In Times of Uncertainty and Change, Realism is Important

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In business, the aftermath of any transformational event such as the Dot.com Crash of 2000,  the Crash of 2008,   the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2019 – to name only a few of the recent upheavals – makes it often difficult to get one’s bearings let alone see through the fog clouding the path to the future. It makes one question one’s judgement, sometimes being too afraid to make critical decisions and sometimes too quick to hop on the next bandwagon seeking safety in numbers. How long the fog lasts depends on the depth and scope of trauma incurred. How long it takes to emerge from it is determined by how transparent the fog has become and if any discernable patterns are forming upon which to build a strategy forward.

This applies to all workers, as well. Any disruption to employment is followed by a uncontrollable backward slide erasing any gains made to that point. Then the dreaded wait while the economy finds bottom before any future plans can be contemplated. Will the prior job still be available, what changes were made by the employer that may require additional training or education that has a substantial lead time before employability? And can education and training for these changes be accessed by someone who has depleted their funds trying to survive?

Chris Rock, popular comedian, director, actor and self-made philosopher, said something very appropriate and very applicable to moments such as this, “in America, you can do anything you want…if there is a job opening for it.” Profoundly honest, this statement implies both positivity about the future and realism about what we all know of today’s form of American capitalism.

There are many definitions of “realism,” some apply to art, philosophy, and politics, but it generally means a focus on reality; facts over imagination, ideals and unsubstantiated trends and predictions. In practical terms, an appropriate definition is “the attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it accordingly.”

In troubled times, it is not enough to provide baseless, optimistic notions to terrified workers. Telling workers to find the funds to spend the next two to four years of their lives pursuing a degree in a field that self-serving prognosticators say is where the jobs will be, only to find out upon graduation that the industry was busy relocating those jobs to lower wage labor markets or importing lower wage workers while studies continued – rendering a potential worker broken and even more depleted. This country has a history of this, especially since the 1980’s when a neoliberal preoccupation with outsourcing became the norm and was celebrated by those already well positioned. In the late 1980’s/early 1990’s,M.I.T. Economist Larry Summers (present at the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations) is said to have angered union leaders who raised concerns about the accelerating rate at which good-paying manufacturing jobs were being outsourced as a tradeoff for increasing foreign direct investments in the United States. He allegedly said, “What’s the worry? A job is a job.” He and the other U.S. negotiators and Chamber of Commerce representatives went on to promise a world with higher-paying, easier jobs and a world of delight for the American worker in exchange for their support.

Some might remember the stampede of workers answering the call to reinvent themselves as programmers because of the shortage leading up to the Y-2000 Millennium bug, only to find themselves unneeded and their skills rapidly growing obsolete while unemployed after the Y2K bug problem was mitigated. Lower-paid programmers were being imported and IT support jobs were being outsourced – leaving those that reinvented themselves disheartened and disillusioned even more.

The media likes to jump on the bandwagon, then take over the reins and drive the bandwagon. Sometimes they want others to believe they are first to promote a catchy buzzword or projection. “The gig economy” is something to embrace and revere, “classroom learning will be replaced by virtual classrooms, ”most factories workers will be replaced by robots,” “creative(debatable) destruction is a good thing” even if self-serving and high in collateral damage, and “the service sector job creation will liberate factory workers and make life enjoyable” are all examples of manufactured misdirection cloaked as trends that left millions of workers and their families worse for wear in the wake. The shock of what was supposed to come led many sincere and ambitious (as well as already beaten down and desperate) workers along costly and unfruitful paths, and the reputation of educational institutions eroded a little more with each mirage. Education couldn’t keep up with the continuous and fruitless change that these short-term fads produced, being blamed by industry public relation representatives for not producing the workers needed. But this was just a way to keep the spotlight off of industry and investment firms who wanted to keep cutting costs by reducing labor and worker development efforts to make the quarter’s balance sheet look better than reality to the shareholders. Without guardrails, the investment industry was able to make the myth of “shareholder value” the doctrine of any capitalist enterprise, which is still hurting workers today.

