Latest / Love Letters to Troublemakers / E12. Reclaiming Dignity at Work and for Workers

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E12. Reclaiming Dignity at Work and for Workers · Love Letters to Troublemakers

0:00
Right now it's not a negotiation.
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It is a one way direction. It is one group of people
0:05
mandating to everyone else what is going to happen, and they
0:08
will always choose themselves. The people who make the
0:11
decisions that crater the companies, nothing bad ever
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happens to them. They get raises even for cutting
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us. They get raises for shutting
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down studios that have been around for 30 years and under
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their watch because of their decisions.
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But do they ever suffer? No, they get bonuses.
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So that's not a negotiation, that's just a gun to your head
0:34
with a different name. Hi, I'm Aparna and welcome to
0:46
the Circle Back Club, a podcast for workers who are done
0:49
pretending that the system isn't broken.
0:52
I'm back for this final episode with my Co host Lars Gallion.
0:57
I cannot believe it's our final episode.
1:00
This has been an incredible season where we've been asking
1:04
what does it mean to build something different?
1:07
And today we're asking what we think is the most foundational
1:10
question of all, which is what does it actually mean to be
1:14
treated with dignity at work and what choices would we make, what
1:19
would we build differently if that were the non negotiable
1:24
starting point for us at work? It's a really special episode
1:27
because we're bringing in so many voices from so many places.
1:31
We'll get to hear from Jazz Brizak, who's a labor organizer
1:34
and the founder of the Inside Organizer School.
1:37
We're going to hear from Madison Butler.
1:40
She's an author and former C-Suite executive.
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We're going to hear from workers and practitioners from the Tech
1:47
Workers Coalition that Lars, you got to record out and about in
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the world, as well as voices from a national culture
1:55
conference that you and I just attended this past week.
1:58
What is dignity? It literally is here right now.
2:03
Inherently, the video is not. Going to go.
2:05
It's not. Something that can be taken from
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us, it cannot be moved away, but we also are reaching and wanting
2:12
it. And what's really cool about the
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body is the body also only communicates in the present
2:17
moment. Your body is giving you feedback
2:19
right now. It's contextual and ancestral
2:23
knowledge and the context of the day.
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But what you're feeling right now is just here.
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So dignity and the body have a lot to do with each other.
2:31
So let's feel it. I think dignity in the
2:37
workplace. For me, boils down to sort of
2:41
this fundamental idea that humans.
2:44
Should be equal and should have equal value and should have
2:48
equal respect and equal right to have their own humanity
2:52
respected. Something that I keep coming
2:54
back to about this topic that I think is really complicated is
2:58
the the fact that dignity is inherent means that it cannot be
3:02
taken away from us. And yet at the same time, when
3:06
we're looking for it at work, we are looking for it to be given
3:09
or shared by the people next to us, by our managers in the
3:13
system. And both have to happen, like
3:16
both things have to be true. And for myself, what I've I've
3:21
seen is when I have, I've put my dignity in the hands of another
3:28
person completely, especially a manager.
3:32
And I'm thinking about a time when my entire team was laid off
3:40
except for me and one other person.
3:42
And the way that I was was told this was from my new manager
3:48
saying that he could have, he could have laid me off, but he
3:53
didn't because of my organizational reputation.
3:56
And that was it. That was kind of like the
3:59
backhanded compliment of like, you get to be here.
4:03
So when I felt that in my body from do I have dignity or do I
4:08
not, of course, I felt a huge amount of fear.
4:12
And also I, my body said, OK, you hold, you hold the keys to
4:17
my safety and my dignity now. And I did what a scared person
4:23
would do, which is at the end of the meeting I asked for a hug.
4:30
No, you didn't. I asked for a hug.
4:34
And so I don't know if this is this is, I mean, it's like,
4:40
gosh, we know what it's not. We know what it's not at work
4:44
and we know when we've we've given it away.
4:48
And I think it's really this is a complicated topic because it's
4:52
both something that we know is non negotiable, but also
4:55
structural conditions we need to create.
