The Working Catholic: Workplace Behavior by Bill Droel

In response to recent disclosures of predatory behavior in several workplaces, human resource departments around the country are redistributing employee handbooks. Likewise, managers are everywhere huddling with employees to review proper deportment.

Rule books and company policies are important. They represent an advance over the arbitrary decisions of a boss, even a benevolent boss. Rule books provide a basis for equal treatment. They are often written after some employee input, either through a personnel committee or a union and thus these personnel policies carry a degree of assumed consent. It is, admittedly, difficult to deal with specific personnel incidents like persistent tardiness, suspicions of addiction, internet surfing, gossiping and harassment. Likewise, written company policies add a layer of procedural wrangling or maybe nitpicking to each incident. Nonetheless, those policies benefit the company, its brand, its managers, its lawyers, its insurance policy and importantly, its employees. To operate any business today on a case-by-case basis is asking for additional trouble. 

Let’s be clear, however. To have a refined and fully-accepted employee handbook is not the same as having an ethical workforce and ethical managers. A rule book cannot dispose workers to see the sacred on the job; it cannot help a worker imagine her job as a vocation. A rule book does not establish decorum in the office. It is incapable of fostering compassion. And please be aware, a rule book cannot give any manager or any employee his or her dignity.

Workers, writes James Drane in Becoming a Good Doctor (Rowman Littlefield, 1988; $16.95), “shape the ethical narrative of their lives by the ways they do ordinary things over and over.” His book is directed to medical schools and hospital administrators, but as Drane says, its argument relates to all occupations and professions. “The whole medical ethics enterprise has been conceived in terms of logic, principles, patient rights and procedures,” he notes. Medical ethics, like other topics in medicine, is taught by using case studies. The result is “an abstract, analytical style.” This approach for doctors, nurses, technicians and many other workers results in licensing requirements, continuing education requirements, renewals, charting, written policies, patient consent forms, information-sharing regulations and lots more. All of this is necessary, perhaps. 

This dominant approach to education for and delivery of health care does not consider the worker’s personal virtue or character, Drane continues. “Attention to a young doctor’s personal traits or character is out of place” in medical education or in hiring. The dominant approach assumes that personal character—the product of doing ordinary things well, over and over—has no place. Putting character outside the bounds of hiring criteria and evaluation, Drane contends, contributes to the disease of agnosia. That is, health care workers might lose the ability to see the face of the person being treated or to respectfully appreciate the people they work with.  A hospital, to continue the medical example, might have a doctor or a nurse who has completely memorized the procedural handbook. That doctor or nurse might be nearly compulsive about observing all the required dos-and-don’ts. None of this, however, guarantees that such a doctor or nurse is any good; that such a doctor or nurse treats patients and families holistically or respects the inherent dignity of each colleague. 

There’s a reason that human resource departments, executives and others don’t traffic in virtue.  Modern business has no binding standard for conduct, except the law. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and others, tried to develop a modern approach to ethics that did not depend on revelation or religion. But, under the weight of too many particulars, the objective rationale behind the modern approach to business and public ethics is easily ignored, even explicitly dismissed. The situation in recent years is worse, as a post-modern approach to public life has gained fashion. It harbors an ironic contempt for objectivity itself.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior Counselor to the President and, by the way, a Catholic, says “There are alternative facts.” This is a stunning example of post-modern relativism. If she is correct, there is no ethics.

U.S. Catholic bishops, to offer a current situation, do not err in restating or re-framing canons pertaining to deviant personnel. They go in the right direction by requiring their employees to judiciously report deviance. But as intelligent bishops should know, even the most comprehensive personnel guidelines will not sufficiently influence an employee who is short on virtue. 

Entertainment executives, to mention a second current example, are not wasting time by requiring all employees to read company personnel guidelines. This pertains even to the biggest stars in the industry, maybe especially the stars. But intelligent executives should know that it takes more than a guidebook to have a culture of respect in the studio or the newsroom. 

How can virtue be acquired? To be continued…

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENSES

                                                       

The current attack on truth by the Trump administration seems unprecedented, but upon review it was and is a tactic used by dictators and ‘dictators-in-the-making.’  The gospel story in John, Ch.18:38 relates that the Roman governor Pilate asked, “What is truth?” then attempted to erase it with a calculated execution with plausible deniability.
         

 Children are most adept at distinguishing the true from the false.  Truth is distilled from fact in the form of make believe or fairy tales.  Kids understand.
  

It is more difficult for adults to define truth when they are fixed on questions pertaining to truth: 

What are the causes? – these are the realists;

What is the really real? – these are the idealists;               

Why me and not nothing? – the existentialists;

What works? - the pragmatists.

Answers must be certain to protect individual and group identity.  There is no compromise with groups with different questions and different versions of truth.

WHAT TRUTH IS NOT

George Orwell went beyond such questions with his ‘make believe’ tale for adults with imagination– Animal Farm.  In Orwell’s story the animals take over the farm of the oppressive capitalist, Mr. Jones.  In time, after an impressive beginning the animals are more exploited than ever by the animal dictator Napoleon – a pig. 

