It was just like any other Monday – a mix of disenchantment, disenfranchisement and (before that) coffee. And then it got worse.

As I ambled into work like the carefree spirit I usually am (less so on Mondays), my attention was drawn to something pasted onto the staff noticeboard. Something more serious and official-looking than the usual cartoony reminders about workplace safety and upcoming cupcake sale days. With a sense of foreboding, I headed over to take a look. Ignorance might be bliss, but knowledge meant you could dodge the falling pianos you might otherwise be blissfully unaware of. Besides, one should always know about upcoming cupcake sales.

I began to read:
“Management regrets to inform you that the annual mid-year salary review will be delayed until next March….” And I didn’t need to check the calendar on the wall to know the month was currently this February. Damn.

This little burst of sunshine was followed by three paragraphs of neatly formatted management-speak on the reason(s) for this. The article even had a photo of the CEO with a suitably grave yet impartial expression, letter-head style at the top. To make it more personal, yet without making it personal, as it were.

I was so sure that it would use the magic words ‘credit crunch’ or ‘recession’ …. or ‘global economic apocalypse’… or whatever it is people were calling it now, that I couldn’t really be bothered reading further. Except… no.

A quick scan failed to reveal the words ‘credit’ or ‘crunch’ (or ‘zombie’), so I became curious (though faintly disappointed if I’m honest) enough to actually read it all. In doing so, I learned that the reason was, rather unexpectedly, this:

‘Alignment’.

That’s right… ‘Alignment’.

In the words of our CEO, the salary review process was previously done mid-year while the annual bonus process was done at the beginning of the year, six months apart. And ’they’ve’ spoken ‘for some time’ about bringing the two in line from an HR perspective. So much time, in fact, that perhaps maybe if they’d talked a bit less they could have done it THIS March, not next March (they didn’t say this, but come on, it’s a
fairly obvious continuation). The note went on, adding that yes, sure, the decision was also made in relation to the economic situation and in order to be more prepared for change and forge longer-term growth…. blahblahblah nothing you can do about it anyway, doesn’t affect the bonuses which we’ll still announce later, it all hurts me as much as it hurts you, alignment, baby, calibration and symmetry.

And , in a stroke of Machiavellian – nay – Soviet Russia-inspired genius, they’d left blank pieces of paper around the noticeboard for people to provide their feedback. Right across from a security camera that’s pointed at the entrance of the building but whose frame of view clearly encompasses the board.

Wow. Why not a trap-door with spikes and a nest of poisonous snakes? Do they honestly think that people would fall for this?

Well, yes, and rightly so, judging by the number of people who had already written something. And the people queuing to read and add their own opinions. And while I wasn’t ready to partake yet in my ‘freedom’ to provide a comment in full view of management, once I got a chance to at least look at them the comments were almost as intriguing to analyse as management’s stupefying decision to try to spin this as anything other than “we can do this, so we will”

The first few people were angry at this betrayal by management and the cynical reason they had given. The company already paid below-average salaries, and now they were not even doing sub-inflationary increases. Fair call, but in writing? In front of a security camera? I was worried about the consequences of just standing there reading the thing, let alone signing it with a quill pen and a flourish!

The next couple of writers had obviously read both the notice and the angry comments and simply offered a resigned comment to the effect that they knew this was coming, and it was inevitable really if you thought about it. So… nothing new to add, just a bit of basking in the warmth of the correctness of their pessimism. I was so pleased for them, though wondered why they’d bothered to write something.

Then there was a bit more angry writing, and then there was a new sub-group of people:

“Things could be worse!” they wrote.
“At least we have jobs!” they cried.
“There are a lot of people suffering a lot more” they exclaimed.

I wasn’t game to straight-out accuse management of falsifying comments and writing them left-handedly to disguise their handwriting, but for the sake of an argument I decided to assume three-quarters of these were legitimate.

From this point on the haters and the new sub-group alternated and then inevitably another kind of person started contributing – not commenting on the message, but only on the responses. And then some clown started not commenting about anything except bad spelling in the responses.

It was like an internet chatroom and it was all muddying the waters and that was irritating me because even if I don’t give a crap about a payrise (well, I do insofar as I’d prefer one over not having one), this whole thing was getting stupid. I’d quickly gone from feeling cheerfully-benign-with-slight-caffeine-buzz to something much grizzlier, and I was feeling a bit woozy at the speed of my transformation. I just wanted to sit down and steel myself for another day at work, not have to confront the great confrontation of our age before I even had my first cup of decaffeinated tea.

I’m not even sure exactly who I was angry at. Everyone, possibly.