4:57
And that moment for me always stands out because it was a
5:01
visceral time when I knew that I had given it away completely.
5:12
That I, it feels like so hard to hear because of who you are now.
5:19
And I also, there have been so many moments just, I, I would
5:23
say even in the last, you know, 5 or 6 years where I've had
5:28
similar experiences. But recently one of those
5:32
moments came, you know, came back to me in a really hard way.
5:35
Somebody reached out to me over LinkedIn.
5:39
This is, you know, an older person and in my 30s, I looked
5:45
up to them almost as a mentor. And then they did something
5:49
really horrible, right? Like they told me that I had to
5:52
suck it up and play nice with people that were bullying me.
5:55
And I hadn't had like a one-on-one interaction with them
5:59
for probably six years. And they reached out over
6:02
LinkedIn and they said, it's good to see that, you know, you
6:06
finally found your voice in response to something I had
6:12
written in Forbes. It's good to see that you
6:14
finally found your voice. And I all I could keep thinking
6:19
as I read that message again and again and again and again, like
6:22
as we do, right? Like when we're ruminating, I
6:25
was like, you're you're one of the people that tried to steal
6:28
my voice away from me by telling me to shut up and get in line,
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right? That you could see me getting
6:34
bullied by another colleague who was your peer, who was probably,
6:38
you know, 20 years older than me.
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And your response to that wasn't come to my defense.
6:43
Your response to that was telling me to get in line.
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And so what's the relationship that exists between us?
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It certainly is bereft of dignity and it's completely
6:58
bereft of respect. Woof, woof.
7:04
And I think like to Jazz's point, right, the IT comes down
7:08
to is our humanity respected. And I think in both of those
7:11
scenarios that we talked about, and I think it's a really easy
7:14
place even before we we share like what is the definition?
7:17
What are what are we hearing dignity really means?
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We viscerally know what it's not and we viscerally know when both
7:25
of the people we're interacting with did not have their own self
7:28
respect, right? By saying get in line or saying
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you know you should thank me that you've kept your job
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instead of saying what is this human experience like for you
7:38
and how can I meet you in the emotion that you're experiencing
7:42
first, How can I meet you and your humanity are impulses?
7:47
Let me organize you. I can organize you better.
7:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's hard.
7:59
I, I think that, you know, when we look at the arc of our
8:03
careers and we're halfway through, we're almost halfway
8:06
through our professional lives. And when I think back and I and
8:12
I know that you and I have both spent the majority of our
8:15
careers advancing some version of equity, inclusion, fairness,
8:21
policies, practices, measurement data, all in service of making
8:25
work work better for everybody and make the world better.
8:29
And I just, it like, it always strikes me, and this is
8:34
something that, you know, does keep me up at night.
8:36
And it's constantly swirling in my mind just how many people
8:40
that work in these professions, they advance their careers by
8:45
pulling people down the ladder. Yeah.
8:56
And what a what an act of indignity to say that you care
9:00
about fairness, but you show up in ways that are patently unfair
9:11
and unkind. And it is.
9:16
It is a truly a twisted, unique puzzle that we're in in late
9:24
stage capitalism to try to figure this out.
9:26
Like, how do we untangle ourselves and get back to what
9:29
it really is? And how do we protect it with
9:31
each other when we're in these conditions?
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And you know, we we dropped listeners, we dropped you in
9:38
right away to let dignity be felt before we even define it,
9:44
before we even, you know, we have so many voices that we want
9:47
to share with you today. And the the invitation for you
9:51
is to sit back and be as honest as possible with yourself as
9:55
you're listening to Aparna and I show this really, really
10:00
important, non negotiable part of our humanness.
10:07
Yeah. And just be with what comes
10:08
through. And, you know, I think just to
10:10
set this up right, as this is our last episode, it's really
10:14
valuable to talk about what have we focused on to even get us to
10:18
be able to have this conversation, right?
10:21
We have spent this entire season really building the structural
10:26
analysis. And if you're with us, you know,
10:29
right, starting in the 1970s, that shift towards shareholder
10:33
primacy. That's episode 2 with Batchel.
