Workers Want Freedom
Freedom is a hot topic at work.
Freedom is also a hot topic politically.
The two frameworks can get tangled up if we’re not careful. I believe there is value in disentangling – and really defining what freedom means for workers, workplaces, and important collegial relationships.
I don’t know about you, but I started working outside the home when I was 15 years old. My introduction to doing work for pay was as an hourly worker.
I started at Chesapeake Bagel Bakery because my friend Jill vouched for me, and my boyfriend Tim was willing to pick me up after my shifts. Then I moved on to Fanny Farmer Chocolates inside the mall. To that gig I added on shifts at Cub Foods Pharmacy. And I spent a whole (and very lucrative at the time) summer as a cashier at my local Walmart.
The tasks associated with these jobs were clear, the work was predictably repetitive, and I was – quite literally – on the clock.
At Walmart I worked as our CSMs (Customer Service Managers) stood at a podium across the aisle from all the check-out stands, surveying the entire scene, ready to jump in if and when we needed a price check, someone’s credit card kept getting declined, or a kid under 15 was trying to buy rubber cement for a school project and they were supposed to show us an ID but the only IDs they had were flimsy laminations they made themselves in shop class. I digress.
Depending on the length of our shift, we each had a certain number of breaks, and it was up to our CSM to divvy them up in such a way that there were always enough folks on the floor for the number of shoppers working their way through the store.
The protocol for those of us working the check stands was that we flicked a switch that made our overhead light blink when we needed help from a CSM. And when we were given permission that we could prepare for break, the CSM would turn our light off, and we would put a little table tent on our conveyor belt to indicate to shoppers that we were no longer available. We were responsible for working all the way through the customers already in our cue, but after that we could start the trek to the back of the store, swipe our name badge which marked the exact time, and then head to the vending machines, toilets, or for our lunch.
Why am I bringing up my days at Walmart considering I have been a CEO for the past 7 years? Because freedom.
Most of us, at home, at school, and at work have had the experience of very limited freedom. In our youth, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing so there were rules everywhere – “don’t hit your sister!” “don’t play in the street!” “put your dishes in the sink!” Back then, we were learning how to be people, surrounded by other people, needing to interact in ways that made it tolerable (and dare I say, advantageous) to be around one another.
Humans descend from social primates. It is one of life’s great jokes, in my opinion, that we are intrinsically wired to live and be in groups, but we also spend much of our lives struggling with group dynamics. A paradox – go figure!
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a bunch of freedom conversations for those of us that are on salary, those of us that primarily use our computers and phones to get our jobs done, and those of us who have a complex set of job responsibilities which make our days and weeks look more different from one another than the days when we were at our check stands scanning groceries.
I want to be very clear – physical labor jobs and jobs that pay hourly are absolutely complex and necessary. Computer jobs are not, in my opinion “better” – they are just particular, so I want to dig in there.
A couple months back I read the book, Building A Non-Anxious Life by Dr. John Delony. In it, Dr. Delony makes the case for zooming in on six daily choices that can help alleviate the crushing voices of anxiety. One of his recommendation’s centers on freedom. He says,
“Someone who’s oppressed, trapped, chained up, or unable to make decisions for and about their future will be anxious.”
He goes on to say, “When I say choose freedom, I’m not being flippant. I know there are billions of people across the globe who are not free from political, cultural, and religious oppression…The freedom I’m talking about is much more local.”
Workers in the wake of the pandemic, as well as the racial justice uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by police, have been very clear with me about the kinds of freedoms they are craving:
o I want to be free to work with and for people who share my fundamental values
o I want to be free to work where it makes sense for me and my family
o I want my body to be free – to not be monitored and controlled
o I want to be free to leave if and when I am being treated poorly, I’m bored, or I’m feeling called to something else professionally
o I want to be free to pursue goals beyond work – like goals related to my health and my community
These freedoms, to me, feel like very human desires, and understandable responses to workplace conditions that for decades were often focused on constriction and control.
Now I don’t want to dip out of this essay before addressing how the very notion of “freedom” has been contorted and re-branded many times over in the U.S. Remember “freedom fries”!? As though we were in active conflict with the French at some point in the early oughts!? That was wild.
Both major political parties and their politicians have tried to reclaim “freedom,” staking their reputation on its very protection. This is a good time to remember that interdependence is an antidote to the fierce individualism that gets us in trouble so often. Scholar Tema Okun offers a deep dive into how individualism is one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture which lulls us into believing we are walking a righteous and natural path, when in fact obsession with individualism is not actually freedom at all. In Okun’s words,
Individualism – “our cultural story that we make it on our own, without help, while pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, is a toxic denial of our essential interdependence and the reality that we are all in this, literally, together.”
Last week I finished reading a fiction book from the library entitled American By Day by Derek B. Miller. Page 97 struck me in such a way that I took a photo of it in the midst of reading so I could refer back to it later. You don’t need to know the particular plot of this story to catch the point:
“We have a lot of new immigrants in Norway. We have to take these classes on culture. Our instructor was an American with questionable taste in movies. She said American culture is all about individualism. It’s not just an idea. It’s what she called a performance. The way you perform individualism is through self-reliance. But acting self-reliant usually means acting alone. And being alone is a weaker position than working together. That’s America’s paradox – your individualism is a strong cultural trait that weakens you as a community and you just can’t see it. You worry that working together undermines your myth of self-reliance, so you hyperexaggerate its value to mask the fear.”
I find this an important touch point in modern conversations about freedom and the reality of trade-offs.
For example,
- I am not free to keep all the income I earn - I pay taxes. The trade-off is that I get to drive on roads, go to parks, attend public schools, and more.
- I am not free to drive while drunk. Good, because if I did that, I could kill people. A driver’s license is a privilege, not a right.
- I am not free to bail at work and think I’ll keep my job. I consented to an exchange. If I don’t hold up my end of the bargain, the freedom I gained by skipping out is met with the freedom from a paycheck.
We’re all adults. We can decide what is most important to us around our own sense of freedom. We can make measured decisions about the trade-offs of freedom. Freedom as an adult living in community does not mean I am free to do whatever I want to whomever I want for as long as I want.
Freedom for me is a sense of spaciousness. There are choices. There is room. I feel like I can breathe.
The last thing I’d like to offer is for you to take two minutes and forty-two seconds to listen to John Legend and the Roots’ rendition of Billy Taylor’s iconic song “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Each time I listen I can’t help but feel some hope.
My commitment to you, is that next week I will share Essay #14 out of 52 about the important relationship between transparency and confidentiality.
Yours,