Worker Bees

I am astonishingly lucky.

I managed to find a job in big, bad corporate America with a company I like, full of hard working people I admire - doing something I love.

Astonishingly lucky.

Because for the average America worker, the working experience isn’t always quite so enjoyable.

An employee is seen as little more than a drone in America. Replaceable, expendable and utterly powerless in the face of market forces. The attitude is: Be Grateful You Have This Job.

It’s totally the opposite in Europe. Being a ‘worker’ has some validity and they enjoy considerable more security as a result. Be Lucky You Have Me, the worker tells the employer.

I think the major reason for this disparity is the conflicting mindsets of Americans and Europeans. (The British mindset is currently stuck in the middle - and leaning increasingly closer to the American viewpoint.)

Europeans are pragmatic. Your place on the totem pole is pretty much decided from birth. There is no shame in being a steel-worker, or a factory foreman, or an office worker for the rest of your life. You have a job. You receive an income. You earn a pay increase during your years of service that matches inflation. Generous holiday allowances and other benefits ensure that you work to live and not the other way around.

Americans, on the other hand, are aspirational.

You might start off as a steel-worker or a waitress, but the American Dream tells you that you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it. You might be considered ‘working class’ right now, but in a few year’s time you’ll be running your own business, or on TV, or clutching that winning lottery ticket. You don’t care so much about the long term benefits of your job because whatever your job is, it’s a temporary proposition.

You work hard and you’ll go places. Who You Are is determined by What You Do and as a result, the American worker lives to work.

This aspirational attitude might go some way towards explaining why Americans allow employers to treat them the way they do.

Less than two weeks paid vacation a year. Minimal benefits and – worst of all – the knowledge that you could be marched out of the door at a moment’s notice (instead of being given a month’s notice like we are in Europe.) The risks might be bigger, but in return the opportunities are better.

I admire that concept, but it doesn’t dismiss my shock when I first witnessed how ‘the working man’ gets treated by the American corporate monster.

The total lack of job security is the most scary prospect. America lives paycheque to paycheque and the timescale between them is a generally no longer than a fortnight.

A working stiff with a $3,000 mortgage, $1,400 car payments and $800 property tax a month to pay off (a pretty average situation) is going to be in real trouble really quickly if he gets the brush off on a Friday afternoon and suddenly isn’t earning that $80,000 salary he was counting on.

The American mindset pushes you to spend big and to build a wobbly tower of monthly credit payments to support your shiny new car, big red house and expensive toys. These ‘things’ say as much about Who You Are as anything you say or do. But the taller the tower, the more quickly it comes toppling down if there’s an upset in your finances – and that upset can whip around and boot you up the arse in a matter of hours.

It’s a totally alien prospect to me, coming from a European prospective.

In England, we lived in a tiny shoebox house, drove one fifteen year old car and struggled from paycheque to paycheque – but we always had the security of a month’s notice if either of us lost our job.

In America, living within our means has become so much easier and we can finally save money and live better – but the more we might extend ourselves, the deeper and more dangerous that drop might become.

Tina is half Jewish and I’m half Scottish – now that we’re aware of just how unpredictable an American worker's fortunes can be, we’ve both decided to maintain a lifestyle more in keeping with the stereotypes of our ethnicity.