THE W.O.R.D.

In Jeffrey Schmidt’s book “Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals,” Schmidt argues that the majority of humans become “disciplined minds” when they are forced to conform to the soul battering system of work and university. Indeed, it might even be said that the university programs they pursued were designed fundamentally to prepare them for the ‘real’ world, meaning the interests of those who are at the top of the corporate and government hierarchies. However, while these professionals have a relatively high level of formal education and given their university training, tend to believe they possess strong critical analysis skills, the institutions they serve severely limits their freedom to think independently. For our purposes salaried professionals, will be defined as those individuals who completed an undergraduate degree at university, often followed by a graduate degree, and who then go on to work for a corporation or government (as is more likely the case with members of our group) and become servants of the hierarchical structure of these institutions.

Given the intrinsic need of human beings to lead meaningful lives, salaried professionals tend to positively identify with the institutions they serve and to legitimize those institutions’ broader effect on the ‘society’ at large. For example, a professional working for a pharmaceutical firm may convince herself that the patent application she is working on is beneficial to the basic process of developing new drugs. Or a government policy analyst working for the Canadian International Development Agency might convince himself that the department does a lot of good around the world, when in fact its programs have at many times done a lot of damage. Instead of questioning the nature of the work they engage in, salaried professionals learn to think critically only within the boundaries set by their institutions. For instance, policy recommendations formulated by government bureaucrats will not diverge from options that are considered ‘realistic’ – meaning options that fall within the range of acceptable opinion. Thus, if a bureaucrat working at the Department of Foreign Affairs were to argue that Canada should sever its military partnership with the United States because the latter is regularly engages in gross violations of international humanitarian law, this would be viewed as absurd. Indeed, to make such recommendations, which run counter to the basic orientation of the institutions they serve, can negatively affect the salaried professional’s career, especially in corporations, where unions are usually absent.

Much of the reason for why all this happens is that the institutions that employ salaried professionals are hierarchical, which means that the agenda and parameters of work are set at the top. If workplaces were democratic, however, salaried professionals would have more leeway to question the basic orientation of the institutions they ‘work’ for and to reorient their institutions if necessary. But what does a democratic workplace mean? It means a place where decisions are made collectively, and where the executive branch, which today makes the important decisions, does not exist.

To get to this end goal, today’s salaried professionals must work within their respective institutions to reform them from the inside and bring slowly bring a greater degree of democracy to their workplaces. This agenda elicits a number of questions, which we’ll discuss together:

QUESTIONS

1. In your experience as a salaried professional, do you believe that you have the freedom to think independently at work?

2. Can you change the world by working from the within the system – meaning within a corporation or government department that does harm?

3. Given that corporations are ‘owned’ by shareholders, do employees have the right to pursue a democratic workplace?

4. Should we strive for democratic workplaces? Or will this be too chaotic?

5. Why or why not should salaried professionals have more democratic rights within the institutions they work for?

6. Should salaried professional ‘steal’ their employers’ time to fight for internal or external reform/causes?

FURTHER READING

Disciplined Minds Reviews:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JVP/is_2001_Winter/ai_90530892

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/february02ryan.htm

When: Monday, April 30, 2007, 5:30pm