EclecticLip

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.

We came back from Toy Story 3 today — a great movie, with a dense, well-plotted storyline.  (It’s amazing what happens when you invest your money in the writers, instead of star actors!  A lesson HBO clearly learned, long ago…)  Haven’t seen the latest Shrek instalment, but that’s not material to the current web post.

One of the wonderful things about ancient mythology is how storytellers would (often) amalgamate past traditions into their current narratives.  The most obvious example in the West, is how the writers of the Christian Gospel of Matthew linked everything they recorded Jesus doing, to passages the Hebrew Bible — what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”.  (Out of respect for the Jewish tradition, I’ll be referring to them as the Hebrew Bible.)  Virgil also meshed his Aeneid to Homer’s Iliad, by linking Aeneas to Troy.

In the East, the Ashtavakra Gita linked itself to the Ramayana by adopting as its eponymous protagonist, a relatively minor character from that epic.  Doubtless, there are innumerable other examples.

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Now, the Toy Story and Shrek franchises are really interesting in that they also build on pre-existing platforms; namely, classic toys and fairy tales respectively.  As such, they’re almost like modern “remixes” of earlier cultural traditions.  And like other “adaptive refreshings” of cultural traditions, they’re doing it in today’s dominant genre, the movie.

(images from Wikipedia)