COVID-19 has been turning our world upside down. People who always had maids are doing all the housework. Recipes that were hidden, feared and unknown are coming out of the woodworks. People are bucking up and learning how to stay with essentials for longer. Most of all, people have been given their right value in society faster than the blink of an eyelid. It's like a grand return to humanity. That's the biggest upside down.
The whole crisis is happening primarily because people are in ultimate danger, not businesses or economy. It brought forward the supreme perspective that people, the soul of industry, are always never indispensable in any scenario, however competitive our business instincts get. It's almost as if the world discovered the morals and ethics that they were ignoring all these centuries and decades, well influenced by an industrialised society. If we really didn't care deep down, and we are cold hearted, we wouldn't be giving in that easily to shutting everything down, despite economic loss.
But the switch has been a hard one to make, even for those making it sincerely. While some companies shutdown and shifted to work from home fast (or equivalent arrangement when possible), others waited to be given orders from the government or waited till everything was really serious. All you had to do is say that you were not well at work and the fear of you being infectous would bring an immediate request to go home and stay there as long as needed to get better, no questions asked. When would most people have that privilege during a non-COVID-19 threat era?
The way most industries tend to function, they know their true source of growth: people. More specifically, people who, like the big bosses, work so they can rest and truly enjoy living, as opposed to living to work. It's also true that to enjoy those advantages, they need a well-industrialized setup so that good profits can be made which allows them to give better pay and benefits (in a reasonably fair pay setup). It's even more true that getting too obsessed with pay usually leaves you with no life outside work and deep emptiness inside that professional passion stands no chance filling. The more you try, it's an insatiable pit that brings you no happiness.
This is what most businesses are designed to run after, taking employees (people) along who try to balance paying bills, ensuring their and their family's security, and building general happiness - all at once. It's a whole system that builds grand dreams on stilts and needs more and more to stay upright and stable with time and growth Get the balance wrong and you get sucked into black hole which is very difficult to get out of. Get hooked onto the wrong thing and it'll pull you in further. That's a memo to employer and employee.
Yes, success is great. But every successful man and woman goes back home, and they work to sustain that home and keep it a happy place that they can enjoy it with the rest of the family. More hours at office so that they can do it better only prevents them from doing it more, or just doing it at all.
This isn't only industry that has grown into this. Society has too. We don't look at people with the perspective of them because human like us, but with how useful they they can be to us and what price that is worth. We're all walking around with a tag on our heads that always translate to sustenance and happiness. Those paying us are trying to lower their costs with the best price they can get, and vice versa. Our entire outlook is based on an extreme of affordability, but can we afford the kind of world that creates? We can't escape being inequitably valued by our jobs with how much we eventually can contribute to them. We can't also escape a valuation system that puts people's contribution to less than what allows them to be happily human.
The switch to honouring people as the true centre of society and industry is real, at least as long as the present threat exists. Now that society and industry has grown an unexpected conscience, will that conscience also be a future benchmark once there isn't a virus to be scared of?
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