Three great themes encourage the Colombian man of today. Work life, social life and affective life are his daily concerns. Each person faces, to a greater or lesser degree, each of these three situations and also experiences them differently.
Work life has to do with the problem of dissatisfaction at work and with the daily frustration that it provides.
Social life has to do with the problem of loneliness and with the permanent desire for truly genuine interpersonal communication.
The affective (and sexual) life has to do with the problem of the inability to love, to give oneself totally to the other, and also with the incessant search for temporary palliative in encounters with the opposite sex.
Occupational life
Of these three problems we will deal mainly with the first: the occupational life of the Colombian.
Of the total Colombian population, 53% belongs to the skilled population, over 15 years old and under 65; The rest is an unskilled and dependent population, made up of adults over 65 and under 15, generally outside the job market (speaking in DANE terms, 53 Colombians out of every hundred constitute the “economically active population” that works for the remaining 47).
Those people who work and who support the dependent population, do so in many places: in the city, in the countryside, in a factory, in a craft workshop, in a warehouse, in the private sector, the public sector.
However, there will always be a rest of people who do not work, or do it half, and who are trying to enter the world of organized work (unemployed and underemployed.
The question that follows is: why do these people work? The general answer is apparently simple: "to make money."
This manifestation is not wrong, but incomplete: if we examine it more closely, in reality we are working to transform nature in such a way that it satisfies, badly or well, human needs.
We work to transform wild grass into rice, wild oranges into jams, iron ore into steel, and then into cars.
In other cases, transformations are made to improve community services.
There are still people who think, however, that physical labor is an Old Testament curse imposed on man as atonement for his sins.
In this belief may be the influence of the Christian stock of our institutions.
On the contrary, others think that man is a fixed being, that he is by nature lazy, that he only moves out of fear and that he is always trying to do as little work as possible. Later we will see the harmful implications of this last ideology.
The most modern definition indicates that work is a social activity par excellence, a definitive part of human life.
For this reason, because work is a social activity, that is why unemployment is usually feared: because it detaches the individual from community life.
From this new perspective, work (as a social activity) fulfills two basic functions: to produce the goods that society needs and to make the individual participate in the system of social relations that exist in their daily world.
Do we work for money?
When it comes to motivation, that is, the drive to work, there are still people thinking that the only and most important incentive to work is precisely money.
According to research in this field, most employees express dissatisfaction with their pay more than with other aspects of their work.
Of course it seems to be easier, or more socially accepted, to express salary dissatisfaction than to express other kinds of dissatisfaction at work.
However, people do not move primarily for financial reasons. Just as there is no evidence that men are selfish or lazy by nature (because they were born that way), on the other hand, there is evidence that there are other things more important than the worker's salary
As an incentive to work, money is one of the least important.
In forty-three investigations on the importance of pay, carried out at all levels, the salary appears to be ranked 3 on average among 105 people surveyed. She only appears fourteen times in first place, seven times in second place, twice in sixth place and once in ninth place.
In a survey carried out with 54 heads of industrial relations, the participants said that in Colombia they only motivate themselves through money and some other monetary benefits (extra-legal benefits), through social activities, paternalistic behavior and by housing.
However, when such executives were asked about the way in which they perceived that their own motivation should be, they said that they would be satisfied "obtaining results", "gaining recognition or congratulations", "meeting objectives in tasks", "for personal fulfillment" and "When you have status and participation in decisions."
As can be seen, there are other things that produce job satisfaction. But if money is all that a man obtains for his work, he is consequently capable of accepting any lawful or illicit means to increase all the money he can.
The climate of an organization
It is from the previous statement where the greatest concern around the occupational life of the Colombian begins. I'm talking about the internal, and not external, aspects of work (like money).
I am referring, first of all, to the atmosphere or "organizational climate" that exists in private or public companies.
Are the managers of our business system, and also the managers of the public sector, aware that we are people all day and employees only part of the work schedule?
Men are more sensitive to changes in the "psychological climate", to intentions and expectations, than to ordinary changes that occur in the physical environment.
