo approach.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture Finale: Discretionary Effort and the Wage-Effort Bargain

This week’s instalment of Labour & Pop Culture explores the issue of discretionary effort and the wage-effort bargain. Basically, every job has components that are voluntary—where workers go above and beyond what is required because they are intrinsically motivated to do a good job.

Discretionary effort is one part of the wage-effort bargaining—how hard employees will work given prevailing wages and working conditions. When employers change wages or working conditions, this often violates the psychological contract employees have with their boss.

The clip above (from Christmas Vacation) humorously illustrates how workers view such violations. A violation, in turn, can trigger a re-evaluation of the wage-effort bargain and perhaps a reduction in discretionary effort.

Which brings us to today. Athabasca University is being pretty terrible to its faculty members at the bargaining table. There isn’t much individual workers can do in terms of withdrawing their labour without engaging in an illegal strike. But we can individually withdraw voluntary services.

For me, that is the Labour & Pop Culture component of this blog. These posts have always been something I did on my lunch hours to add some levity to the more serious posts I make about labour issue (which stream into my courses for pedagogical purposes).

I just can’t justify doing extra work for an employer that talks about respect and then advances proposals like company doctors. So I've decided to start actually taking my lunch hour. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as I have enjoyed offering it.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Why do workers take safety risks?

One of the more vexing aspects of workplace injury is when workers appear to disregard safety hazards and protocols and expose themselves to occupational hazards. Employer apologists often weaponize such events by blaming the victim of injuries.

I recently ran across an article entitled “Why Do Workers Take Safety Risks?—A Conceptual Model for the Motivation Underpinning Perverse Agency” that proposes a model by which we might understand worker decision making when faced with dangerous routine and novel tasks. The full text of the article appears to be available online if you want to read it.

The crux of the article is:

This Risk, Agency, and Safety & Health (RASH) model proposes that people willingly expose themselves to chronic injuries via a series of risk-taking processes.

This causal chain starts with personal motivation and over-alignment with organisational purpose (including impression management).

Ideally, that motivation would be moderated by an ability to predict future harm consequences from the task at hand, but that mechanism is weak because it is difficult to predict cause and effect, the consequences are too far in the future, and the opportunities for vicarious learning are few.

The motivation then causes misdirected creativity, hence the development of personally novel ways of solving the problem, albeit with greater risk of harm. Perverse agency then sustains actions that exposure the person to harm.

The paper does focus a lot on workers’ decision making and the underlying motives. But there is acknowledgement that worker decisions do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, workers’ approaches to tasks and safety may be negatively influenced by “over-alignment with organizational purpose” and the reward and cultural structure of the workplace (which are management creations).

Further, the nature of many occupational injuries may retard workers’ ability to grasp the consequences of the behaviour and adjust accordingly. Overall, a thought-provoking analysis of decision-making around safety.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Darth Vader's Performance Assessment

It's summer and, honestly, I got nothing left this week so enjoy some Star Wars-related labour stuff. Especially the mission statement stuff.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Incentive Pay at the Office

This week's instalment of Labour & Pop Culture looks at incentive-pay systems as portrayed on the television show The Office. I'm currently revising AU's introductory human resource management course and incentive pay is one of the topics we touch on.

The basic idea, as noted by one of the workers in the sketch, is that the employer wants more production out of the workers without paying them more. So manager Andy sets up a points system whereby workers can win low-value prizes for achieving performance targets.

Incentive-based pay sounds like a good idea, but it is fraught with peril for employers because designing an effective system is tricky. Set rewards too low and they have no effect. Set rewards too high and they can drive all sorts of perverse behaviour, such as increasing quantity at the expense of quality.

The Office does a nice job of noting that the interests of workers and employers conflict in such systems and that workers can, if they work collectively, subvert these systems. This is a good lesson for wannbe managers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Darth Vader's Performance Review

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is an audio-skit entitled “Darth Vader's Employee Evaluation. I’ve been incorporating pop-culture representations of human resource management functions into a revision of the intro to HR course that I coordinate because comedy often reveals unspoken truths about the workplace.



The key joke in the skit is the HR advisor asserting that Vader’s constant force-choking of his subordinates is harming the operational effectiveness of the Empire. The advisor’s suggestion of a more encouraging-management style (“maybe give them a pat on the back?”) is greeted with a very honest reply from Vader: “I don’t understand. How would that kill them?”

The workplace dynamic that this skit hits on (although perhaps not intentionally) is that performance management is essentially one arm of the employer trying to get employees to act in a way that is completely illogical to the worker given the broader structure of rewards and penalties in the workplace created by another arm of the employer.

