Workplace Anxiety. Out of a Job: The Misfit Willy Loman

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1 Workplace Anxiety Deal with it: Your job will change every five years for the rest of your life. Even if you stay with the same company, the job descriptions require you to "re-invent yourself" over and over again. Theorists refer to this ever-changing personal resume as the "virtual portfolio" - implying the need to "edit yourself like words on the computer screen: The shape of the job is never finalized but exists under constant revision. Labor economists, who measure the impact of cell phones and Internet, laptops and computers, assure us that work changes as technology accelerates at the exponential rate stated in Gordon Moore's Law (1965): Data density doubles every 18 months. Competition in the world marketplace demands that workers keep pace with Moore s Law. Many factors contribute to the faster pace: An international economy, offshore outsourcing, changes in world markets, Internet workforces all around the globe that are mobile without moving. The exponential rate of change guarantees that each of us, several times during a career, will feel like and probably be - a misfit. The fundamental change in the workplace over the past decade invites us to meditate on workplace anxiety as we ponder the future. Out of a Job: The Misfit Willy Loman In his famous play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller has Willy Loman's wife say about her husband who lost his job: "He's not the finest character that ever lived, but he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog." What kind of attention did Willy s wife want paid to her jobless husband? In later

2 Page 2 interviews, 1 Miller explained that Willy's wife may have been speaking about the support a family might give a depressed man but Miller himself was asking the audience to consider the larger social and political context in which a lot of people give their lives to a company or to government and then, when they are no longer needed, are "used up" and tossed aside like disposable plastic cups. "A lot of people are eliminated earlier from a productive life in society than they used to be," Miller explained in a 2001 interview. This is the moral theme of "Death of a Salesman" which seems more relevant to the virtual portfolio than when the play was first performed in As work makes us feel like misfits several times in our lives, we become each in turn a Willy Loman. Does anyone notice? Miller's play has celebrated 50 years of continuous success, having been performed countless times in America as well as Japan, Europe, Russia, and Asia. Existential anxiety about the meaning of work touches humanity across the globe and over the decades. The play remained popular throughout the Cold War and the McCarthy era even though Death of a Salesman became a political hot potato when it was construed as a cynical attack on the American dream. In 1956, Miller was himself called before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) where he refused to testify, was convicted of contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. Death of a Salesman was written from Miller s own memories of the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929 and continued through the 1930s. As recently as 2001, Miller stated that the moral shame of workplace inhumanity is greater today than during the Great Depression. Is Willy Loman s anxiety, the indignity of job loss, a permanent blemish on the virtual portfolio? Is the virtual portfolio a high-tech euphemism for the essential tragedy of our existential situation? Does the virtual portfolio pour chocolate coating over the bitter law that everyone will be stripped of dignity and humiliated several times in an ever-changing workplace? If our work belongs to the ephemeral virtual portfolio, how do we as a society live with this shameful tragedy? Does the shame cast long shadows over the workplace? Is this a social defeat that is imposed inevitably by external forces like old age, 1 For the interview, see

3 Page 3 disease, and the limited ability to acquire new skills? Does the shadow hide social acquiescence before inexorable factors like senility, physical decline, and inevitable death? Human resource managers at large American corporations often give freshly laid-off employees free copies of the book Who Stole My Cheese? a Aesopian mouse fable about anger management that advises against self-pity and counsels workers to accept adaptation or else lose out and die like rats. Could Loman s boss have prevented Willy s suicide by urging him to not live like a loser? In many offices today, the employees trade quotes from the cult movie Office Space which satirizes the double messages hidden beneath the positive affirmations of the managers. (Listen to some of the movie quotes at Labor, Work, Action Is the virtual portfolio intrinsically tragic? To answer this question, it helps to clarify the meaning of work by looking at the classic study of the vita activa written in 1958 by Hannah Arendt ( ). In her The Human Condition, she sharply distinguishes work from labor, labor from action, and action from contemplation, with one chapter devoted to each activity. Labor is intrinsically troublesome, painful, and often exhausting because labor aims at physical survival of the biological body, and the body needs food, shelter, and clothing as long as the individual breathes. The biological struggles of the animal laborans is noted in linguistic usages that distinguish Arbeit from Werke, ponos from erga (Greek), laborare from fabricari (Latin s opus facere), and the French travailler from ouvrer. The opposite of labor is leisure (otium). While the individual human body necessitates constant support through private acts of labor, the objects shaped by human work, by contrast, can stand on their own in the public sphere. Work accomplishes a finalized result that stands separately from the constantly needy organism. While labor is a continuous process, work is a production that ends with products. Works (opera, oeuvres, Werke) pass through the struggling efforts of individual human hands and then belong to the shared public sphere which stands apart from the private economy of an individual person s biology. The opposite of work is laziness (aergia). Labor and work (in the strict sense) are two distinct aspects of what today fit under work. Arendt goes on to distinguish other aspects of action, especially the kind of action (praxis) that uses speech and deeds to build shared