10:35
Cool. We went into the psychological
10:38
contracts that demand a certain level of silence.
10:42
That's episode 4 with Leilani Lewis.
10:45
Of course, the psychosocial hazards that we can't stop
10:48
talking about and that the system deliberately is
10:52
producing. That's episode 6 with Doctor
10:55
Nicole Dekay, the self advocacy trap, episode 8 with Hala Saleh.
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All roads lead to here. The word underneath it all is
11:07
dignity. And So what is it actually?
11:10
You know, as we've been recording this entire spring and
11:14
talking with so many people, I think what comes to me is that
11:17
dignity is not a perk. It's not a leadership style.
11:21
It actually is the precondition. It's the foundation for
11:24
everything else. We can't have safety without
11:27
dignity. We can't, we can't engage in
11:30
collective action if we don't believe in the the dignity of
11:34
every human being. It's the precondition for
11:38
honesty at work and honest workplaces, and almost nobody in
11:43
corporate America, and really all of modern work has actually
11:46
built for dignity. Yeah, I think precondition is
11:51
the perfect word to position dignity.
11:54
It comes first. It comes before anything else.
11:57
And Prentice Hemphill's definition and what it takes to
12:01
heal is in my mind. And we're actually going to come
12:03
back to this brilliant humans words at the end of the episode,
12:07
which is dignity is the capacity to feel the inherent value
12:11
simply in the fact that we exist.
12:13
It is the seat of agency of choice.
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And yeah, I think yeah, Parna's hand is on her heart.
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Like that's it. I think agency and choice being
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a really, really important part of this of that.
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If this is inherent there therefore I have choice and how
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I am showing up and feeling and being with other people.
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And to your point of partner, when we look at how the
12:35
organization, the modern corporation is founded in power
12:39
over dynamics, bureaucratic output, they're not designed for
12:42
dignity. We are really trying to
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outsource it or give it, bestow it or take it away from each
12:48
other. And that's core to what the
12:51
system is that we're in. So the question isn't do leaders
12:56
want to treat people well? We're asking if the structure
13:01
and structure role incentives ever even let them do that,
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which I have a feeling we all know the answer to that.
13:10
But let's hear from others in what this question means to
13:13
them. There have been lots of points
13:15
in my career where I've had to sacrifice that.
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I unfortunately think for many people who hold any kind of
13:20
marginalized identity, they've had to show up in ways and
13:24
outfits and voices that are not actually representative of them.
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And every time I've done that, and it's felt like a disservice
13:29
to who I actually AM and very much like a betrayal.
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And I think for many of us, in order to actually climb the
13:35
ladder, if you really want to, you have to do that.
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And so there are lots of times where I was someone I am not
13:41
actually in real life, and I don't feel proud of that
13:44
necessarily, but it was a survival mechanism at the time.
13:47
My entire conversation with Madison, it happened around the
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same time we have recorded our episode with Halla.
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And you know, this idea of self advocacy is an individual coping
14:01
strategy and not a systemic solution.
14:04
How limited it is in its ability to give us the results that we
14:09
want, right. And which is not to say that
14:12
there are benefits of maybe negotiating your salary, right?
14:15
Or I think as people who are socialized as women to not raise
14:20
your hand and say, Oh yeah, I'll take the notes or yeah, I'll
14:22
order the cake or I'll do whatever.
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And we even see executive women doing those kinds of things,
14:29
right. So it does have in some ways, it
14:31
can offer you some short term gains and all of that ends up
14:35
being hollow because it because dignity doesn't live inside the
14:42
foundations of organizations. It isn't it isn't something we
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think about when we design policies.
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And now I it's bringing like now I'm thinking about the
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conversation that we had with him by Youssef on Wellness,
14:57
right? And we talked about the idea of
15:00
the three day bereavement leave, which is not even federally
15:04
mandated, mandated, right? Like it's nice.
