Workin’ Overtime
A recent visit to the international restaurant chain Texas Roadhouse got me thinking about the evergreen topic of corporate insensitivity.
Throughout the chain, the staff are required to do a country music line dance at least once per hour they work. That’s pretty demeaning in my eyes, but secondary to something else that wigged me out even more.
And that is this: the waitstaff-who are of course being paid well below minimum wage-are required to wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!”
I haven’t known many waitpersons who truly loved their jobs. In fact, most of them were waiting tables because they were trying to keep their heads above water financially and didn’t have any other marketable skills. I can’t imagine many of them would agree with the sentiment expressed by the corporate sloganeering that Texas Roadhouse employees are forced to wear.
Aside from being an intensely new low in demeaning the working class, the thing that irks me here is the amazing myopia or hubris of a corporation that thinks it has the right to assert an individual’s personal opinion and display that opinion publicly. It’s a violation of the employee’s privacy and the separation of one’s work life from one’s personal life.
There’s no meaningful legal difference between those tee shirts and a company putting out a television commercial that shows photographs of employees claiming that they voted for a particular political party or that they support a particular political position. And it’s a very short road from there to requiring that employees look, speak, act, buy, and vote according to the corporation’s demands.
Lest you think that’s a ridiculous assertion, consider that many employers already expect that employees will promote the company’s marketing efforts in social media by using their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.
What gets lost amidst all this corporate interference in people’s personal lives is that employment is a mutual agreement which is supposed to be in both parties’ interest, and that corporations should both ask and compensate employees for their sacrifices.
In the past, we saw how the labor market changed when corporations transitioned from a lifetime employment model to employment at will. When the corporate world unilaterally decided that company loyalty to the employee was outmoded, they eventually learned that they could no longer assume they would receive the same level of employee loyalty to the company in return. In short, loyalty-like everything else in the employer-employee relationship-is a two-way street.
Now that companies are finding new ways to assert control over their employees’ personal lives, they need to realize that if the company expects to intrude on an employee’s personal life, they also need to make room for the full reality of that employee’s personal life.
Unfortunately, that’s something most companies have yet to learn. I have a friend who is a software engineer. When his company asked its staff for ideas about how employees could further promote the company, he suggested that the best way he could contribute would be to post to a company-sponsored engineering blog, where he could discuss the technical details of some of the innovative work his team had done, giving the company some free credibility in the engineering community.
Needless to say, corporate leadership didn’t want anything to do with promoting the skills and reputation of its engineering team, for fear of losing them to other employers. As a result, my friend’s willingness to promote corporate marketing efforts on his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts-as well as his overall sense of loyalty to the company-have both been correspondingly lowered. Edit: And a few months later, he left the company.
Employment is a transaction which is supposed to be equitable and of mutual benefit. The perpetual efforts of corporations to wrest every last ounce of value from their employees, usually without offering fair compensation, has impact on employee loyalty and retention that is obvious, but which most companies utterly fail to consider.
Texas Roadhouse’s requirement that waitstaff wear tee shirts that say “I ♥ my job!” doesn’t make me want to work there. In fact, quite the opposite: I’m moved to deep sympathy for their staff, who have to work in such a demeaning and humiliating environment created by their overbearing and insensitive employer.