Sally Adee interviews André Spicer in NewScientist (10 December 2016) regarding the increasing concern corporations have for our health:
So what is this obsession in corporate culture with enhancing health and happiness?
There’s always been debate over whether a happy worker is more productive, but a more interesting question is how employers are now intervening to “make things better”. In the last decade or so, they’ve suddenly become interested in employee happiness and are designing workplaces to make the physical space itself increase happiness. One company built a workplace to look like a pirate ship.
But most interventions involve the employees themselves. BP gave each employee a Fitbit. It was a gift and using it was optional, but increasing numbers of companies are now insisting you use these things. At a hedge fund in London, the traders have to wear them, plus record things such as their diet and sleeping habits, and then the employer correlates that with their trading activities. At one Swedish utility company, if you don’t go to the gym as part of your working week, you get paid less.
I know my Arts Editor was periodically harassed concerning her health habits before she retired, with money dangled to buy her cooperation – although she was notably dour about those episodes. I work at a large engineering firm, and while there’s an occasional corporate email about taking care of our health, it hasn’t risen to the level of active intrusion into our lives.
I suppose I should be horrified, but this bit amused me instead:
So this is all about companies squeezing everything they can from their staff?
That’s one aspect. The second part is a cultural shift – what psychologists or philosophers would call category mistakes. Employers are starting to equate physical fitness with corporate competence. It’s this idea that if you’re slim and running marathons, you’re going to be a fantastic CEO. From 2001 to 2011, the proportion of CEOs in the US who ran marathons doubled, and you can be sure those marathons are featuring on their CVs. Give employers a choice of two CEOs with exactly the same skills and they’ll almost always choose the slimmer one. Your hobby can no longer be the community garden or whatever you’ve been doing. You have to be running marathons.
I also know that the Mayo Clinic offers an expensive, thorough, quick examination for CEOs – visualize a Formula 1 pit stop where all the tires get changed.
I don’t have the reference handy, but as I recall they mentioned that one CEO came in and left with an acute leukemia diagnosis and a bottle full of pills – and off he went back to his duties just a few hours later.
André is quite dour himself in interpreting these developments, especially in the light of automation threatening many jobs, as well as the new 5 AM to 9 PM work cycle:
So that explains this new economy built around self-enhancement, happiness and the body?
Yes, that’s one way of creating new forms of employment when knowledge-economy work is in decline. We are transitioning to the body economy. It’s also simply capitalism: what do you do when all other sources of growth have been exhausted? You turn to people’s private lives and you begin looking into their bodies and psychologies. You turn their minds and bodies into something you can sell.
Leads one to wonder if automation will be increasingly met with brickbats. Perhaps it’s time to consider how to decide which tasks should be automated. Keep in mind the hidden difficulties with such proposals, for which I have two examples, that computers used to reference mathematicians, not the modern digital wonders that have replaced them, and that we used to employ many secretaries and clerks whose duties today are automated. Was it wrong to automate those jobs out of existence? Nowadays it seems quite normal, doesn’t it? So while I’m tempted to propose that jobs that are very dangerous or very difficult (read: damn near impossible, such as flawlessly calculating mathematical tables) should be eligible for automation, whereas everything else isn’t, I do not feel it is truly a workable proposal.
Considering it honestly, either
- The libertarians are right, and that by freeing up people from boring and dangerous tasks, we’ll create new jobs with a more creative flare;
- Or (1) used to be true, but there’s a limit to how long this can go on.
- [I’ve managed to forget what I had dreamed up here.]
I also can’t help but notice how corporate competition appears to be limitless – rather like that of biological evolution, albeit on far more rapid and plastic basis. Are their endpoints in biological evolution? I think you’d have to assume endless geological stability, and that doesn’t really exist on the time scale of evolution.
