Our society is both democratic and capitalistic, and a certain tension exists between the goals of the two, especially in the commercial sector.  Democracy idealistically emphasizes the rights of the individual and the collective welfare of individuals in society.  Capitalism focuses on productivity, profit, and competition.  The two can coexist, as they have in the United States, but the preservation of two inherently contradictory agendas is a precarious balancing act.  In American society today, the pendulum has swung to the capitalistic side, which could be positive, were it not for the negative effects on the quality of a large portion of our lives – the time we spend in the workplace.

Unquestionably, capitalism is responsible for much that is good in our society.  The productivity of business and industry allows many of us to enjoy a very high standard of living.  The creature comforts that we have – automobiles, modern homes equipped with numerous conveniences and comforts, supermarkets and stores stuffed with a wide variety of products, and all the rest – are the result of the productivity of competitive enterprises that are determined to make money.  Furthermore, these enterprises generate jobs that enable us to buy what they produce and, in more modern times, to afford the services that they offer.

However, we have recently experienced some drastic shifts in emphasis that have had a negative impact upon us, both as workers and as consumers.  This negative shift is most apparent in the workplace.

More than ever before, companies precipitously lay off (read "fire") workers, even those with many years of service to the company, as they downsize, merge, outsource, and engage in any cost-cutting endeavor that may (not necessarily will) increase profitability.  Despite the glib reassurances (read "lies") of management, nearly every merger – and mergers are now almost daily events – results in loss of jobs.  When two companies combine, some positions naturally overlap and become redundant.  Mergers may be a godsend for top managers and stockholders, but they can be a disaster for the workers.

More than ever before, companies are reducing the size of the workforce to increase the profit margin.  A frequent explanation is that advances in technology have made it possible for fewer employees to do more work.  However, the truth is that the companies are attempting to milk workers for all they can get away with – which is often quite a lot when people are fearful of becoming unemployed in a market brimming with other laid-off workers.  After all major layoffs, whether the result of some capricious decision by management or of a merger, the survivors are not only demoralized ("Am I next?) but also stressed from assuming additional workloads and responsibilities.  Quality of work may suffer (thus ultimately negating the benefits of cost-cutting as the company loses customers), but the gurus at the top are slow to notice this because they are focusing on quantity.

Companies no longer feel much obligation to provide attractive benefits plans to attract and retain employees.  Admittedly, some of these cutbacks are the result of forces beyond the control of the company.  Reductions in healthcare benefits, for example, are mostly a consequence of the rising cost of healthcare.  However, one could argue that one of the main reasons that healthcare costs have risen is that companies in the healthcare industry itself – notably pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies – are making huge profits.  Anyone who has filed a series of claims with a health insurance company comes away convinced that these outfits themselves are one of the reasons why healthcare costs as much as it does.  They seem to devote more time and money to generating paperwork and denying legitimate claims than they do to providing coverage.  What's the sense in spending well over $100 on bureacratic red tape to avoid reimbursing an insured person for a $75 medical bill?  Even medical professionals say that the health insurance industry in the United States is grossly mismanaged and inefficient, yet it reaps huge profits.  And if drug companies need all the money that they say they do for research and development, why are they spending millions on advertising?  ("Talk to your doctor," the ads say, as if patients are going to choose their medication – like their laundry soap – based on a TV commercial and not on their physician's expertise and knowledge.)

But we digress.  Businesses have now virtually eliminated one of the primary benefits that was commonplace fifty years ago as a way to attract and retain loyal employees – the pension plan.  Today, public workers (government employees) are almost the only people who enjoy pension benefits. Employees in private corporations are expected to put aside a large chunk of their salaries toward retirement, even though wages have not increased significantly, if it all, when measured against inflation.  If our standard of living is higher now than it was in the past – and it probably is – it is not because the average worker's salary has increased but because most families contain two wage-earners.  If all or most of the working wives were to drop out of the workforce and become housewives, our economy would collapse overnight.  Certainly, almost no family could put any money aside for the future.

All of these trends in business have had a profound negative effect on our way of life, in and out of the workplace, but the effects on the quality of life in the workplace are the most obvious.  It's probably a chicken-and-egg question as to which came first – a decline in employees' work ethic or corporate practices that made employees work half-heartedly.  However, evidence certainly supports the latter view.  When a company offers little job security and lays off even seasoned employees with little or no warning, when its benefits package is skimpy, when it offers no future security even to employees who devote their entire working lives to the corporation, employees feel no compulsion to be loyal.  This lack of identification of the individual employee with the interests of the larger corporate unit has eroded the work ethic and is probably responsible, at least in part, for the creation of the "me first" generation.  Why should workers be "team players" when the "team" shows every indication of not giving a damn about them personally?  Why should they work hard to promote the interests of the corporate entity when the success created by their work makes the corporation attractive for a merger?  Unless they are stockholders in the company, they will reap no benefits from the merger and may very well find themselves discarded by the very company whose interests they worked to promote.

