“Low, low prices.” With that motto, a generation ago Walmart took over the world of retail. For years Walmart seemed untouchable; they could consume any competitor with volume, price and efficiency.

Yet in the past several years, some have questioned whether the Walmart empire has a gaping hole in the center. Forbes reported in 2014 that “Walmart’s low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing.” Americans for Tax Fairnessfound that “a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers.” When hourly workers go on strike to demand higher wages, often they’re fired.

Now, a recent New York Times cover story has highlighted the suffocating working conditions of Walmart’s successor: Amazon. Employing a sea of white-collar workers, Amazon has perfected the art of squeezing every ounce of productivity (and life) from its employees.

“One day I didn’t sleep for four days,” said Dina Vicarri, who sold Amazon gift cards. Another ex-employee’s fiancé would drive to the Amazon campus at 10pm after becoming concerned about his bride-to-be’s nonstop working night after night.

Liz Pearce, who worked at Amazon’s wedding registry said, “I would see people practically combust.” Bo Olson, who worked in books marketing, said “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” The pressure to deliver faster and cheaper under the constant surveillance of Big Data has led to high employee turnover. A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, showed that the average tenure for Amazon employees was one year.

Robin Andrulevich has called their human resource policies “purposeful Darwinism.” Hire overachievers with handsome incentives, drive them hard, and cut the lowest performers loose.

The conditions for warehouse employees at Amazon often are even worse. In 2011, Amazon came under scrutiny for brutally hot warehouse working conditions – they even placed paramedics outside for fainting workers. (They installed air conditioning after a public outcry.)

Walmart and Amazon today are fierce retail competitors with different business models. But they share at least one value: employees are expendable.

The Problem With the On-Demand Economy

Last week, I received the oddest email from Maren Kate, the former CEO of Zirtual, a company providing US-based online assistants — including my assistant Amber, working out of Utah. “It is with an incredibly heavy heart that I have to send this message. As of today, August 10th 2015, Zirtual is pausing all operations.” I didn’t fully understand what was happening.

Later that day, I learned that Zirtual, which had been on track for $11 million in revenue in 2015, essentially folded overnight. A round of debt funding didn’t come through, an within hours, 400 employees were let go and left to fend for themselves. Amber was dumfounded. She didn’t know what she was going to do for work.

Such is the lot of a new generation of workers in the On-Demand Economy. The Economist aptly titled an article on the phenomenon “Workers on tap.” The On-Demand Economy brings together computers and freelance workers (generally contractors) to provide a host of services: from chauffeurs (Uber) to home repair (Handy).

The problem with today’s On-Demand Economy – of which Amazon has at least taken cultural queues – is the same ailment plaguing Walmart and Amazon: employees are often seen as fungible assets. They may be human “resources” or even human “capital” (oddly, enough, and unlike money and machines, this capital can laugh and cry). But the unique lives of real people are often lost in the mix.

I can understand the desire of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to not want his company to become a lumbering “country club” like, in his view, Microsoft did. Frugal, productive and hard working are all good traits. But when companies drive employees, whether white collar or blue, to a place of desperation, we’ve made a critical mistake. And the mistake is dependent on our view of people. Are they assets or image bearers? Dispensable or deeply valuable?

Restoring the American Worker

I have a 6-year-old who occasionally treats her 2-year-old sister like a fly. Slightly annoyed, she often escapes to another room or simply builds her fort with a “No 2-Year-Olds Welcome” sign in front.

I then sit her down and explain a core Christian doctrine: All people are people. Even whiny 2-year olds have dreams and emotions, fears and joys, failures and triumphs. All people are reflections of God, I say to her. The all have value.

In the biblical account, people come first, then work.People are not designed for a job – jobs are designed for people. God put Adam in the garden “to work it and care for it” after he endowed them with inestimable worth (Genesis 2:15).

Today, we often take job descriptions and try to jam people’s lives into small boxes. When this happens, souls shrivel.

It also leads to odd distortions. Young college graduates work hundred-hour weeks in New York private equity firms as their bodies and relationships shrivel. Manufacturing line workers do the same repetitive tasks for decades – and their minds deteriorate as the years pass by.