We are sensitive to changes in our remuneration (external), but we are also especially sensitive to those aspects that identify us as people (internal).
For example, a stone-word, a word spoken out of time, a phrase misinterpreted by the subaltern, lowers the psychological level (and even the efficiency) to a greater degree than the effect produced by the decrease in the intensity of the illumination or in the temperature of the workshop or office.
A word said at the wrong time -a public and unfair scolding, or an unexpected emotional explosion-… and how much energy do you later expend in returning things to their original course, in turning positive and warm the climate that you made negative and cold! with a harsh phrase! Not to mention the feelings of guilt and remorse when an injustice has been committed, and all the efforts that are made to repair the fault without "sacrificing" pride, or showing signs of weakness.
This example speaks volumes on its own.
There is a widespread belief that people want more money, more radios, more houses, more things, and that the more objects they have, the happier they will be.
I think that these things should not be denied to people, but they can perhaps be simple apologies, simple “happiness supplements” to the detriment of their deepest needs.
Within the framework of the so-called organizational climate, I consider then that if there is a fight against environmental pollution, we must also think about a fight against that pollution that occurs within the workplace and that manifests itself in the form of feelings of frustration and alignment that plague many persons.
Stupid and polluted work
It is exasperating to have to think that work only creates tension, repressed conflicts, pressure to dissatisfaction.
Could it be that the joy of life, excitement, creativity and enthusiasm only happen outside of work, or on weekends? Is it that work cannot be a source of joy? (I once said that I believed in the Scottish proverb that "hard work never killed a man": men die of disease, boredom and psychological conflict).
Let's imagine there are factories and offices run by people who seem to hate the human race.
Factories and offices where work is as stupid and sad as can be.
Places where contaminated work exists. Satisfaction at work is not independent of having a home, social security or recreation: those things can be had, and yet live permanently dissatisfied at work.
Living polluted, contaminated with a general frustration, "cold" around tasks. Through this cliff we come to individualism and authoritarianism.
Individualism and Authoritarianism
Unable to live together, to be enthusiastic, to be creative, useless to collaborate as a team, to handle the problems that arise in groups, to understand the needs of others, to know ourselves, Colombians become individualists.
As we have difficulties to manage our emotions, to confront our feelings, to open up with collaborators, to work as a team, then we become individualistic. Doing what we want to do, regardless of others, determined to satisfy our own needs above the needs of others.
We become selfish because alienated work does not seem to leave us any other alternative.
In this way, in our daily work we begin to fall into the hands of those executives who live by eagerness for nowhere, of certain activists who disguise their insecurity by doing things to the point of shame.
We fall into the hands of those bosses who seem to have been trained to believe that exercising power over other people is one of the requisites for success.
We fall into the hands of those bosses with feelings of inferiority who project their own inner conflicts on their subordinates. And with all these actors, authoritarianism then becomes a moral and behavioral guideline that runs down the length and breadth of the pyramid. Organizational democracy thus loses its first round.
The Threshold of Contradictions
From another point of view, it is common for many individuals to admire forms of authority precisely in order to submit and depend on them (dependence), while at the same time wanting to be an authority so that other people submit to them (authoritarianism).
The same thing happens with participating: why is it that some people live crying out for participation in decisions, while denying the right to have it to those under their government? Here stands the threshold of contradictions between the conditions of work and the individuals who inhabit that work.
For example, sometimes I believe that middle managers, locked in certain strict and authoritarian ways, seek the possibility of being free to make some decisions even beyond the will of their superior.
Isn't that why things stop, the steps are covered, because the public official wants to move them at will, thus seizing a small chance of being autonomous and free? For the same reason, is it not for that reason that the employee wishes to see himself as a real part of the entity where he works and, by moving his possible decisions, he points to some meaning in his life, proves that he is intelligent and thus tends to erase the routine of some wildly gray days?