Specifically, the advisor ignores that Vader’s behaviour is a reaction to the pressures of his job. Vader’s own boss does not tolerate failure by his subordinates. Consequently, Vader cannot tolerate failure among his subordinates and behaves accordingly.

Further, punishing space admirals shifts blame for failure (from Vader to them), there are always junior officers available to replace dead space admirals, and punishing employees is way easier in the short-term than working with them to improve their performance.

HR’s unwillingness to recognize the reasons for Vader’s behaviour means that Vader is unlikely to accept their suggestions. An interesting question is what happens to the HR advisor when he subsequently tries to discipline Vader for continuing to force-choke his subordinates?

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Working from home boosts productivity

There was an interesting study about the effectiveness of working from home out of Stanford. You can read a brief summary in this article.

The study examines a large Chinese firm and followed 500 workers, half of who worked from home and half in the office. The upshot was that home workers:

1. Worked longer (almost a full day longer each week—a work-time gain of 13%!).
2. Concentrated better (so were more productive while they were at work).
3. Were cheaper (no office space costs)
4. Had 50% lower attrition, less sick time, and took fewer breaks.
5. Had a smaller carbon footprint (less commuting, more intensive use of home space).

I’ve been working from home since 2007 and this is pretty consistent with my experience. The key drawback was half of the home workers felt lonely. And there were a few people humping the dog (which was more than offset by gains among other workers).

Letting workers chose whether to work from home (self-selection) resulted in an overall increase in productivity of 24%. If you can stand it, you can watch the author do a 14-minute talk about the study below. He’s reasonably funny and pretty smart but zzzzzzz….



The usual caveats apply to this research: single study, foreign country, YMMV. But it certainly has a lot of face validity for me.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: You don't have to be stupid to work here...

One of the great parts of being a professor is that my job can sometimes be to take a widely accepted idea and test it to see if it is true. This is very similar to what workers do around the lunch room when they roll their eyes at the latest employee engagement efforts, but just a bit more thorough.

The point of this style of research is to suss out ideas and approaches that don’t work as advertised in the hope of sparking change. A recent essay by Andre Spicer entitled “Stupefied: How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door” is a good example of this kind of research. It is well worth the read.

Spicer examines the rather common experience of new graduates who are hired to exciting job descriptions based upon their skills only to find that their actual job is low-level paper pushing and that no one is interested in their ideas for change. The result of this false promise tends to be cynicism, learned passivity, and/or staff turnover (which continues until a suitably cynical and passive worker is found).

Bureaucratizing work is a key mechanism by which organizations stupedify their workers. Complex processes and forms (often enacted under the guise of risk management and quality control) limit workers’ scope for innovation. This happens in at least two ways.

First, creating a set process means that when a worker has a good idea, there isn’t a way to express and advance the idea (i.e., “there isn’t place for this on the form”). Second, advancing an idea outside of the existing norm tends to be slow, labour-intensive, and subject to multiple points where the idea can be shut down.

Underlying this approach is a Taylorist model of organizations as machines where all parts are expected to work in lock step towards making a single product )”you can have your Model T in any colour so long as it is black”). This logic is often unspoken (and sometimes exists below the level of consciousness).

Smart employees quickly get the idea, though, and then check out—either psychologically or physically. Management efforts to re-ignite engagement (e.g., buzz-wordy stuff like strategic planning, rebranding, and adopting best practices) typically fail because they don’t attend to the root the cause of the disengagement (i.e., the absence of opportunity to meaningfully shape work.

The opportunity cost of these sorts of behaviours is huge—both in wasted effort and in developing a culture of “three bags full, sir”. The costs of such behaviours are rarely borne by organizational leaders, who move onwards and upwards.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Industrial Strength Tranquilizer

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Industrial Strength Tranquillizer” by the Austin Lounge Lizards. The Lounge Lizards are a satirical folk-rock group (think Weird Al with a mandolin).

This song narrates the kind of hopelessness common in many jobs:

There's a lot of wisdom here, amongst the employees
Some of us are street smart some have PhD's.
We're all bored and tired, but we've all found ways to cope.
Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.

One of the more interesting labour issues that employers, unions and governments will confront in 2018 is the legalization of marijuana. While news stories have recently focused on the (in)ability of the police to address impaired driving due to the lack of a good drug test, the real battleground will be the workplaces.

This University of Calgary study suggests that some blood and urine tests currently used can result in a false positive for workers who had 15 minutes of exposure to secondhand smoke in a closed environment. This certain raises all sorts of difficult questions about whether discipline enacted based on such tests will ultimately stick.

