The News: Same as the Old Boss?

Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

What exactly is fueling American dissatisfaction with work?

It’s been fascinating to watch the American public sphere grapple with the question, which is simultaneously about them, the people out there who are not public writers and commenters who have had what are widely regarded as bad jobs, and us, the people who supposedly have good or great jobs (like a lot of major public commenters do).

Some of the answers only apply to the bad jobs: poor pay, no benefits, inconsistent hours, no security, brutally hard or exhausting labor, physical risk (especially in the pandemic) that no one cares about or tries to mitigate.

Some of the answers only apply to the good jobs: alienation from leadership, an increasing sense that no one in charge cares about mission or values, weariness with being micromanaged or with pointless forms of workplace hierarchy, exhaustion with what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” or work that seems to serve no real purpose, frustration with eroding compensation and benefits, dissatisfaction with a lack of loyalty from employers, and above all, a desire to opt out of ever-escalating demands for longer hours and more productivity.

One of the things that I think makes many pundits, journalists and public writers working within formal, structured organizations uncomfortable is that there’s a shared answer between those dissatisfied with bad and good jobs: bosses, owners, the people with power at the top. And that answer is not merely how they boss but that they boss at all.

American workers, whether in popular culture or real life, have long accepted the figure of the boss both as a source of potential menace and as a person whose comradely authority might actually be appreciated and relied upon. Or who might be a kind of clueless and harmless figure easily bypassed by the real talent—say, Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I think more recently the boss is a figure who is almost the only imaginable incarnated extension of the invisible world of oligarchic power and wealth: the absentee franchise owner who passes impossible dictates along to a harried manager of a fast food restaurant, the chancellor in whose name a message of further austerity is sent to adjunct faculty from an entirely inaccessible Board of Governors, an editor who appears briefly in a staff meeting to announce new dictates from the publisher. Often the boss is a person with power who does not fulfill the fantasies we have about what power might constructively do to benefit all of us working at a particular company or organization and yet is a person who has tremendous power in terms of the latitude granted to them: they are in the rooms where it happens, they can break rules without fear of being called up and reprimanded, and so on. And even people who wouldn’t complain for a minute of the 1% in the sense of objecting to wealth inequality are I think sick of this kind of bossing: that the power isn’t used but that it is preserved.

---

Let’s think, for example, about Jeff Zucker, the subject of additional revelations today in the New York Times.

Zucker has had the kind of power that many workers want the boss to have, or so it seems. The power to redefine what the organization does within a competitive market, to command others to follow the redefinition, to hire staff who will bolster the direction he’s chosen, to continue to monitor and maintain the collective output or product of the people under his authority, and he’s been given credit for the outcomes of that power a number of times in his career—at the Today show, in shaping programs like The Apprentice, Fear Factor or Scrubs, and then at CNN. Ostensibly, he was also blamed for what looked like a commercial failure under his leadership at NBCUniversal and pushed out of his job in 2011—but it wasn’t long before he was back in executive leadership at CNN.

What other kinds of power did he have? His resignation is ostensibly about admitting that he broke a rule, which was to disclose a romantic/sexual relationship he was having with a co-worker under his authority to HR. Reading the NYT story suggests that this is the visible tip of a vaster domain of this kind of power. Not specifically the sexual conduct, but instead the interlocking of Zucker’s professional life with the lives of other powerful people in ways that are mostly invisible and unaccountable either to his workplace or to his customers, the viewing public. He’s been working with Allison Gollust since he was at Today; the NYT story reveals the uncomfortable detail that she moved her family to “the floor above Mr. Zucker’s in an Upper East Side building” all those years ago. When Zucker was out at NBC, Gollust was hired to run a clambake birthday party for Andrew Cuomo’s girlfriend, and he then hired her to become his communications director.

When Zucker took over at CNN, she went back to working for him. Then Chris Cuomo was brought in to host a show. He’d been working at ABC News, where a woman who was seeking a full-time job now says that she listened to Cuomo’s career advice, came to have lunch with him and was sexually assaulted by him. After Cuomo was at CNN, Chris Cuomo offered to do a segment about her new employer, a public relations firm. As the NYT story puts it “Ms. [Jane] Doe suspected he was concerned about her coming forward publicly with her allegations and wanted to use the proposed segment as an opportunity to ‘test the waters’ and discourage her from going on the record about his sexual misconduct”.

The interweaving of Zucker, the Cuomos and Gollust’s lives is sufficiently intricate and full of both obvious ethical issues and suggestive implications that the temptation is to just stick with that—and to see it as one more individual story. But I think it’s what people sense about bosses and leadership at both ends of the economy. Bosses get authorial credit for what teams of people do together, but they’re generally absolved of authorial responsibility for organizational and institutional failure. Zucker was the wunderkind who saved Today and spruced up NBC’s line-up; he was briefly excoriated in public for NBC’s dropping ratings and reputation, but just over a year later was back being a boss. The success of a boss is a frequently told public tale; the failure is private, deniable, and shrouded by litigation and reputation management. The bosses are not above the institutional law on paper and say so in public; the bosses are frequently doing all sorts of things that nobody else could do and get away with it and that comes out only in an unusual breach like this one, and only in very partial form.

But this is what millions of Americans know well in their own working lives. It’s not a public fact but it’s a frequently witnessed truth. The businesses large and small that people are walking away from are owned or managed by bosses who take no responsibility, who mismanage people frequently, and who absolve themselves of the rules and procedures they impose on others. People witness it all the time. But we live in a moment where there are no laws to constrain much of this, where employers at all ends of the economy have gotten used to thinking that their workers have no choice and no recourse, and that bossing is just one more example of the privatization of profit and the sharing of risk. So at last people are doing the one thing left to them, which is to leave or to withhold as much of what they are asked for as they can.

When I read the story about Zucker, I don’t find myself much interested in the specific adjudication of specific actions. I just keep coming back to the universe of bossdom, where governors and brothers, producers and lovers, bosses and petitioners, men demanding and women running, successes claimed and failures offloaded, all stand visible for one moment. Likely not for long: there are new bosses coming all the time.

Maybe what we need is a real audit of power up and down the entirety of American life, no holds barred, because I think that’s where the difference between a boss and a leader, between someone who has power and someone who is entrusted with leadership responsibilities, might become a public fact in a new way. Or maybe we just need to keep leaving and withholding, since there aren’t very many bosses and there are a lot of the rest of us.

(Special image bonus, by the way: search Unsplash for “boss” if you want to see what the corporate-driven vision of “boss” is at present as reflected in stock imagery.)

Image credit: David Blackwell, “Llama Like a Boss”, https://www.flickr.com/photos/40966760@N00/6863021288