Yet the biblical account gives us a very different view of work. It is neither one of seeking self-worth from working at a sexy tech company, nor one of selling off every skill and hour we have to the highest bidder on the other side of an app.

Work, in the Bible, is fundamentally about creative service. That is, work is a way for us to use our God-given creativity and talent to serve the needs of others.

But in an age where Amazon rules – and can nearly set the price for any good it offers because of it’s unending drive for faster, cheaper, more efficient -is it realistic to think that a large retailer could provide a life-giving environment for its employees? Could employees become more than expendable assets and contribute to a fully human community?

Hope for Retail: The Costco Model

In the late 90s, Matthew Horst worked part-time at a grocery store. He was punctual, cared for his customers, and did quality work. But the lack of benefits and a cancerous work environment prevented him from realizing his potential.

When Costco opened a store in his neighborhood in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they hired Matthew. Even though he has always been classified as “special needs”, Costco took a chance on him.

Today, Matthew takes pride in a parking lot free of carts. He boasts to his friends at the eyeglass center, bakery and customer service desk. And he loves his customers.

His brother, Chris Horst, said it well: “There are many companies which ‘succeed’ at the expense of their workers. I am a firsthand witness to a counterintuitive company: Costco succeeds through the flourishing of its employees.”

A 2013 Businessweek article reported that Costco pays its employees $20.89/hour (compared to the $7.25 national minimum wage). Joe Carcello, a 59-year-old with an annual salary of $52,700 and a sizable nest egg for retirement, said “I’m just grateful to come here to work every day.”

President Craig Jelinek says about his employees, “We know it’s a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment and loyalty.” And so employees are paid well and treated with dignity – and contribute to a highly profitable model for retail.

Jelinek’s philosophy is simple: “This isn’t Harvard grad stuff,” he says. “We sell quality stuff at the best possible price. If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.”

Other big retailers that have tended to see employees as expendable assets, historically, have become casualties. K-Mart and Sears come to mind.

One has to wonder if Walmart (and even Amazon) are next.

This post first appeared on the Patheos Mission:Work blog at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/missionwork/2015/08/the-expendable-worker-looking-for-hope-in-the-on-demand-economy/. Image: Pixabay.

Economy Finance

Review of Young Money

June 12, 2014

Today Christianity Today published my review of Kevin Roose’s Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. The book was literally hard to put down. As Roose unfolds the experience of eight young college graduates at the world’s most powerful investment banks, he captures the reader with a haunting portrayal of work that in almost every way destroys a soul. If I ever needed motivation to build Denver Institute for Faith & Work, I need look no further.

Here’s the first part of the review:

Only halfway through his first year as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, Jeremy Miller-Reed fell into a deep depression. The 100-hour work weeks and endless Excel spreadsheets he could handle. But his boss, Penelope, he could not. Penelope looked like Julia Roberts but had the personality of Genghis Khan. Junior analysts dreaded her wrath. After assigning a 20-page memo to Jeremy over her vacation, she returned to find a single page missing. “You had all week to get this right!” she screamed. That night, Jeremy went to the roof of his apartment, lit up a joint, and cried in the rain, thinking to himself I can’t do this anymore.

In college, Jeremy, like most young financial analysts, was bright, motivated, and had high hopes. He graduated from Columbia University, and in the summer of 2010 was excited to begin a career at Goldman Sachs selling commodities—oil, gas, corn, wheat, precious metals. Lured by a starting salary of $70,000, plus bonuses of up to $50,000, he rationalized that a two-year stint as an investment banker would be good experience for a planned career in urban design or politics. It was a common decision among his peers. At Harvard in 2008, 28 percent of seniors headed into financial services, and at Princeton in 2006, it was a stunning 46 percent. But for Jeremy, it was a decision that would haunt him—as it would the sorry cast of Kevin Roose’s new book Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits.

From 2010-2013, Roose, a business writer for New York magazine, shadowed eight freshly minted investment bankers during their first two years on Wall Street, tracking their stories. From starry-eyed interns to disillusioned, exhausted, and depressed spreadsheet jockeys, Roose’s Young Money reads like a handbook for everything and anything than can go wrong with work.