15:06
It's a nice to have thing the companies offer that you could
15:09
have three days when somebody in your immediate family, a spouse,
15:13
a parent, a child, possibly a grandparent dies, you can have
15:19
three days. And if we were really centering,
15:26
dignity would be constrained this period, not of just
15:32
grieving, but also of like the tactical things that need to
15:36
happen when somebody passes away, that we've decided three
15:40
days, we've quantified it and said three days is a sufficient
15:43
amount of time. That that statistic truly is
15:45
unbelievable to me. It just, it's so strange and I
15:50
think is a really good place to think about dignity because
15:56
every single person experiences death.
16:00
That is, that is our shit. That's where we come together in
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the human experience. So just the experience of being
16:06
alive is that it ends. And to not design systems for
16:15
that kind of spaciousness, for us to fully be in that human
16:18
experience is such a, it's such a huge act of avoidance, which
16:25
means that no one, you know, the people who are designing those
16:28
policies are also not giving them themselves that space.
16:31
And that's grief like, and if we can't grieve, we can't, we can't
16:36
change anything. So Ouch, Ouch, Ouch, Ouch.
16:41
I want us to play the clip from Chris.
16:43
Speaking of designing systems, this is somebody who has been 30
16:48
years deep in designing people and culture.
16:52
I don't know if there's a shared meaning around.
16:54
Dignities. And I think when we think about
16:56
dignity and respect in the workplace, it's very similar.
17:00
It's not well defined. And if it is defined, it's not
17:04
well lived. And if it's not well lived, it's
17:08
not well coast. Developed and supported.
17:11
It's exactly coming back to our episode with Doctor Nicole Dekay
17:15
on psychosocial hazards. Where one, what are we actually
17:21
measuring? Like are we measuring the right
17:23
the right thing that we we need as people?
17:25
And on top of that, do we have a shared definition of what can
17:30
actually protect workers or give workers what they need to be
17:34
successful? That's a huge, huge miss.
17:38
And particularly in our society, we need room to practice.
17:47
And this came up, you know, Aparna and I were where we heard
17:50
from Chris was at this this conference of change makers.
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And we're so good at talking about it.
17:59
We're so good at talking about what we need.
18:03
We're so good at talking about what's missing.
18:05
But we're not good at practicing it.
18:09
And we don't have the room, to Chris's point, we're never going
18:14
to have the room to practice it if it's not well defined and if
18:18
we are not given the space to actually live it, to be coached
18:21
to develop and support each other around it.
18:25
So, OK, let me ask you, what does dignity demand
18:28
structurally? That even the best individual
18:32
leaders right like the people our bosses that we still Revere,
18:37
cannot provide by themselves. Yeah, I'm everything that I'm
18:41
gonna say is rooted through my teachers who have taught me what
18:45
dignity is. So I'm thinking of Stacey
18:48
Haynes, who's with me right now. Prentice Hemphill is with me all
18:51
through. What does this look like from a
18:54
somatic experience? And politicized somatics means
18:59
you're rooted in the context of what is happening in the world
19:04
right now. And so to answer your question,
19:07
what does dignity demand structurally is literal
19:10
structural analysis. We need the history, We need to
19:14
understand why we don't have access to it, What and how was
19:20
the system created, which we hope we're we're supporting in
19:24
this podcast. And then you also need
19:27
structural repair. We can't plop dignity on top of
19:32
a system that is meant to exploit our labor.
19:37
That's just we can't do that. And so structurally we need
19:41
systems to help us to create repair interpersonally, as a
19:45
leader, that's being honest about what system you're
19:49
supporting, what you're responsible for, what it's like
19:52
to be seated in a position of power.
19:55
It's a responsibility to to create systems of trust.
20:00
Systems of transparency. We have to be transparent.
20:03
If we're looking at the person across from us as actually
20:06
having dignity and to the point we were just talking about, we
20:10
actually need to look at the metrics that we actually care
20:14
about as people. And that is not something that
20:18
we can just look at an individual leader to be
20:21
responsible for. As an individual, you need to be
20:23
committed to the healing process required to be able to access
20:28
your own dignity, and all of that has to be done through that
20:31
structural analysis as well. So it's a team effort, no small
20:36
feat. We're just going to send
20:37
everybody back to Graduate School.
20:40
Yeah. Yeah.
