The oppressive workplace: compass glitches

Phil and Tez reflect on working life

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Clearly any economy will benefit from having more people in work. There are many reasons why individuals aren’t working but one of them is because not all workplaces are nice places to be: sometimes quite the opposite.

Let’s face the unpleasant truth that for many the workplace is a scary desert devoid of prospects that leaves too many dependent on the benefit system. It’s hard to see how progress can be made in reshaping our economy without tackling this.

There are a number of forces at play that can make working environments into toxic experiences: in this first post we look at the impact of the person at the top. We take an historical approach, starting with recent headlines and stepping back to the start of the manufacturing era with Henry Ford.

In The Times (see here), BrewDog co-founder, James Watt, identifies Britain as among the, ‘least work-oriented countries in the world.’ Meanwhile, industrial shakers are clamping down on working from home (WfH) and, presumably, relish the reinstatement of the great commute where workers spend 2-3 isolated hours a day in traffic jams. Let’s not pretend that either 100% WfH or life in a jam is ideal but let’s also stop cheering simple answers each time the pendulum swings past in our favoured direction.

Of course, we’ve been here before. When they were still British, the plantation owners complained about their lazy slaves, while Victorian mill owners found ingenious ways to extract the last drop of effort from the workforce, some even paying with funny stuff that could only be spent by enriching the owner further.

We’ve been here more recently, too, as our once-great car industry declined, and Britain was the sick man of Europe. The lie was exposed when foreign manufacturers moved in, and British workers kept building the best cars in the world.

Let’s be honest, those at the top are not always the best guides in diagnosing the health of the workplace.

In our book (see here), we note that Adam Smith’s invisible hand (free market forces) neither drains the toxins from commerce nor does it morph human selfishness into all around goodness. We acknowledge that the market has an ameliorating impact, but it cannot set ethical standards since it only reflects and responds to the ethics of the active players. It may be self-levelling, but it’s not redemptive.

When manufacturing was in its infancy and before the market became a religion, Henry Ford headed off in a very different direction. He said that workers should be paid as much as possible, that customers should pay as little as possible and that the management needed to square the circle by making profits.

His rough path from farmhouse to factory left his English impenetrable at times, but Project Gutenberg’s edited version of, My life and work (see here), is an accessible way into his thinking.

His ideas were as wild at the time as they are today. Cars were custom-made for wealthy clients, and each bespoke creation carried high levels of risk. It made sense, then, to set prices high and manufacture as cheaply as possible in hopes of a healthy profit when you finally sold one, a few times a year.

In a stupendous leap of imagination, he inverted the values of the day with cheap cars, thousands and then millions of customers, plus a well-paid workforce. By design but perhaps also by luck, mass production slashed costs and risks, while quality soared.

His approaches to disability and training were radically refreshing, too. He didn’t believe the disabled should receive special treatment, but that the workload should be designed so that they could earn equally alongside their peers. Similarly, he believed that students should be able to pay for their education by selling their piecework into his factories. He even explored hospitals with a cheap and credible model of care.

My grandfather’s first car was a Model-T – which he drove with his pet goat sitting up beside him. It was the car rather than the goat that signalled better things to come.

So, where did the toxins come from that corrupted this ideal over the strife-riven decades that followed? Well, some of them came from the heart of Ford himself: the market is morally neutral, the management is not.

Rose Wilder Lane (Henry Ford’s own story) quotes Ford as saying, ‘I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell. In my opinion, a man makes his own heaven and hell and carries it around with him. Both of them are states of mind.’

We know two things about one of the world’s greatest innovators. He hated bankers and admired Adolf Hitler. Since the Jewish community was heavily into banking and investment, it’s tempting to explain both his pet hate and love in terms of raw antisemitism. It may have been just that but may also have been part of his sensemaking based on his experience.

It’s not hard to see why he would dislike the banker class who also needed a slice of profit from his magical wealth-creating pie, ramping up the margin needed. As they gained power with the growth of the stock market, they were increasingly able to secure their slice.

Why he should admire Hitler is deeply worrying, especially since markets today seem attracted to powerful authoritarians. Hitler mentions Ford in Mein Kampf (see here), while Ford was pleased to receive the Führer’s friends. It’s murky, and Ford repudiated some of what went out in his name, but it leaves questions over whether his antisemitism was what drove his likes and dislikes or whether it emerged from his business decisions. Elsewhere his ethics are all over the place: he supplied the British with tractors to feed themselves in World War I, was against US involvement in WWII and supported of the League of Nations.

He said that he thought you made your own heaven and hell, and in a sense, that’s what happened. The best of what he did and the worst of what he did came out of what he made up for himself.

When he died in 1947, his life’s work along with the best and worst of his hopes and fears, loves and hates, were ceded one way or another to the market, which managed his investments and selected his successors. It also ensured that his crazy ideas about charging as little as possible and paying as much as possible were kicked into the long grass.

Without a reliable moral compass, the ideals of the innovator may save the world or threaten swathes of humanity, or almost anything in between. We can’t trust the market for our morals or make them up as we go along. We need something better.

Also from Phil & Tez

Why vigour and virtue both matter at work (17 April 2025)

Work, rest and play (24 April 2025)

This set

The oppressive workplace: compass glitches (1 May 2025)

The oppressive workplace: sharp elbows ( 8 May 2025)

The oppressive workplace: herd instinct (15 May 2025)