The American Way of Checking Out

I thought of this black mark on my résumé while reading an exhaustive and depressing new study of the American workplace done by the Gallup organization. Among the 100 million people in this country who hold full-time jobs, about 70 percent of them either hate going to work or have mentally checked out to the point of costing their companies money — “roaming the halls spreading discontent,” as Gallup reported. Only 30 percent of workers are “engaged and inspired” at work.

At first glance, this sad survey is further proof of two truisms. One, the timeless line from Thoreau that “the mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation.” The other, less known, came from Homer Simpson by way of fatherly advice, after being asked about a labor dispute by his daughter Lisa. “If you don’t like your job,” he said, “you don’t strike, you just go in there every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”

There a lot of reasons why so many of us are “checked out” at work, including decades of soaring productivity coupled with stagnant or declining wages, a tight job market where workers are considered replaceable, and a young generation of workers cobbling together work to get by while looking for a full-time job. But, according to the study, the main factor contributing to all the discontentment in the workplace has to do with having terrible bosses.

“The managers from hell are creating active disengagement costing the United States an estimated $450 billion to $550 billion annually,” wrote Jim Clifton, the C.E.O. and chairman of Gallup.

And how true! You can be very good at your job and enjoy the work you do but if you have to report to a terrible boss every day who doesn’t acknowledge your work and is just an overall unpleasant person to be around, you’re going to start harboring some bad feelings. If bosses treated employees right, and used the record amount of cash they’re sitting on to give employees the pay and benefits they deserve, maybe things would turn around a little bit.

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