20:40
Where did you learn dignity? Why?
20:42
I learned it in grad school. I want to ask you one more
20:45
question. It's the most like US.
20:48
It's like I studied it. Yeah.
20:52
Anyways, go. Ahead, I did study it you know,
20:54
you know what's funny is when I was in grad school, I would
20:59
battle it out with all of the professors and I was like, none
21:02
of this really matters Like teach me something that matters.
21:05
And as I've gotten older that learning has mattered, right?
21:10
I, I do think that there is, there are a lot of people that
21:14
are like, teach kids STEM, teach kids entrepreneurship, teach
21:17
kids how to sell things and hustle and build things.
21:19
And I think all of that is, it's not unimportant.
21:22
But I do think that there is something about a, a really good
21:25
liberal arts education that forces you to sit with history,
21:30
that forces you to sit with and learn how to do structural
21:33
analysis. Now, a lot of it doesn't
21:36
translate into actions. And that is a battle that like
21:39
we're up against all the time. And I think that's the that's
21:42
been the battle with the DE and I, that's been the battle with
21:44
collective liberation. But at least you have the
21:48
language. So this is just like my little
21:50
elite plug for getting a good liberal arts education.
21:54
But I want to ask you one more question that's maybe a bit more
21:57
serious, which is what do you see as the connection between
22:02
dignity and power? And I'm asking you that because,
22:04
you know, in the conversation that we had with Madison, she
22:07
talks about, you know, being in the seat of power and how it
22:10
matters for certain people to be in those roles.
22:14
And, you know, she talks about how when you're in the seat you
22:17
have, you have a little bit more space, you can show up
22:19
differently. But what does that tell us about
22:22
everybody without a seat and the people that are never gonna be
22:28
in a seat like that? I mean to, to simplify it,
22:32
right? To to answer the question around
22:34
what's the connection between dignity and power?
22:38
Actually, you know what? I wanna I, these aren't even my
22:41
words. I'm gonna pull up Stacey Haynes
22:44
from the book The Politics of Trauma, because I think there's
22:48
something something here that I think can differentiate and be
22:52
really clear on what it is and what it isn't, which is her
22:55
talking about dignity and privilege.
22:58
So dignity and privilege are entitlement are very different.
23:01
We can think of privilege as something given by social and
23:05
economic systems that can leave people with more access and a
23:09
deeper sense of worthiness. Their dignity has not been
23:12
systemically targeted. But I would not call this an
23:15
embodied sense of dignity because it's built on false
23:18
ground. Privilege depends on oppression
23:22
and power over. In that sense, the dignity it
23:25
grants is always limited. And the reason why I couldn't
23:29
say this in my own words and why I wanted to read Stacey's words
23:32
is that that is the, and and to your point, a part of like we
23:39
see this happening again and again, where it's like we're
23:41
spinning on top of ourselves, like we're doing the thing to
23:45
each other even while we're trying to break the oppression.
23:48
And I understand Maddie's words of, yes, being in the in a seat
23:52
of power does matter. And to Stacy's point, you are
23:58
then hit in the seat of something that was given to you
24:04
on false ground. Probably it's not something that
24:09
you can then bestow to other people because it was was on
24:14
false ground. Dignity does not come with
24:18
power. Dignity does not come with
24:20
power. I guess.
24:26
And perhaps power actually corrupts dignity.
24:33
Maybe. Yeah.
24:36
I mean, you can't be, yeah, you know, I think, I think that
24:40
we've, we've had variations of this conversation.
24:43
We've said, can capitalism and dignity at work coexist?
24:48
And I think with one exception, a middle-aged white man,
24:53
everybody that we chatted with said, no, you, you can't have
24:56
that because capitalism necessarily requires extraction
25:02
and exploitation. And there's no dignity in
25:05
extraction and exploitation of labour, even that highly
25:08
compensated labour, right? Even the technology workers who
25:13
are training AI to do their jobs and maybe making upwards of, you
25:19
know, a quarter, $1,000,000 a year, there's still no dignity
25:24
in that. I want to switch gears and play
25:28
this clip from Jeff. And you know, what was funny to
25:33
me is that we did not coach him to say what he said.
