How many people do you know who have approached their careers with careful attention to developing their competencies only to be bullied out of the American workforce? The answer for me is a whole lot of them.

Almost everyone I know who I respected as a significant contributor who conscientiously and carefully gave their best effort day after day have been pushed out of their job. They have had their careers ended not just by buy-outs but also by a new manager philosophy. This neoliberal philosophy is profit first even if the final outcome is destruction of the enterprise’s good reputation and the end of the enterprise.

I personally know nurses, librarians, managers, teachers, scientists, bank loan processors, retail salesmen and probably others. These employees were pushed out because they insisted on telling the truth about the workplace. Also because they were trying to achieve excellent outcomes. And because they had consideration for fellow employees and customers. They also had good mental attention for doing the job as it was meant to be done as supported by the mission of the workplace. They specifically became educated and trained in order to do excellent work. These kinds of workers have been banned in many American job sites. Knowledge worker competency is no longer wanted in America. In the effort to boost profits and change every policy in the interest of profits American enterprises have been ignoring ordinary good sense and safety and getting rid of people who behave with a conscience.

I haven’t been motivated to write about this before today but I do so in response to a great article that I read. The title of the article is: “Suicide mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane,” by Maureen Tkacik, Mar 28, 2024, from The American Prospect: Ideas, Politics and Power, (https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/?fbclid=IwAR2FGVrz6QFhEcB1nXdBxMUGvt3u9O55w0lfAMt1DS1ploRaw7c3VbmKGuQ_aem_AcX16zTCFmG5LqceRQiYUy96WdT6B6kElQkZ-haDVjcQIA0dmHY0LKwj_pjNkMcF5RY). This article is a great place to start understanding why the new management strategy needs to end.

This article captures the feeling of workplace hopelessness at Boeing that a great thirty year quality and safety inspector engineer named John Barnett experienced. It described his testimony about the workplace policies that made it impossible for him to continue making safety contributions. John Barnett was making a legal desposition about the troubles at Boeing when he was found dead. He didn’t get to give his third day of testimony. It is clear that John described workplace bullying. And it’s undeniable that bullying escalated to a bullet in John Barnett’s temple. Some say suicide and others say murder.

Putting it mildly, I don’t think that this was ok. It wasn’t ok for John Barnett, it wasn’t ok for any of us who want to ride in an airplane and it wasn’t ok for Boeing. It wasn’t ok for the many dead people from two separate total death Boeing plane crashes.

It shows that the new manager style is tragic and terrible and we should stop it. The choice of sacrificing a company in the interest of a short-term manager profit is called the principle agent problem and it is a form of control fraud.

The CEO made money in the millions, the stock went up in price benefitting share holders and the company many once revered and that John Barnett made a huge effort to save, to correct, to improve may never be successful again. John Barnett died while he was trying to tell this story.

I have to say here that I think that stock price increases don’t make up for the losses that were externalized to others. And I would say that is true even if an insurance company can pay off the families that lost their family member. I would say that even if employees that are bullied out can find another job. I would say that no matter what the stock sales buy in the form of lifestyle.

We should also realize that the American workplace has been seriously harmed under this neoliberal policy set. Good workers who could contribute to make enterprises succeed, can’t do that anymore. Also remember the doctors, nurses, firemen, teachers and others that were dismissed because they wouldn’t take a covid vaccine. They were also sidelined because they were good at their jobs and had a conscience.

If you want to learn how neoliberalism got started, where it came from and what its tragedies are beyond the Boeing tragedy, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at amazon.com. I explain how we started with classical liberalism, moved to modern liberalism and now are experiencing the unpleasantness of neoliberalism.

A final comment I’d like to make is that most ordinary jobs in this country have experienced this radical management change under discussion here. While some jobs are under corporations, others are in government. In a fascist system where private industry partners with government, radical destructive changes can remodel the old systems that produced a stable and productive economy in the direction of new systems that have control fraud or that have been redirected towards corrupt political goals. It is hard for work-a-day people to stop this change. Many Americans feel frustrated.