One more example: some people act as if they wanted man to be divided into two separate subjects: a rational person who operates logically, who works with facts and draws purely objective conclusions from them; and another person, an emotional person who is blindly irrational, who ignores and misinterprets facts, and who operates in a crooked way.
In the middle of the twelfth century, the famous habeas corpus law allowed individuals to escape the justice duel and obtain the judgment of a jury; This law put an end to illegal detention and today this jurisprudence is rooted in the laws of almost all nations.
Today there is also - as a democratic counterpart - a principle of freedom through the law of habeas emotum, an aspiration to exercise psychological freedom that is expressed as "the right of the individual to their own feelings and the expression of them, except in cases in which that expression limits the emotional freedom of others ”.
However, cultivating emotional maturity is easier said than done. Most of the times, individuals display more intellectual than emotional maturity; We are wise, intelligent, cunning, theoretical, but we cannot control the slightest irritation, the smallest anger.
On the contrary, it is often the anger, the rage, the tantrum that controls us!
A Cultural Shock
We can continue with many more examples of the social contradictions that are reflected in attitudes towards work: for example, a recent nursery school has been promoting the possibility of a certain amount of permissiveness - understood as little amount of discipline in the former. childhood years - which, they say, facilitates a more mature development of the child's personality. Will it be difficult to imagine the “culture shock” that it represents for a child to leave a permissive (and democratic) home to get in touch with an authoritarian school, an authoritarian university (even in its dogmatic ideologies) and a job where Are the relationships authoritarian from beginning to end, in the private company or in the public sector itself?
This is the core of my working hypothesis: appearance. The Colombian worker lives in a politically and constitutionally democratic society; but inside, in the organization and business environment, things do not work so democratically.
The threshold of contradictions and appearances passes from society to the workplace.
The worker can perform excellent responsible functions in roles and groups outside his organization (a club, a civic group, the parents' association, the union), but they often do not have equal responsibilities within the company. Within your organization the responsibility and autonomy of the workers are different: here severe orders predominate.
Formal democracy and real autocracy are then the terms of a dramatic social antagonism in Colombia.
For an Expansive Democracy
If our hypothesis is correct, now we must begin to think about whether or not we are in a change disposition.
Some of us are in favor of undertaking this humanistic change beginning with democracy within work, that is, in that portion of each one's life to which we dedicate eight or more hours of active coexistence.
This type of industrial or organizational democracy, and under any kind of democracy if there are several ways of practicing it, requires a lot of effort and the effort of many. Some are going to resist it: but without resistance to change, other important phenomena in history would not have occurred. Democracy, moreover, could not exist without some kind of active opposition.
The first problem is, as Erich Fromm would say, “the fear of freedom”. Is it not because of the fear of freedom that the peoples are being passively pushed towards a totalitarian society? Some groups could oppose organizational democracy - a first step towards total democracy, for expansive democracy through new forms of cooperation and human solidarity, which promote the well-being of the community and the development of individuals. within organized work.
Some trade union associations may also oppose expansive democracy at work as they may wish to present any improvement of theirs as the sole fruit of their effort or try to delay changes until they are in a position to win the conflict.
But, to be consistent again, democracy is always based on the existence of some effective opposition.
I do not want to think that this conjecture is absolutely necessary: rather, I believe that modern organizations have in industrial democracy, or whatever you want to call it, an unmatched opportunity
Basis of a Settlement
Faced with the alternative of a totalitarian society (that castrates its best men, that represses enough emotions, that dehumanizes work), and of an expansive democracy like the one we pointed out in the previous pages, the organizations of the public and private sectors, and their leaders, could sit down to plan the bases of a conciliation within work. This statement is not intended to be a new model for the country. But when it comes to ml, I think we are from a generation that cannot go back. At the turn of the millennium, we are like an airplane pilot crossing the sea who has reached a point of no return because he has no fuel to go back and then he must keep going despite storms and other dangers. We may be at a point of no return, but we are facing the future….and we can manage it through a planned change that offers us a new quality of life and a new type of relationships that humanize daily existence.