 

Napoleon

Napoleon secures his power through a public relations campaign based on lies through his spokesperson – Squealer.  Animal Farm defines truth by pointing out what it is not – Fake News.

Squealer

WHAT TRUTH IS

The Christmas story defines truth in presenting an image of what it is.  Friends and ‘compañeros,’ Pastor Joe Ellwanger and his wife Joyce, write in their Christmas letter:
  

The Truth of Christmas is worth celebrating year-round with lives full of radical love and courageous work for justice.  After all, the Son of God became a human being in the poverty of a cow stall.  It is clear all human life matters.

Truth is here; we just need to recognize it and distinguish it from Squealer’s lies.

Artwork by Monique, 3rd grader.

The Working Catholic: Genuine Change by Bill Droel

Will the buds of social improvement flower? There are promising signs. People are speaking out for respectful behavior in workplaces. Others are adamant about equal treatment under the law. Some desire better attention to mental health and addiction; still others are sensitive to food and product safety. To turn these and other initial bursts of interest into meaningful social change means avoiding pseudo-change; those activities that feel like social change but only approximate genuine politics.

Discussion groups, for example, are not change agents. Consciousness-raising is not politics. Oh yes, our society benefits from book clubs. Roundtable discussion groups that meet over drinks and a topic are important. These and other modes of intellectual sharing assist those who advance the common good.

It sometimes happens, however, that participants in a discussion group assume that they are thereby tackling a social problem. A parish group, for example, forms around shared concern over opioid addictions.  They read and discuss Dreamland, a terrific book by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury, 2016). They subsequently invite the entire congregation to a couple of presentations, including a well-attended one with the local sheriff. The parish group accumulates a referral list for families dealing with addiction. All of this is good, noble and necessary. It is not yet social change. An opening must be found into the pain treatment industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the nursing home industry, the criminal justice system, the social service bureaucracy and the like.

The parish group itself does not have to be a change agent; in fact, it probably should not be. But the group can perhaps find ways that its members can get inside the problem from within their workplace, their college, their professional association or their union. Plus, the small parish group can perhaps coalesce with other church groups in their denomination or across denominational and religious lines and then join even bigger circles of influence.

A key to social change behavior is the understanding that outsiders must get to the inside. This journey requires sophistication and some tradeoffs, including serious attention to core principles.

Here is one example of outsiders getting to the inside. Globalization has many unfortunate side-effects. But globalization by definition is huge and seemingly amorphous. Sweatshops in Bangladesh are a bi-product of globalization. But there’s nothing one can do about them. But wait. Some students have found a clever way to break into the seemingly impenetrable harshness of the global economy. First students at one school and then students at the next school went to their college bookstore. They asked the store manager to name the factory that produces the school’s sweaters, shirts, jackets and the like. They simultaneously pushed the college administrators to require that bookstore vendors have humane labor codes. The students, who communicate with those at other schools through United Students Against Sweatshops (www.usas.org), got their school to sign-on with an apparel monitoring organization, Worker Rights Consortium (www.workersrights.org). Guess what? Some major apparel retailers and clothing brands met with student representatives. The companies now expect their overseas sub-contractors to observe humane working conditions.

Is the problem of sweatshops solved? Not yet. Some apparel lines want to do their own monitoring of the overseas suppliers; the student groups want independent monitoring. So, the students have to get further inside some apparel companies. In doing so, the students have to consider their principles: Is half a loaf acceptable or do we push for three-quarters of a loaf? Is the credibility of the students enough or would a celebrity endorser help? Maybe a bigger presence on social media is the answer? What else is involved in social change? To be continued…

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

THE ICE BOWL AND PRIORITIES

 Fifty years ago the Green Bay Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys in the legendary “Ice Bowl” at Lambeau Field in Green Bay.  I remember watching the game on T.V. at the Dominican Priory in River Forest, IL.  I was delighted when Bart Star, on a quarterback sneak, followed lineman Jerry Kramer across the goal for the winning score.  A couple of the brothers from New Mexico were rooting for the Cowboys.  I had no idea what was going on in Milwaukee. 

Change the Game

In August Mayor Maier blocked our march

by issuing a proclamation.  Chief Brier

was quick to jail us.  Then our numbers surged.

The aldermen complained, you wreck our rep-

utation as a place that’s fair.  Their fair.   

  

In fall their strategy turned cold.  They dup-

licated a weak Wisconsin statute

exempting owner- occupied and small

 buildings, exactly what Milwaukee had.

We marched for something stronger, fair for all.

Year’s end.  Cameras turn toward Green Bay,

the Packers minus twenty cold, last play –

a sneak, they win-fans ecstatic!

We huddle, keep our line tight, our eyes on the goal.

A poem by Margaret Rozga which appears in her book of poems about the fair housing marches in Milwaukee fifty years ago.  The book is titled:  200 Nights and one day, Benu Press, P.O. Box 5330 Hopkins, Minnesota 55343  www.benupress.com