Unplanned Obsolescence

It’s time once again to survey some of the interesting trends emerging in business, such as these two tragic examples: employees whose jobs are valued and the proposed regulation of consultants, whose jobs are not.

A major newspaper brought the first trend to my wandering attention when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in Washington, D.C., this spring to celebrate its 50th anniversary and make jokes about the new ventilation system at the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Because of the high security involved with the NATO meeting, many streets in Washington were closed, and many government and private-sector employees were given the day off.

Unfortunately, the day off didn’t apply to persons at the World Bank whose jobs are considered necessary or "essential." This "peeved" one client-services worker, who was extremely angry to learn that her job was necessary. This brings up a number of questions:

• Why would the World Bank have employees whose jobs are not necessary?
• Do employees get a lot of personal satisfaction from working in jobs that aren’t necessary?
• When companies hire employees, shouldn’t they tell them up front if they’re being hired into unnecessary jobs so they have a clear idea about whether or not they can get preferred vacation slots?
• Has the pay for unnecessary jobs kept pace with inflation?
• What advice should you give a young person entering college who is seeking the kind of academic track that will position him or her well for an unnecessary job?
• Aren’t you glad the World Bank doesn’t have your checking account?

I’m leery of companies that have nonessential jobs, but not because they’re wasting their money. I used to work for a company that would ask only "essential" employees to come in on days when we had life-threatening blizzards. I would always be sure to come in on those days because I believed this "nonessential" stuff was a corporate trick to find out who thought their jobs were not needed, so at a later time when cost cutting was needed, management could simply ask those employees to stand outside in the blizzard.

This might be hard for some soft, weak-willed managers. They might prefer that someone else perform such a distasteful task, which brings us to consultants. Earlier this year, Nevada considered a proposal to establish a state board to register and license management consultants, in the same manner that Nevada regulates certain "entertainers," which I once read about in a well-thumbed issue of Boys’ Life.

A concerned Nevada legislator noted that persons armed only with business cards can call themselves consultants. As a former consultant, I take issue with this because at no time during my window of consultation did I ever have business cards.

Businesses have opposed licensing consultants, which is curious to me because I would think that businesses would want to ensure that their consultants were capable persons free from communicable disease. I think this is a broader philosophical issue for corporations, which resent any government involvement at all in commerce — except for subsidies and advantageous tax treatments.

Businesses also rely heavily on consultants, not only to provide specialized knowledge, but also to provide a needed scapegoat if things go wrong. For example, during one of my consulting gigs, I wore a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches and passed myself off as a writing consultant to a company that was having chronic problems with employee handling of "punctuation." I quoted them a price, they hired me, and I did workshops on the finer points of quotation marks with an advanced seminar on apostrophes.

After that, if anyone complained about the company’s punctuation, they could blame it on me. For once, I was an essential employee.

Dan Danbom is rapidly becoming obsolete.