I couldn’t find a video for this song except this one. So instead, I give you another Star Wars video.



Every morning when I punch my timecard at the plant
I try to be a pleasant guy but lately I just can't.
Overwork and under pay are poisoning my mind.
Until I'm on the bar stool I don't believe it's quitin time.

I need industrial strength tranquilizer
A shot of Old Crow and a glass of Budweiser
To help survive inflation with falling pay.
It takes industrial strength tranquilizer
A shot of Old Crow and a glass of Budweiser
To help the working man through the working day.

Bosses in the board room talk of productivity
But they just mean to put the screws to working stiffs like me.
If we're good and work real hard and save our pay until
We're able to afford the kind of crap they make us build.

[chorus]

There's a lot of wisdom here, amongst the employees
Some of us are street smart some have PhD's.
We're all bored and tired, but we've all found ways to cope.
Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.

[chorus]

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Superstore on staff meetings

To start the new year of Labour & Pop Culture, we return to NBC’s comedy Superstore. Last year they had an interesting storyline about strikes. This year, there is a recurring bit about staff meetings that is just a touch too real. Here are some clips:

Staff made training videos about improving efficiency during bathroom breaks.

Staff debrief a workplace tornado.

Staff debrief a workplace robbery.

Honestly, it is hard to watch stuff that so bitingly accurate.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The Clampdown

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “The Clampdown” by the Clash. The clampdown refers to the growing calls in the 1970s for governments to oppress groups (e.g., welfare claimants, striking workers and other agitators) that sought to change the social, economic and moral norms of the UK. 

You’ll recall that the 1970s was the beginning of what became the neoliberal retrenchment led, in the UK, by Margaret Thatcher.

There are lots of worker references in the lyrics. Wearing the “blue and brown” refers to the most common uniform colours of workers and the song talks about the tendency of workers to be co-opted by the system.

You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now

The price of this, suggests the song, is that you essentially sacrifice your life to economically and socially benefit others (essentially capitalists).

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get running
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

At the end of the song, we hear a call for revolution (whether electoral or political is unclear):

In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown

I picked a Springsteen cover because I can’t stand the Clash. You can suffer through a live version by the Clash here if you want.



Hey, hey!
Ooh!
The kingdom is ransacked
the jewels all taken back
and the chopper descends
they're hidden in the back
with a message on a half-baked tape
with the spool going round
saying I'm back here in this place
and I could cry
and there's smoke you could click on

What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers

The judge said five to ten, but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D'you know that you can use it?

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get running
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now

In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown

Yeah I'm working hard in Harrisburg
Working hard in Petersburg
Working for the clampdown
Working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong
Begging to be melted down
Gitalong, gitalong
(Work)
(Work)
(Work) And I've given away no secrets - ha!
(Work)
(Work)
(More work)
(More work)
(Work)
(Work)
(Work)
(Work)
Who's barmy now?

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Exit, voice, loyalty and neglect

I’ve been reading about employee reactions to deteriorating working conditions as a part of an ongoing research project about how fear affects workers' willingness to report health and safety problems. Back in 1970, Albert Hirshman posited that members of organizations have two basic responses when things start to go badly: exit or voice. Exit is self explanatory; voice is action workers take with an eye to improving conditions (e.g., speaking out, whistleblowing).

Over time, this typology has been refined to include loyalty and neglect. Loyalty (sometimes called patience) happens when workers choose to ride out a bad patch (often in silence, but not always). Neglect is essentially workers giving up and can result in non-compliance, obstruction, and disengagement.

The exist-voice-loyalty-neglect (EVLN) model has been applied to any different situations (e.g., consumer behaviour, romantic relationships, employee turnover) and often yields interesting insights and explanations. One aspect of a good social science theory is that it has high face validity: basically it sounds plausible to an informed ear.

In reading EVLN, I was struck by how much of my own experiences I can see in this model. My first reaction to organizational troubles at Athabasca University (back in 2004-2006) was loyalty: basically I assumed that those in charge knew what they were doing and the few problems that I could see were aberrations that would be corrected or just accepted.

By 2009, it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that there were deeper issues (specifically incompetent leadership and looming financial woes) and I chose various forms of voice to try and resolve them. As it became apparent that internal governance processes were ignored (about 2011?), my use of voice escalated and turned to using external venues to generate additional pressure.

As things worsened (e.g., layoffs, constant threat of closure, non-stop violations of the collective agreement), I then turned to neglect (around 2013) where my strategy was to obstruct the employer until circumstances changed. An alternative would have been exit but, as a middle-aged guy 10+ years into a pension plan, exit wasn’t a good option.