Chronic insecurity in the workplace can cut two ways.  On one hand, fear of being laid off may make workers knock themselves out by working hard to become indispensible to the company.  On the other – and this is far more likely – it will cause them to work at half steam as they become aware that nobody is indispensable and that the company can and will fire them, without cause, no matter how hard they have worked.  As more and more workers become convinced that a job consists only of showing up and doing the minimum amount of work, quality of work suffers.

The ripple effects of this kind of attitude among millions of employees are enormous.  Products are flawed because workers overlooked details.  Efficiency declines.  It takes only one weak link in the production chain to undermine efficiency; when several such links exist, the results are disastrous.  Most of all, customer service becomes nonexistent.  Employees learn quickly enough that the company wants them to make the most sales and move on, not to satisfy as many customers as they can.  Unless there are lots of complaints, the boss doesn't care – and people rarely complain anymore because customer service is so often lacking that nobody expects it.

American corporations rely less and less on quality and service to be profitable.  Instead, as the glut of advertising shows, they believe that "hype" generates more sales and profits than does quality or service.  Here the negative fallout from current business practices moves from our lives as employees in the workplace to our lives as consumers in the marketplace.  We become upset with and stressed out by employees who don't seem to care about anything but sales, even though the employees may themselves be upset with and stressed out by employers who consider service to be, at best, a secondary matter.  The marketplace becomes hostile territory, with consumers and workers growling at each other, while the suits sit above the fray, counting their money and designing more mendacious hype to promote their wares.

Worse, this has been going on for so long now that we expect and accept the situation.  We not only accept that even some of the "finest" products will have flaws and will not last very long; we expect this to happen.  This is not always because of obsolescence.  It is often because the product is made by half-hearted workers in companies that focus on profit and little else.  The more devious among these companies purposely ensure that the products won't last so that we will have to purchase replacements.

Perhaps one of the greatest abuses of the consumer is self-service – a fine idea when it was limited to vending machines and cafeteria food but a practice that has gotten out of hand.  The self-checkout, touted by companies as a way to cut overhead and thus reduce prices, has become in fact a device for eliminating service and increasing profits.  If we stopped to think about it, we would recognize that self-service turns customers into unpaid part-time employees of the business.  Except in New Jersey and Oregon, the two states that do not permit self-service gas stations, consumers have willingly accepted the idea of self-service, but the price at the pump is no lower in these states than it is in New Jersey and Oregon.

Nobody expects businesses to ignore the profit motive; after all, they're in business to make money.  However, there's a huge difference between making a profit and indulging in the kind of greed that negatively affects the lives of workers and consumers.  While socialism has proven to be a failed experiment in countries that have tried it, capitalism is eroding some of the democratic ideals of America – in ways that the country's founders could not have foreseen.

Companies in America need to look for new business models.  I suspect that a viable model may be Google.  Though I have no inside knowledge, I understand that Google is a wonderful place to work, offering perks that are not dreamed of in other companies.  People are falling all over themselves to get jobs at Google, and the company has far more applicants than openings.  Meanwhile, Google is highly profitable; since going public, its stock value has risen dramatically.  Customers who first became devoted to Google as it became the model for an increasingly important service – Internet search – remained loyal, even when Google had to introduce advertising to help finance its service.  The advertising was unobtrusive, more a part of the service than an intrusion.  Without launching a campaign of annoying and insulting TV commercials, "Google" became a household word, achieving huge name recognition, which is the sine qua non of advertising.  Instead of spending huge sums of money on hype, it has used some of its profits to expand and improve its services.  Offering some of these innovative products and services free of charge to consumers has enhanced Google's image more than a spate of TV ads could.  It has proven that, within the capitalistic system, it is possible to improve the lives of employees and customers alike without embracing the idols of greed.

Whether or not Google can continue to be a "good business," in the sense of being benevolent and profitable at the same time, remains to be seen.  However, much of the rest of American business has descended to such depths of "bad business" that we, as consumers and workers, have little respect for or trust in them.

I have no idea what they are teaching at Harvard Business School and other places that train managers these days.  However, they should be teaching that we can have better business, without sacrificing the capitalistic goals of profit-making, if businesses follow certain principles:

> Provide a corporate environment that promotes employee loyalty, offers a modicum of security (at least to long-term employees), and rewards the work ethic.
> Spend less money and energy on advertising hype and more on quality and service.  Use technology to improve service, not as a substitute for it.
> Respect the customers.  We are not morons and do not appreciate being treated as "suckers."  Whether we are customers or employees (we are often both), don't just tell us that we are important to you – show that we are.