The corporate management of Goldman Sachs starting today has completely eliminated its vaccine requirement for workers. Glory be! Why did the company do this? Because it needed its workers back in the office. This supposedly eliminates the final barrier but this spin downplays the significance of the mandate itself.
When your own employer violates your fundamental human rights through medical blackmail, threatening your livelihood based on compliance with a rushed and experimental shot funded and pushed by the government, people are entitled to feel rather put upon.
Management finally decided that the jab mandates were not the best way to entice people to make the slog to the office and deal with all the messiness of the workplace again rather than languish in the comfort of their living rooms forever.
It’s tragic that it took so long. We’ve known for more than a year that the vaccinations are pointless in this case. They don’t stop infection. They don’t stop transmission. Ramping up the percent of compliance in this case confers no benefit to the community. No one in the office is somehow safer by virtue of being around the fully vaccinated, as I hope we know by now.
Why did so many private companies go along with the mandates? They were pushed to do so by media, government, and Big Tech. The choice was unscientific and brutal toward employees. Adding to that were the mask mandates that so many employers pushed on workers and customers. Cover your face! Your breathing is poison!
Such requirements reveal a real lack of respect for the bodily integrity of others.
Imagine having worked your whole career in finance and having reached the pinnacle of your profession with an advisory position at Goldman. One day the memo comes down: get the vaccine or get fired. Outrageous. Then they scaled this back and said if you want to come back to the office, you have to be vaccinated. Still outrageous.
So it’s entirely understandable that people are resistant. Another problem is that people have learned how to work well at home using all the tools available now to offices, including Slack and Teams and every manner of hangouts and video calling. It worked for a year—not always well and no question that in-person is overall better for productivity.
And yet what purpose does it serve to make everyone come back to sit in an office while using the exact same tools to communicate that they would otherwise use at home? The main purpose is to be part of an in-person community that is actively engaged but that requires that people are generally happy and confident in their worth and appreciative of both colleagues and bosses. These days, that’s a rarity.
Consider the difference that Spotify made as a company. It has 8,600 employees, which strikes me as an enormous staff. They were almost entirely remote during lockdowns. Recall that the company faced intense pressure from the national media to take down Joe Rogan’s podcasts on pandemic topics, on grounds that he was allowing unsayable things to be aired.
The company would not give in! Not only that, Spotify allowed its entire platform to be used for the creation of fantastic dissident content. This has gone on throughout.
So yes, I count this company as among the good guys.
Well, Spotify finally returned to the office this year, and guess what? Vastly more people came back than management expected. Why might that be? Perhaps because they WANTED to be there! And why? Because no one forced the result.
This is a great principle for life itself. Let people be free to make choices and they will be happier, because at least the first condition of humane engagement is satisfied: authority is recognizing the dignity of human volition.
She added: “If you recruit grown-ups and then you treat them as kids, it’s going to backfire.”
Wow, please read that again! Treat people as grown-ups, not kids. What a revolutionary thought! And from the head of HR no less! I know thousands of readers of this right now are saying the same thing: “I wish my company had a head of HR with these views!”
Here is the essence of the problem today. Government has treated us like children. Big Tech has treated us like children. Big corporations have treated all their workers like children. This has been going on a long time but it has never been as bad as it has been since the pandemic response. They dared to divide people by class and job skills as if we were in middle school. They told us what to do and what not to do as if it were the 3rd grade.
Oh, and all of this was topped off by preposterous cartoons put out by the CDC. And what about this incessant instruction to “wash your hands?” Yeah, no kidding. We know that. Why did they keep saying it? It wasn’t to give health advice, as good as hand-washing is. The purpose was to treat us all like children so we would begin to believe it.
It’s the same with the ridiculous stickers on the floor like it was nursery school and the demands to line up a certain way like it was 3rd grade. This was not about health. It was a deliberate attempt to infantilize the population. That’s why all these exhortations were ultimately reduced to cartoons and stuck in all major transportation hubs.
They treated us like children. They censored what we could hear and still do. They gave nonstop instructions in what we are supposed to believe as if it were a first-year catechism class. They produced FAQs that read like shorter catechisms.
“Should I get vaccinated?”
“You should get vaccinated if it is approved for your age. The experts have proven that the vaccine protects you from severe disease.”
And so on it went through. And private companies picked up on the whole condescending narrative.
Routinely during this time I would walk around maskless. Countless times, someone would scream at me to put on a mask. I finally figured out two good responses: 1) pretend like I cannot hear them or, 2) state very plainly “I’m not sick.” It never worked of course because by this time, COVID compliance had become ritualized and people were behaving like infants following orders.
I think Ms. Berg puts her finger on the whole problem of the lockdowns and mandates and the whole of the hortatory hegemon of these ghastly years. They treated us all like children. It’s no wonder that adults came to resent it! And no wonder that so many have lost confidence in the system.
A great boss can energize an entire enterprise while a bad boss can disable and demotivate even the best workers. So it goes for whole societies too. Government and its allies in the media and tech have combined forces to be the worst bad boss ever. At the same time, it’s an opportunity for good companies to take a different course, as Goldman is finally doing and good companies like Spotify have done all along.