While things are (at least superficially) better (because the employer is keeping the club behind its back instead of waving it in our face), objectively, not much has changed. A difference for me is that, absent a crisis, I’m now mostly disengaged. I still do my job but I try to limit my interactions with my employer as much as possible (increasingly I'm spending my time on my research and engaging with community partners).

For example, I don't attend optional meetings and I don't read much of the institutional email. When I have to attend a meeting, I usually do it by teleconference because that is way less emotionally demanding. Basically, I am counting down the days to retirement (just under 2900 calendar days, if you were interested) and using neglect to bridge to exit.

My colleagues have exhibited different pathways through the last 10 years. This reflects that workers select among the EVLN options based upon their level of satisfaction with, investment in, and alternatives to their current job. I see a lot of neglect these days—mostly in the form of silence—as well as moments of voice (often defensive and occurring when something threatens a core term or condition of employment—but not always).

Whether the university can re-engage its staff in constructive voice activities remains to be seen. Some of that will likely turn on the strategic plan put forward by the university and the degree to which the university can operationalize that.

-- Bob Barnetson

Deep thoughts on sabbatical?

I’m currently on sabbatical. A sabbatical is a leave negotiated by my union to allow workers some time away from day-to-day duties (e.g., teaching, administration) to focus on learning. We often call it research time, but I do research as part of my normal duties. The real boon of a sabbatical is that it gives me time to read around, reflect on what I’ve learned over the past few years, and integrate it into my thinking.

For whatever reason, I do my best thinking while I’m doing something else: cycling, walking, paddling or (at the risk of over sharing) showering. Last week, I finished reading a very frustrating set of social media posts wherein workers were opposing minimum wage increases (a position that benefits employers and disadvantages workers). I always struggle to listen to workers who over-identify with their employers' interests.

So I went down to the river to paddle. Grinding upstream against the current is good exercise but can be monotonous. I looked over at the shore to gauge my progress and saw a pile of old animal bones that one of the gold-panners had stacked up on a boulder. That got me thinking about bones and anthropology and, finally, evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that we can sometimes better understand our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours by recognizing that our minds developed over a long period of time. During this developmental periods, our ancestors typically lived in small nomadic groups. We retain much this “savannah mindset” even thought we now live in radically different circumstances (e.g., industrial societies where capitalism organizes production and distribution).

This approach can, for example, help us understand why the motivational effect of additional wages is nonlinear and decreases after a certain point. But, like any lens, the savannah mind focuses our attention on some things (i.e., determines what is valued) and obscures other things (i.e., what is not valued). So I started to think about how a savannah mindset might explain workers arguing for public policy that is contrary to their collective interests.

To the savannah mind, employers are valuable allies because they give us resources (e.g., wages with which to buy food). Consequently, we want to retain their favor and help them out. Any threat to employers’ interests produces anxiety. That employers pocket (say) two-thirds of the value we produce for them before giving us as little wages as they possible can is not something the savannah mind can grapple with (there was no real surplus value for the powerful to extract in nomadic bands).

Consequently, the idea that there is surplus value that can be distributed to workers as additional wages or retained by employers as profit) does not emotionally resonate with workers. (Just to forestall this critique, I’m not arguing that employers have profits in the amount of twice the wage bill. Simply that there is profit skimmed by employers from the value created by labour.) Similarly, the idea that we belong to a class (i.e., a social group that exists across society) is foreign to the savannah mind. The savannah mind is more likely identify with the group of people we see every day (including our employers).

Conversely, workers view taxes (and the state that levies them) as a threat to their interests because it reduces the resources available to workers. Again, the the savannah mindset struggles to recognize that the state then uses these taxes to provide important things (e.g., schools, clean water regulations, fire departments). These features of our environment appear natural (they have “always existed” for most of us), rather than being the product of a profound (and mostly invisible) level of cooperation among a large number of actors whom we'll never meet.

So, when the (bad) state suggests forcing (good) employers to pay low-wage workers slightly more, this appears (to our savannah minds) to be profoundly threatening to our (group's) interests. Of course there are lots of other reasons why workers might oppose minimum wage increases. workers are subjected to endless employer propaganda and negative religious views on human nature. And, for most workers, minimum wage increases yield limited personal value.

But it struck me that employer lobbyists (intentionally or not) are tapping into a bit of a psychological hot button for most workers when they complain about the (largely imaginary) negative effect rising minimum wages. So what does that means for proponents of public policy initiatives like increasing minimum wages? I don’t know off-hand—I got distracted by an eagle sitting in a tree above my kayak. Maybe the next time I hit the water, I’ll have another brainwave.

-- Bob Barnetson