An old song from the early 1970s came on the radio today and it triggered a lot of feelings as, no doubt, its writer Jonathan Edwards originally intended.
Sunshine is a folk/pop song that was at its core a protest about authority and the bloody Vietnam War then raging. But I’ve always seen it also as an indictment of “the man” — the boss who lords over your life.
They can’t even run their own lives. I’ll be damned if they’ll run mine.
These days “the man” can be a man or a woman, of course. In my career both the best and the worst bosses I’ve ever had were women, and believe me, there’s a lot of competition for the title of worst.
My work life started in the field of broadcast journalism, and over the course of seven TV markets, seven television stations, and eleven managers (also known as news directors), I could count on one hand the number of upstanding bosses. That is, if my hand had zero fingers.
Unless you count the kindly man who rescued me from unemployment hell in Alabama. Unfortunately, that savior-of-a-news director at my new TV station in Huntsville left the very day I started. But I will always be grateful to him for saving my tender young TV career.
Evil
I used to wonder why news directors all seemed to be divorced. I thought it was because of the demands of the job. But in retrospect, maybe it’s because the job attracted some not so stellar personalities.
Not saying all TV news managers are evil, but in my 15 years in the broadcasting biz, yes, they virtually all were.
By the way, the reason I needed saving in Alabama was that my previous station in Montgomery had fired me without cause less than three months after I’d relocated 1,000 miles for the job. Literally evil management. They lied to get me there and lied to throw me under a bus.
Sunshine go away
So yeah, that was a period of time in my life when I did wish the “sunshine” would go away. Didn’t feel much like dancing, as the song goes. The sour taste from that experience lingered for my entire TV news career.
It wasn’t until much later, when my work-life steered toward public relations that I encountered the best of management. I joined a state agency where the women who hired me and directed the public affairs operation not only patiently trained me for a (mostly) rewarding 20-year journey in public and corporate communications, but nurtured me and prepared me for what was to come.
I say “mostly” because my next chapter, global corporate comms at a major aerospace company was simultaneously incredibly rewarding and crushingly disappointing. They saved the worst for last, as they say.
Careful what you wish for
This was the time when I essentially pioneered the art of corporate blogging. Those years were creative, innovative, challenging. While under the direction (and protection) of senior executive leadership I was allowed to experiment and flourish. Once I was “promoted” out of that role it was like being thrown to the wolves.
As a manager, I learned, you are a pawn of your direct supervisor, usually a mid-level comms exec. Sure, they compensated you well, but you most definitely paid it back in stress and sacrifice.
For example, executives will use you to ramrod the termination of employees they’ve preordained for extinction, or maybe just lost interest in–or those they want to jettison so they can move their own pets into a job. (My attempts at finding those targeted employees new positions within the company were met with cold consternation from management and HR. Go figure.)
Execs will also task managers with projects that they themselves can claim credit for later. Love that.
Raise the retirement age?
And when they’re through with you — say, when you’ve reached a certain age — then it’s bye-bye. (See my above reference to worst boss.) That’s why I have to laugh when I read articles touting raising the retirement age.
I guarantee the reporters writing these articles are not in their 50s or 60s because there are precious little of those. Mind you, the CEOs championing these ideas are seniors themselves, but when you have multi-million dollar stock packages and golden parachutes, what do they care?
Like me and many, many of my cohorts, the rest of us are pushed out on pretext. When you can save a buck by hiring someone fresh out of college for half the salary of the old fart, why not?
So they want to move the minimum Social Security age out further. Good luck with that. Many veteran employees can barely manage to hang onto their jobs to age 62, thanks to discriminatory practices. Imagine having to scrape by without a job until 65 or even later.
Age discrimination is illegal. But it’s practiced every day by big corporations. The reason it isn’t curbed is that it is difficult to prove in court, especially versus the bottomless resources of corporate legal. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening every day, everywhere–and in my experience, all at once.
Sunshine come on back
All of this is to say, “the man” is alive and well, 50+ years after that one-hit wonder rose to #4 on the charts. The man (or woman) you work for still has cards they ain’t showin’. They’re still trying to run your life.
Don’t let them.