Skip to main content

Being Fair

The man is almost a trillionaire and wants to edify us all on fairness in the workplace by way of presentism. He must really think that regular working people are spectacularly dumb if that statement was meant to convey any real meaning. Unfairness is the entire point of workplaces. People almost never get what they fairly deserve. Folks who are super conscientious are burning out because they take pride in the quality of their work and find themselves saddled with the worst projects. Others spend their entire time at work building political capital so they can get ahead - they have no time, desire or skills to do any real work. 

Everyone else is somewhere between the two extremes - and none of it is fair by design. The workplace is meant to be exploitative or the enterprise cannot be profitable. Once everyone gets treated fairly, it would be impossible to keep the house in order. There has to be the right mix of hope, fear and confusion to make the system work. Fairness is not meant to be on the menu but this guy has an easy fix for all that. Maybe such level of enlightenment is attained when a person's wealth is so vast that it is incomprehensible to the huddled masses he addresses in his post. 

I know for a fact that I would not have been able to raise J in the way I wanted if I did not have the flexibility to work from home from the time she was about ten years old. They would be no path for me if I had to present myself in the office to be "fair" to everyone else. The person most in need of being treated fairly by me - my daughter, would have lost out big while none of those folks at work or even my employers would have benefitted from me sitting in the office.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...