Just give me money, that's what I want...

Every year since I moved to the great state of Michigan, the Free Press runs a business piece on the top places to work in southeast Michigan. And also every year, they do a poll on what are the most important workplace factors to employees...and every year, pay and benefits end up at the bottom (only 48% this year considered it an important factor, trailing direction, execution, conditions, career, and managers). And every year...I am amazed. I mean truthfully, the only reason I work is that I get paid--if someone would pay me the pittance I get paid to sit on my ass at home, I'm outta there.

I never really understood it until I read Matthew Stewart's The Management Myth. In a nutshell, Shepherd discusses one Frederick Winslow Taylor, who in the 1920s was commissioned by the Rockefellers to find out what motivates workers to be more productive. Taylor's research initially showed that what motivates workers to be more productive is money. The Rockefellers, being the greedy bastards they were (are), were less than pleased (surprise, surprise) with the outcome. So Taylor, keenly aware of where his paycheck was coming from, rigged the process so the outcome became "workplace culture" (anyone stuck working for a corporation these days is all too familiar with this bullshit). Though Taylor's work has been thoroughly discredited through the years, management still continues to subscribe to the false outcome (again, surprise, surprise--more for the top, less for the people who actually do the work)--and people, being the lemmings that far too many of us are, have pretty much succumbed to the falsehood.

A couple of things I'd like to see in future polls (about as likely as me doing a vertical jump and landing on the moon--the business pages are for businesses, not truth, justice, and the American way): 1) A breakdown of the salaries for which people thought culture (or its derivatives) was more important than pay and benefits--it seems entirely possible that someone making six figures plus would find money less important than someone making $35-40,000 a year. 2) Some follow-up questions, such as: If you had the outside means, would you do your job for free? What if your company cut your pay $10,000 (needless to say, we'd need to leave minimum wage workers out of this question because they'd basically be working for free) per year (or $25,000 to $50,000 for people making $100-200,000 per year): Would money be more important than the other factors at that point? Would you look for a new job? Would you work as hard? Would you still consider your company a great workplace? 3) And how to explain this: only 46% of those polled thought their pay was fair for the work they do, and even less (32%) thought favorably of their benefit package. How can you reconcile money not being more important than culture when you don't think you're being paid (or receiving benefits) fairly?

In the end, I think this is just another case of flawed polling, and the working class getting fucked in the continuing class war.

Peace,
emaycee