Welcome to Job Hypocrisy – The New American Way

Welcome to Job Hypocrisy – The New American Way

There is little doubt that the Republican Party may mouth being pro-worker, but virtually all federal efforts in this regard fall into the category of tariffs and trade agreements. The former pro-NLRB is now simply an instrument of corporate America, with anti-union rulings rising fast. OSHA worker safety rules are being scaled back as well. Congress made minimum wage a law under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and that rate was last set in 1991: $7.25/hour. GOP resistance to raising that absurdly low number has prevented any increase since. There are no lower rates set in any state. The effective minimum wage has increased in 30 states and D.C. since January 2014… but the fed rate remains as it was set in 1991.

As the US Supreme Court appears to bow deeply to Donald Trump’s desire to usurp civil service protections and congressionally approved budgetary levels as well as the creation and administration of federal agencies, allowing him to fire and eliminate most federal agencies, tens of thousands of federal workers have or are about to lose their jobs. So what?! Really?

As artificial intelligence is exploding in the workplace, the average American worker has every reason to be concerned. In late July, President Trump prioritized the growth of AI without much in the way of addressing worker concerns. The expected unemployment realities have most recently witnessed upticks in the normal economic parameters that preceded a rise in those numbers.

Part of this reality is represented in the battle between Fed Chair Jerome Powell and President Trump over interest rates. The international financial world, already questioning the obvious impact of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill – massively increasing the federal deficit, soon to cut millions from medical and nutritional benefits while effectively rewarding the richest in the land with very substantial tax cuts – are prepared to further downgrade the dollar the instant they believe that the President controls interest rates and that the fed is no longer a neutral stabilizing check on monetary and fiscal policy. But this anti-labor ideology is trickling into our culture as well.

What is equally interesting is how major employers are changing their relationships with their own employees. Diversity, equality and inclusion policies are dying faster Russian soldiers on the battlefield. Efforts to make the workplace more comfortable, from snacks to more comfortable work surrounds, are fading fast, as remote work is ending for most workers. And even worker benefits that everyone agrees are a boon to productivity, still very much a ubiquitous American policy like paid vacations, hover in the “if you use them, you are a second-rate employee” line. Take what you may need to de-stress and then stress about why you are not getting promoted.

In a May study based out of universities in Hong Kong and Spain – The detachment paradox: Employers recognize the benefits of detachment for employee well-being and performance, yet penalize it in employee evaluations in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes – the impact of this inconsistency is analyzed. Workers harm their own careers by failing to take advantage of clear work rules that purportedly encourage vacation time. Instead, these “heading for burnout” employees enhance their likelihood of promotion by skipping vacation time.

“Americans work a lot, often at the expense of their own well-being (Griffith, 2019, Wong et al., 2019). US adults work an average of 47 h per week—almost a full workday longer than what typically qualifies as full-time (Gallup, 2014). As a result, approximately 25% of work-related tasks occur outside of regular working hours, and 46% of Americans had unused paid vacation days at the end of 2023 (Pew Research Center, 2023; U.S. Travel Association, 2019). When the COVID-19 pandemic further blurred the line between work and private life by transforming the homes of 71% of Americans into offices (Pew Research Center, 2020, Staglin, 2020), it led to a 25% increase in self-reported burnout—with a lack of separation between work and private life stated as the primary stressor (Spataro, 2020).

“Job-related burnout is not only detrimental to employee well-being but it also hurts productivity (Oswald et al., 2015) and results in organization-carried healthcare costs estimated to be between $125–$190 billion per year (Zimmer & Schnall, 2020). Indeed, work-related stress accounts for eight percent of national healthcare spending in the United States (Blanding, 2015). It is not surprising then that conversations around work–life balance are currently at an all-time high: Mental health advocates, academics, and even managers are starting to condemn the glorification of overwork and are encouraging workers to take breaks and to ‘protect and prioritize [their] mental wellbeing’ (Caron, 2019) on platforms like Twitter and in the popular press (Grant, 2021, Markman, 2021, Price, 2021, Whillans, 2020).”

Writing for the July 14th FastCompany.com, Jared Lindzon explains this hypocritical reality: “Workers who take small steps to enforce work-life balance—like setting an out-of-office message on weekends or not answering emails on vacation—are often considered less committed and promotable, even when they’re encouraged to take those actions…. Managers perceived the employee who enforced some relatively minor work-life boundaries as more focused, less stressed out, and less likely to experience burnout. However, they also perceived that employee as less dedicated to work.

“‘The same people who said that [the workers] are going to be more productive also said that they were going to be less promotable,’ says coauthor [of the above study] Eva Buechel, an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. ‘So even the people who say this is really important and even encourage work-life balance penalize them [for detaching].’” European mandates for long work breaks, often five summer weeks, literally shut down all but the leisure time and hospitality sectors during this period. Indeed, August is a sacred vacation month in most of Europe.

Even in Japan, the overworked employee is often “worked to death.” Karoshi, which can be translated into ‘overwork death’, is a Japanese term relating to occupation-related sudden death... The most common medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attacks and strokes due to stress and malnourishment or fasting. Mental stress from the workplace can also cause workers to commit suicide in a phenomenon known as karōjisatsu.” Wikipedia. That the average American worker puts in 150 hours in more a year than the average Japanese worker should scare us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in a highly polarized country where upward mobility has left the building, where AI is replacing all sorts of jobs at an accelerating pace, exactly what does it mean to be a hard-working, average American… and what do we have to show for it?