When the mask slips and the bosses say what they really think

There is feelgood HR blather, and then there’s the way the world really operates

Photo by Emre Alırız on Unsplash

Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded.
AOC tweet (in reaction to Tim Gurner lamenting the laziness of Australian workers)

There are times when you have to shock the system and make it more capitalistic and there are times when you have to shock it back. All the benefits of productivity have gone to the top 10 per cent and a lot to the top 1 per cent. You end up with disgruntlement of everyone… [a majority of US voters now believe their nation must be] saved from the rich and powerful”.
Hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham

I somehow missed the real-time brouhaha over Tim Gurner’s comments, only reading about his remarks – and the inevitable, gritted-teeth retraction of said remarks – in the weekend papers.

In case you too missed the brief scandal, it began when the property developer rocked up to speak at an Australian Financial Review (more on that august organ’s ideological enthusiasms shortly) summit. No doubt assuming he was in the company of like-minded real-estate spivs, Gurner let fly – specifically at tradies, but more generally at Australian workers. 

Gurner doesn’t believe a rapidly growing population and a slowly growing supply of homes have anything to do with Australia’s housing crisis. Asked a question along those lines, Gurner responded, “We absolutely have to have immigration. Australia doesn’t work without immigration and if we’re not growing, we’re dead.”

If he’d just stopped there, he would have spared himself being the subject of a globe-spanning two minutes hate. After all, with a few honourable exceptions, all members of Australia’s (and the Anglosphere’s) political and business elite share precisely that view.

But Gurner just couldn’t help but vent some long-brewing frustrations. Frustrations he would have reasonably expected to be widely shared, at least within the confines of whatever fancy hotel ballroom the corporate jamboree took place in.   

I’ll rely on Sydney Morning Herald reporting for the rest:

Property developer Tim Gurner says employees have become too arrogant, and that unemployment must rise substantially to lift productivity, especially in the construction sector.

Gurner told a business event on Tuesday the pandemic had a “massive effect” on productivity, especially among tradies, and that it was worsening the housing crisis…

The dynamic between employers and employees had to change through a 40 to 50 per cent jump in unemployment, Gurner said.

“We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change.”

I assume the main point Gurner was making – a point many others have made in less inflammatory terms – is that the tight labour market has shifted the balance of power too far in favour of Labour and that situation would soon be rectified if the unemployment rate was five or six rather than three per cent. But it’s not difficult to understand why Gurner’s remarks prompted global outrage.

Gurner doesn’t appear to be a man lacking in self-belief. I’d wager he still (much more quietly) believes exactly what he said. But as pretty much everyone does when the baying online mob shows up, he soon went to water, releasing an almost-apology within 48 hours. (“I made some remarks about unemployment and productivity in Australia that I deeply regret and were wrong… My comments were deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families across Australia who are affected by these cost-of-living pressures and job losses.”)  

It's a gaffe when they tell truth
There’s an old joke that a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently lets the truth slip. I’m not sure Gurner’s remarks even qualify as a gaffe because he simply stated what people in his class sincerely believe. To wit:

*Mass migration is an unalloyed good

*Workers are lazy, ungrateful and prone to self-importance. Given the shift in the balance of labour-market power unleashed by a once-in-a-century pandemic, it’s essential that the lower orders be urgently scared into working hard – and, ideally, working hard under the watchful eye of their supervisor in the office. (The new normal of widespread WFH arrangements gets employers and their managerial henchpeople especially beetroot-faced, so I think we can all be grateful Gurner didn’t get started on that topic.)   

*Employers are the important ones in the employer-employee relationships. Wage slaves should be pathetically grateful that wealth creators (upstanding men and women such as Gurner) are around to provide them with a job. 

It’s not like the views people like Gurner hold are a closely guarded secret. Anyone with an internet connection can quickly locate Gurner-like pronouncements from Gurner-like businesspeople and Gurner-like op-ed writers.

The following articles are paywalled, but here’s a representative sample of the red meat the AFR throws to its officer-class readership:

CEOs should be paid (even) more

Workers are paid too much and should be much easier to fire 

If we did offer workers secure, reasonably paid employment, that might negatively impact dividends. Obviously, nobody wants that   

It’s now even more important than usual that employers wield the scythe mercilessly (otherwise the cost of capital might increase even further)

No matter what you do to try to help the proles, they just keep breeding, failing school, not working and fomenting crime and disorder   

I could go on for an extremely long time, but I think you get the idea.

If you believe I’m cherry-picking examples, I’d encourage you to pick up a business newspaper the next time you get the opportunity. Or read one of the gazillion tomes aimed at those who are, or who aspire to be, hard-charging C-suiters. Or even just one of those ‘Start your own small business’ books. You’ll soon discover that the worldview of employers, senior managers and small-business owners is as follows:

*You should have as few employees as possible and always take a “hire slowly, fire quickly” approach. If there’s a good reason to fire 10 per cent of your workforce, you should do that unhesitatingly. (Frankly, even if there’s no good reason to do it, you should do it anyway pour encourager les autres.)

*You should wring the most possible labour out of an employee while paying them as little as you can get away with. After all, they haven’t earned to right to be well rewarded because they haven’t (a) clawed their way up to the uppermost reaches of the org chart or (b) taken on the risks and responsibilities of owning a business.

*The most shameful thing an employer/manager can do, both as an individual and as a representative of their class, is “allow the monkeys to take over the zoo”. (This both undermines the authority of the employer/manager in question and potentially makes it that little bit harder for other employers/managers to keep their own subordinates in line.)

*On the other hand, any entrepreneur/CEO with a reputation for casually firing lots of people and generally behaving like a sociopath – ‘Chainsaw’ Al Dunlap, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – is almost certainly a genius that you should hero-worship and seek to emulate.      

Well, duh
All of the above seems so self-evident to me that I questioned the utility of even bothering to write it down. Granted, there was plenty of performative outrage in the wake of Gurner’s unguarded moment. But I’ll be performatively outraged if anyone who has held a job for longer than five minutes is genuinely shocked to learn an employer is bitterly disappointed by the appalling work ethic of their presumptuous underlings.  

That noted, I am constantly taken aback by the number of people, especially young people, who believe they’ve found a second family at their workplace and who view their employer or supervisor as a benevolent parent figure. I guess that actually happens sometimes, particularly in the not-for-profit sector and public service. But it’s certainly not the norm.

So, I’ll end by repeating the advice I gave when the Murdochs abruptly dispatched their highest-profile employee (for reasons that are still yet to be revealed):  

Your employer will unhesitatingly throw you under the bus for any reason, or sometimes even for no reason at all: Lots of people like to believe they have more than a business relationship with their employer. They often believe, despite the abundant evidence of their lying eyes, that their bond with their boss resembles one they might have with a friend or family member. But as I touched on in my last Substack, it’s comforting but almost always delusional to think that the organisation currently employing you has your back. Carlson reportedly socialised regularly with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. He has made them many millions of dollars over the last decade and a half. At least in public, he has always been a good company man. In short, Carlson had no reason to believe the Murdochs would abruptly turn on him. But turn on him they did.