But firstly, Management and their ridiculous ‘Alignment’ argument. They actually used a different word, which is if anything more ludicrous but I don’t want to use it because this isn’t about a specific example, it’s a broader point I’m making. But honestly, what was this, some kind of aesthetic decision, like straightening a picture on a wall or arranging ceramic kittens on a bookshelf? Let’s put this into perspective: last year energy prices rose by 30% and as soon as January 1 hit the train companies raised their prices by 10%. Food prices are up. Council rates are up. We’re in a recession and now just as you might think inflation might slow, the government is talking about printing money to spend its way out of trouble and the main side-effect of this will be… yes, more inflation. Lower real wages. And the thing is: our company is doing WELL. And even if it wasn’t – why the primary reason of ‘alignment’?

Instead I was being asked to care about the useless people in Human Resources enough that I wouldn’t possibly want them to have TWO things to think about at different times of the year.

“Things could be worse”
“Yes, I know”

I mean, it’s all well and good that interest rates are falling because it’s a nice virtual payrise for anyone paying off a mortgage, who now needs to pay less interest on their loan. But I’d invite anyone to take a guess – just one guess – at how many landlords have reduced the size of their rents to benefit all the people who live in apartments and do not own their own house. Oh, wait. There isn’t a scanning electron microscope small enough to register that number. Pressed to provide an estimate, I believe it sits somewhere above zero but less than one.

“We’re still the lucky ones”
“Yes, I know”

What nobody has yet pointed out is that politically, management can’t really get away with giving themselves massive payrises. Not in these tough times… I mean misaligned, uncalibrated, unsymmetrical times. However, because bonuses are encapsulated in contract provisions, and as part of their salary packages management always get larger multipliers than ground staff, management stand to benefit a lot more from bonuses than payrises. How convenient, then, that our CEO was upbeat about the bonus situation. He has reason to be.

“People are struggling to make ends meet”
“Yes, I know”

And I noted with interest a comment from a guy who has worked here a while, who pointed out that some time ago, the bonus and payrise process WERE synchronised but it was at HR’s request the processes were deliberately split so that the two didn’t interfere with each other. So in other words, the same people who previously (allegedly) wanted the two split now want them recombined. I can’t wait til they decide it’s all too hard again and they can look through a dictionary to find the opposite to ‘synchronisation’ and use that to spearhead another excuse to spli the two.

But these are easy opinions for me to hold: management are evil and self-serving. Workers are consistently victimised by those who have power. Ho hum. Revolutions have been fought, won, and completely subverted countless times before and this is neither unique nor particularly interesting historically speaking. Even on a Monday.

“And besides, there are people worse off”

And finally, I’m actually just as angry at the many people who continued to play the ‘things could be worse’ card. I’m so angry at them that I’m willing to be vilified as unthinking and unfeeling and selfish by pointing out that ‘Things could be worse’ and ‘There are people worse off than you’ are explicitly forbidden in debating, and for a good reason.

They stifle debate, they argue a truism and they divert from the topic.

Yes, a bullet in the chest is worse than a knife in the shoulder. What’s your point?

“There are people worse off than you”
“There is ALWAYS somebody worse off than me, so how can you use that in
an argument?”

Don’t talk about Art. Don’t talk about Sport. Or Entertainment. Or Music. Or Literature. How can you talk about any of these things when there are people worse off than you. Stop complaining. Stop talking. Don’t make a noise. Don’t make a fuss.

What is anybody meant to say to that? I know that it’s meant to provide a different perspective on a bad situation. And I acknowledge it. I know that I’m in the wrong as much as I am in the right because there really are, truly, people worse off than me.

But.

Wouldn’t you rather work for a company, or a community, or a nation whose prevailing philosophy was ‘things could be better’ than ‘things could be worse’?

I don’t want to complain, but I don’t want to be silent either. And I definitely don’t want to be told I can’t be upset by one group, and especially when the group responsible for all this allows me to express my views only on the proviso that I clearly identify myself if I have discordant views. And people are defending them by spouting truisms so that the people at fault don’t have to, and can instead consult their book of 101 Business Euphemisms and find a convenient reason to do something that has nothing to do with why they are doing it.

I suspect I’d rather like to be in management. I could stomp on an anthill and watch the little ants scurry around, some of them waving their appendages in futile indignation, with others congratulating themselves on the accuracy of their own doomsday prophecies or correcting each others spelling mistakes or musing on their philosophical acceptance of my greater power.

Actually, to be honest I’d rather be outside with my camera.

All other things being equal, it’s actually a nice day outside. Though things could be… better.