Moral Black Hole

The work of young analysts is often mind-numbing. Most investment bank rookies spend days (and nights) creating “pitch books”—hundreds of pages of financial data for companies considering buying other companies. After hours of formatting cells, creating graphs, and producing Excel models, often pitch books would be blasted by bosses… (read more)

Economy

Vocation: The Holy Grail of Corporate America

January 7, 2014

Five hundred billion dollars. That’s how much economists estimate the US economy loses every year due to employee disengagement.

A recent Gallup poll showed that 70% of Americans are disengaged from their work – either simply punching in and punching out each day, or actually working to sabotage the company they work for.

Globally it’s worse: recently Harvard Business Review noted that 80% of the global workforce is disengaged – 10% worse than America. And the numbers aren’t getting better. Back in 2007-2008, the Global Workforce Survey conducted by Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) polled 90,000 workers in 18 countries. Five years ago, 79% were disengaged worldwide. That’s one percentage point better, showing the world has lost ground in the past 5 years.

Imagine a global economy of Dilberts, wandering in a forest of cubicle boredom– and a sea of managers doing little to stem the tide of corporate ennui. If images of The Office are popping into your head (without the entertaining antics of Michael Scott), you wouldn’t be far from the truth.

But why hasn’t this question garnered more of our attention? Employee disengagement costs not only the US economy, but it dearly costs businesses, both large and small, in annual revenue and profits. And if these numbers are accurate for Christians as well as people of other faiths, that means that 4/5ths of the Body of Christ would rather be playing Angry Birds, checking Facebook posts from high school buddies, or taking naps under their desks than actually working.

Considering we live in an economy ever more dependent on creativity and innovation, we have to ask the question: How did the modern world become so disengaged from work, and what can be done about it?

Gary Hamel, named by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s foremost business strategist, tried to tackle this question in his book The Future of Management. He introduced a simple framework for ranking employee engagement, which he called “A Hierarchy of Human Capabilities at Work.”

A Hierarchy of Human Capabilities at Work

Level 6: Passion

Level 5: Creativity

Level 4: Initiative

_____________________

Level 3: Expertise

Level 2: Diligence

Level 1: Obedience

At the bottom is obedience – employees who show up each day and follow the rules and procedures. Obedience is necessary for large-scale organizations, but people on Level 1 simply do what they’re told. Next is diligence. These employees stay until the job is done and take personal responsibility for their work. They’re hard workers, and want to do a good job. Level 3 is expertise, or personal competence. They’re not only hard workers, but they’re good at what they do. They’re well-trained, many have great skills, and they’re eager to learn more.

Here’s the problem, however, with Levels 1-3. “Trouble is, obedience, diligence and competence are becoming global commodities,” writes Hamel, in his new book What Matters Now. “You can buy these human capabilities just about anywhere in the world, and in places like India and China, they can be bought for next to nothing.” And corporations have realized this, which is why millions of jobs have been outsourced from American and Europe to the Far East. If you’re an employee under the line in Hamel’s Hierarchy of Human Capabilities at Work (Levels 1-3), it’s likely that sooner or later, you’ll be looking for a job.

What, then, of the higher levels? Beyond expertise is initiative. These are employees who see problems or opportunities, and don’t wait to be told what to do. They’re proactive, and find ways to initiate new projects that create value for their company.

Level 5 is creativity. Here, “employees are eager to challenge conventional wisdom and are always hunting for great ideas that can be imported from other industries.” They challenge tired industry norms, pay attention to emerging trends, leverage existing skills and assets, and meet needs that customers didn’t know they yet had. For example, the creatives at Apple weren’t the first to invent a smart phone, but they did combine the idea of a smart phone with web browsing, a music player, email, alarm clock, calendar and an ecosystem of other apps. Level 5 employees are culture-makers – they create new ways of doing and thinking, and in the process shift companies, and occasionally industries.

Yet the apex of Hamel’s Hierarchy is what he simply calls “passion.” Hear how he defines passion: “[These are] employees who see their work as a calling, as a way to make a positive difference in the world. For these ardent souls, the dividing line between vocation and avocation is indistinct at best…While other employees are merely present, they are engaged.” Vocation – a deep sense of calling, a zeal to work for a purpose beyond oneself – is the single greatest need for corporations across the globe. In a creative economy, audacity, imagination and passion create the most long-term value.

