Get ready for the post-covid office workers’ rebellion

“I’m really not going to be putting up with any s#%t at work ever again - life literally is too short”

This week, Jonathan Frostick’s LinkedIn to-the-point resolutions, following his very publicized heart attack, made global news. A few weeks ago, junior Wall Street bankers 's complaint about inhumane working conditions went viral.

Here is the link to the New York Times article and the now famous baby bankers’ deck. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury had to get involved. Apparently, the issue of unreasonable Covid work demands also applied to consulting firms. The Guardian took it seriously and published an opinion piece: Burnt out: is the exhausting cult of productivity finally over?.

On the other hand, Twittosphere did not take kindly to the complaint of the baby bankers. The disparaging comments were motivated by the very American idea that the kind of money a world-class bank offers to its employee justifies anything including health sacrifices, divorces or burnout. Indeed, with bonuses, first year analysts make somewhere around $120,000/year in the World largest banks. Yet, this thinking seems to have less and less support globally. After all, 77 million Americans are on psychotropic medications, a quarter of them for more than ten years as I pointed out last week and this number grew exponentially during the pandemic.

The Financial Times, always obliging, eventually came to the rescue by publishing op-eds from very satisfied very rich former baby bankers with endearing headlines such as “the baptism of fire I needed as a junior banker”. Stories that ultimately supported the notion that exchanging one’s entire freedom for prestige and money might lead to lifelong psychological damage and delusion instead of diffusing it.

The baby bankers rebellion was a big and short-lived affair, apparently solved with fruit baskets and pelotons, not unlike the death from sleep deprivation of City intern Moritz Erhardt in 2013. But the Frostick’s story re-opened the pandora box: is work really worth the trouble?

The reality is that the pandemic brought on a very harsh lighting to our 24/7 connected work lifestyle. First, the pandemic was in itself a reminder of the frailty of human life. Then, once distractions were removed by quarantine, the silliness of the rate race, business travel, corner offices and dithyrambic titles became obvious. After all, as Yuval Harari reminds us: “work” as we know it is a very recent invention which might soon disappear.

Without meaningful human connection, people seem similarly miserable in their Hamptons mansions or Queens apartments. It forced humanity to notice the essential again: solidarity, spirituality and living by one’ values. No amount of money seems enough to justify prolonged misery any longer. There is a great Shelter Island story of Kurt Vonnegut informing Joseph Heller, that their host on the Island, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had ever earned from “Catch-22”. To this, Heller responded “Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

 Many companies took advantage of the pandemic to finally achieve their penultimate goal of getting office workers to think about work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The small breaks like transit time, business trips or co-worker chats absorbed into a constant work stream. And because employees could not go far during evenings, vacations and weekends, companies subtly asked them to pitch in at any hour and on any day. What was your excuse for not responding to emails, slack messages or texts? Your boss knew you were not a the theater, surfing or with your ailing mother. And in a twisted move, private companies that pocketed gigantic public subsidies and reported amazing results last year reminded their employees they were lucky to still have a job in the midst of pandemic. But were they really “lucky” or trapped?

For the private sector, the office worker’s rebellion is a real risk as they still need people to function at least until AI fully kicks in. Difficulties to attract talent, high turnover rates, lost productivity and reputational damages will be the motivating factor here. But it could as well be something more genuine: a deeper reflection on the purpose of “work” if it isn’t to improve the human condition.

The upcoming post-covid revolution is an opportunity for the private sector to think about authentic and les tokenistic ways to foster satisfaction and dignity in workplace experiences. If the private sector says they care about employee student’s debts, their physical health, their children, their aging parents or their psychological well-being, a fruit basket or four month membership to text therapy won’t cut it in 2021. Time to get ambitious and creative...

 Nietzsche’s famous two thirds rule reads “Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”

 Do you hear the people sing?

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