Brian M Downing
Every now and then, we make a passing observation that bounces around our minds and leads us to ponder its significance. Not long ago, I was standing in line to board a plane. Finishing off a cup of coffee as my boarding pass was scanned, I asked if there was a wastebasket handy. The employee dutifully, though unnecessarily, held the wastebasket to just below her chin and smiled. As I dropped the cup in, she smiled more broadly and chimed, “Thank you!” A bit surprised and confused by this service, which went well beyond anything I expected – or wanted – I boarded the plane and walked back to my seat, in coach. “That poor woman,” I thought to myself.
I remembered a gym manager nobly enduring the wrath of customers forced to suffer the indignity of waiting a few minutes for fresh towels, and others in the service sector treated dismissively or even contemptuously by consumer kings. The solicitous cabin attendants going down the aisle of the plane offered no counterexamples. I saw it now: the arrogance of our society and the demands of the service sector strengthen each other. Arrogant customers demand subservient workers; and workers ordered to be subservient bring out arrogance in customers.
I wondered where the country was heading. Are we becoming a nation composed more and more of a haughty affluent class and a service class harboring various levels of resentment toward them? Perhaps resentful workers demand subservience and revel in brief haughtiness when they check into a hotel or dine out or go to the mall, and so their resentment is directed horizontally toward one another rather than vertically toward the uppers. Maybe resentment is discharged every which way and it ricochets throughout our society in which most Americans now brandish snub-nose senses of entitlement.
Perhaps most people in the service sector don’t feel resentment, or if they do it doesn’t fester. Putting up with rudeness and arrogance is simply what they must do to pay the mortgage, clothe the kids, and make ends meet. It’s an acceptable if unfair trade, no more demeaning than having a report redacted by a superior or having one’s expertise ignored upstairs. Some see it merely as a way station, a purgatory, before they can enter the surly gates of upper management and employ others to take the grief.
Maybe we are witnessing an approaching denouement of processes, noted by Mills and Whyte in the fifties, by which human beings are degraded and rendered more readily manipulable by business, media, and political forces. That is, years of hyper-rationalized management, keystroke counting, drug testing, monitors, and mystery shoppers have mercilessly dehumanized a large portion of Americans. Isn’t there a cost?
What impact will the impending recession, which will probably be deeper and longer than its predecessors of the last fifty years, have on all this? Perhaps resentment has been contained by prosperity and the façade of prosperity that easy credit and booming real estate values have allowed. What happens when the disrespected people of the broad service sector can no longer afford to own houses – important status appurtenances that had narrowly separated them from the really poor and downtrodden?
I’m fortunate to be self-employed. I give thanks everyday for that. I can easily recall long ago standing at attention and enduring the insults of sergeants, but I always knew I could say goodbye to all that when my enlistment expired. However, these social trends of increasing arrogance, subservience, and polarization are not transient matters that will end in a few years. There must be a cost.
~ ©2008 Brian M. Downing