Many of these projections, today, are nothing more than Wall Street-backed marketing efforts to promote a stock or group of stocks, not an independent futurist’s view based on sound research and analysis. Once the money is made, the trend tends to dissipate and those acting on the momentum are at a loss for believing. The money starts to build around the next manufactured “trend.” Business media outlets cannot hide their bias and contempt for workers. How often do you hear, “good news for x company, they are laying off 2000 employees,” or see them take a hard stand against worker’s pleas for increased wage and benefits – those who gave up so much during economic crashes as requested by employers and who carried the brunt of the crash’s aftermath?

There are many examples of media bias and its effect on workers. One extreme example is how the big money and the media stoked the Savings and Loan Crisis of the early 1980’s, dismissing the pending doom for many homeowners as they did during the Crash of 2008. Even weeks before the announcement of coming bank failures as a result of over-valued real estate and shady mortgage-backed securities, many media outlets were laughing off warnings from non-Wall Street bank economists and carrying even more Wall Street water by saying there was no better time to get into to a house mortgage. To do so, many unwitting citizens accepted a sub-prime loan: an adjustable rate for the down payment, an adjustable rate mortgage and even accepted a home equity line of credit based on fictitious equity weeks before the massive downturn. As interest rates rose and mortgage holders could not make payments against their declining or disappearing income, the scene became bleak.

Around 10 million Americans lost their homes, around 2.6 million workers lost their jobs as credit markets froze and over-leveraged companies had to contract. “Between January 1 and October 11, 2008, owners of stocks in U.S. corporations suffered about $8 trillion in losses, as their holdings declined in value from $20 trillion to $12 trillion. Losses in other countries averaged about 40%…” These were losses to the least connected and actually profits to those who built and knew how to play the crisis – a tremendous transfer of wealth from those least able to absorb it. The predominant “losers” were workers who experienced a hardship from all directions. Workers saw decimated personal and retirement savings as a result of being unwittingly or deceitfully invested in mortgage-backed securities. Concurrently, many lost their jobs, their homes, their safety nets and forward progress. Families were traumatized, as were the next generations of workers. When jobs started returning, many jobs paid far less than originally experienced and benefits were lower than previously offered. Homelessness rose and hopelessness flourished. This can be the outcome of ignoring reality and blindly accepting over-hyped, self-interested and uncontested manufactured trends.

Education, workforce development, government leaders, politicians and the media need to be less self-centered and do a much better job of vetting these life-altering, faux predications to which workers – desperate for a better life and who tend to trust the so-called experts too much – unwittingly become prey. And as major media sources become more focused on devastation, confrontation and disasters and less with good journalistic investigative news, and as unverified and self-serving smaller “news” sources emerge to fan the flames of anything that keeps them “followed,” consumers of information need to be more critical than ever as the motivation for “infotainment” is money and measured in viewer attention and retention.

Realism needs to be always front and center. Many workers have few chances left to reinvent themselves for the better. A decade is a long time to a family already living on the edge. Honesty and realism need to be the mantras of this decade, or rebuilding America will take only that much longer. False starts and happy talk need to be avoided. Government policies need to be changed back to facilitate a stable business environment and growing economy for all, seeing exporting of American goods (not jobs) as a natural state for a thriving economy and society.

We once did exactly this until the 1970’s when the first U.S. steel mills were sacrificed, followed by the electronics industry. Prior to that, government enacted legislation to incentivize companies to create and maintain jobs here in the United States and disincentivized companies that were only in it for themselves. Companies and their shareholders did quite well, and stability and longevity were more important than quarterly increases in earnings per share. Life was good for the middle-class, who had clear pathways to advancement and the security of paid sick leave, paid health care for them and their family, defined benefit pensions, often paid educational support and a career that lasted 30-40 years for them as well as their next generation. Today, no U.S. job or career is exempt from potential extinction – even the promised better service sector jobs such as call centers, paralegal, medical, finance and engineering have a short shelf-life.

We have a lot of work do and there is a tremendous amount at stake. Let’s hope cooler, clearer, non-dogmatic, altruistic and realistic heads prevail going forward. We can do this, but a lot depends on which direction Wall Street wants to push us and which direction our leaders will let them, and if anyone with a big enough platform and enough citizens that create a loud enough voice critically question the current state of the American worker and the American society in general.