4 Page 4 communities. Work is what homo faber does - human hands produce usable, durable goods that convert the artificial environment into a home for mortal human beings. Action is what organizes this larger home into communities and relationships that together provide peaceful conditions for the quiet contemplation described by Aristotle as the highest happiness. Human action, which transpires as deeds and words, confers significance on labor and work which in themselves can feel empty or futile. Transforming the Workplace While Arthur Miller saw no political solution to the tragedy of the workplace, Miller s own artistic life emerged as the narrative story about Willy Loman, a story based on the memory of his Uncle Manny Newman, a Brooklyn salesman who committed suicide during the Great Depression. Perhaps we can see in Miller if not a solution then at least an approach to our own contemporary virtual portfolio. After all, Arthur Miller transformed the darkest destruction of personal identity into art, and Hannah Arendt begins her chapter on action with the statement: "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Arendt argues that properly human action transforms deeds into words and makes words themselves a kind of deed. 2 The verbal deed belongs to the community of speakers and to their shared memories. Telling our own stories in our own terms is a way to enliven and dramatize the apparently haphazard list found in the typical job resume. Willy Loman did not, unfortunately, see his story as a personal narrative before leaving the scene; he saw only gaps, holes, missteps, and the recurring failure of false expectations. Our narration of the personal portfolio can create a framework within which courage or graceful humor becomes the subtext of our storyline. The storyline we create may or may not be part of our submitted 2 Action and speech are so closely related because the specifically human act must contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: Who are you? And: In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. This disclosure of who in contradistinction to what somebody is his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide is implicit in everything somebody says and does. The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp

5 Page 5 resume, but each narrative is our own story, a living outline in our own voice that weaves the objective facts of our job histories into a picture that connects the dots, adds colorful hues, and provides emotional tone. Telling the story need not be tragic. In fact, comedy is an appropriate mode for the animal risible. Laughter conveys the grace that meets missteps, which - like those of Charlie Chaplin are ennobled by a spirited hop, skip, and jump. The weaving of our own stories the trajectory of our working lives becomes a personal struggle for significance. It reveals the close-up features of human character, the impression our soul projects over time. The advantage of the virtual portfolio is that it encourages us even requires us to revise and develop our narrative every time we re-write our resume as we ponder where we have been and where we want to go. Portraits of Character A patron saint for such personal stories can be found in Aristotle s successor Theophrastus (d. 287 BCE). While Aristotle advocated the study of character for his Ethics and Rhetoric, Theophrastus placed human character at the center of his universe, more important than identifying species of plants or animals. Theophrastus s book Characters sketches the portraits of contemporaries from anecdotes that illustrate personal qualities based on actual behavior. While our resume may not be the personally revealing document that allows us to know ourselves, we can consider the virtual portfolio an opportunity to reveal something about how we have unfolded our identity through the roles we have played in action. Behind the disjointed steps of the portfolio, our personal narrative can reveal what even we ourselves sometimes fail to see. It places in perspective any particular job we may have done. The process of sharing the job-tojob stories can become a kind of social celebration that takes us beyond the common tragedy of office space. Contemplating Willy Loman's tragedy, we should keep in mind that the resume is also a contrivance much like a work of art, and works of art show us not what has happened or what usually happens. They also show us what could happen. George Bernard Shaw reminds us of this use of art in his Pygmalion, later adapted into My Fair Lady, which is a play about the heroine's need for a better job and the better way of

6 life that went with it. As George Bernard Shaw said of Eliza Doolittle, "You use a glass mirror to see the face; you use works of art to see the soul." We might translate: The job resume shows us the facts of the marketplace; the story of our jobs conveys who we really are beyond the limits of social circumstances. Page 6