But Hamel sees a problem: “[Here’s] the rub. These higher order human capabilities are gifts; they cannot be commanded. You can’t tell someone to be passionate or creative. Well, you can, of course, but it won’t do much good.”

Let’s take a step back and summarize. Most of the world can’t stand their work. It costs the economy and businesses billions of dollars, and it costs individuals of a sense of purpose. The world’s best business thinker sees this problem and crafts a hierarchy that puts action, creativity, and, of all things, vocation, at the top of his list of most valuable assets. But the problem is that these traits can only be gifts. That is, they must be given.

You can probably see where I’m going here.

It’s one thing to say that we ought to think about how to live out our faith in the business world. It’s another thing to say that the most desperate need the world – and our companies – has is people who are called to initiate and to create, both activities that have their very foundation in God himself (bara is the Hebrew word for “create” or “initiate”, used to describe God’s activity in creating the universe in Genesis 1).

What’s the takeaway? One of the wisest use of resources for any company is to help people discover their vocation, and then create fertile environments whereby employees can use their gifts to grow, create, and make a difference.

I’d also say that it would be fiscally wise for corporate leaders to leave space for honest expressions of faith, recognizing that you can’t give your employees creativity or passion. But perhaps Another can.

This post first appeared on the Denver Institute Blog.

Economy

Dishing Up Dignity

January 16, 2013

Today Christianity Today published my essay on two Denver-based restaurants: Café 180 and SAME (So All May Eat) Café. These restaurants, however, are not your typical lunch cafes. They both run on a pay-what-you-can model. That means customers are asked to donate either money or volunteer time for a meal. The effect of this model is, I believe, nothing short of revolutionary.

Several months ago I ate lunch with both Libby Burky, the Director of SAME Café, and Cathy Mathews, the Co-Founder of Café 180. Libby opened SAME Café in 2006 after working several years at a food shelf. She became frustrated by the poor quality of food at the food kitchen, and came to the conclusion that poor food, as well as simple hand- outs, rob people of their dignity. So she opened SAME Café off of historic Colfax Avenue on a new model. Serve organic food, cooked using clean energy, and make it available to all regardless of ability to pay. If they can’t pay, then customers are asked to volunteer one hour for a meal. Working for your meals restores to the unemployed or homeless the dignity of earning your keep.

Cathy Mathews, who I focused on for the article, has a similar story. With some help from Libby, she opened Café 180 in Englewood in 2010. Cathy’s story, however, flows out of the desire for community. She lives in Cherry Hills Village, and realized she knew very few of her poorer neighbors in Englewood. She desired a solution that would go beyond charity – a way to share not just money or food, but our lives with one another. And Café 180 has become just that – a community of rich and poor, secular and Christian, Republican and Democrat, all eating around a common table.

As I spent time with Libby and Cathy, what began to impress me was the way these restaurants can bring together people from drastically different walks of life. Both those who believe in the mission (the wealthy) and those who need a meal (the poor) volunteer in the kitchen. In doing so, they share their lives. Also, because the food is amazing, those who can pay full price arrive come faithfully for lunch. And those who haven’t had a great meal in a while, they too can each Mediterranean pizza or French Dip sandwiches.

The past two decades have led to the drastic gentrification – wealthy people moving into historically poor neighborhoods – of cities across the US. This can often cause class and racial tensions because when property values rise through redevelopment, the poor often must leave their neighborhoods for the cheaper suburbs. But pay-what-you-can restaurants have the potential to bring together these two wary neighbors around a good meal and a mission based on justice and hope.

Cathy Mathews shared with me that the desire to open Café 18o came from an extended time of prayer and silence. She felt “prompted” to see if she could assume the lease. Although Cathy is extremely humble about her faith, Cafe 180 is a great example how an individual put her faith into action at work.

So, I have a host of questions for discussion:

(1) What do you think about pay-what-you-can restaurants? Do you think this business model could work in other sectors?

(2) How can businesses make social good the primary bottom line? Do products and services you offer lend themselves toward building community and bringing people from different walks of life together?

(3) Could a pay-what-you-can restaurant work in your neighborhood? Why or why not?

Jeff Haanen

The Expendable Worker: Looking for Hope in the On-Demand Economy

Review of Young Money

Moral Black Hole

Vocation: The Holy Grail of Corporate America