25:38
And he took us right back to that second episode with Bacho
25:42
where we talk about Milton Friedman before the 1970s.
25:46
They wouldn't only lay people off when they were in sheer
25:50
bankruptcy and. Then as soon as Milton.
25:52
Friedman came out with his whole doctrine, right?
25:55
Yeah, once done. And it wasn't even a book.
25:57
It was a. Freaking article.
25:59
It's one article and it was that's all they needed to be
26:02
like shareholder value, shareholder value.
26:05
It was completely unprompted. It was completely unprompted and
26:10
and how what happened in the 1970s with Milton Friedman, with
26:15
Jack Welch changed workplaces and not for the better.
26:18
And it's, you know, it was almost as if Dignity was
26:23
decommissioned. It was phased out, something
26:26
that workers in the 20s fought so hard for.
26:28
The 20's, the 30's, the 40s, all of the labor movements in the
26:33
first half of the last century were Yeah, we lose it all to
26:40
help a very small number of people get stinkingly rich.
26:45
Yeah, the rug was pulled and the way that we related to work
26:49
changed overnight, which, you know, of course happens
26:51
throughout human history as well.
26:53
But that structural critique is necessary.
26:56
What we might be missing is the question of what we can actually
27:00
do. Individuals, leaders, literally
27:03
here and now, what do we do inside this this system?
27:07
We have lots of folks who have told us about what that means to
27:10
them, of what can we actually do about it?
27:12
So let's listen in as a leader, are you taking PTO?
27:15
Because if you're not taking PTO, neither is your team.
27:17
We've built this and it around friendship, so the idea of
27:20
friendship, taking care of each other, looking out for each
27:23
other in business like it's made it a great experience.
27:26
Amongst the five years in doing this, it's been wonderful
27:29
because it's a hectic line of work.
27:32
But when you're centered around that mutual respect, love,
27:36
friendship, dignity, we grant that to each other.
27:40
So you know, something that I struggle with is the question of
27:44
whether dignity is actually scalable in a profit driven
27:49
system. And I, I say profit driven
27:51
because certainly the ways in which private sector corporate
27:55
America works is wildly extractive.
27:59
But I also think that there is an element of that in the social
28:02
sector. There is an urgency to do things
28:06
even when they're not the right things, even when they're not
28:08
going to yield the outcomes that we actually say we want.
28:11
And yeah, I guess I'm, I'm curious if you want to help us
28:17
think through how we scale dignity, even if, even if that's
28:21
something that is scalable. How do we scale dignity, right?
28:25
If we really believe that the individual and of course the
28:29
person next to us. If I really believe that my
28:31
worthiness is inherent, and a dear friend of mine says like, I
28:35
don't even say worthiness, I just say inherent inherentness
28:39
because it cannot be something that is given or taken away.
28:44
If we as individuals choose to fully live our lives and see
28:48
ourselves that way, then we can scale it.
28:53
It becomes scalable because it shows up in our relationships.
29:02
Is it scalable in a profit driven system?
29:06
I really don't know how to answer the question.
29:08
How would you answer this question?
29:10
Well, I think that there is. There's a part of me that feels
29:14
like we can make dignity contagious by bringing it into
29:23
the room with us really intentionally, right?
29:27
Because it's felt in the body. And earlier in the episode, we
29:30
played that clip of you where you talk about how it's
29:32
inherently in the room, right? And it's in our bodies.
29:36
And our bodies are also only ever in the present moment,
29:39
right? Communicating with us.
29:41
And this is something that I've been reflecting on a lot over
29:45
the last, I would say very intentionally the last six years
29:48
as I've sought to sort of, I don't want to say better my
29:52
leadership, but just show up in the world as the kind of person
29:57
that I needed both growing up and that that I certainly needed
30:03
in my colleagues and bosses as I was coming, you know, into my
30:06
20s and coming into the the workforce.
30:09
And so in that regard, I really and obviously so imperfect and
30:17
can sometimes be emotionally volatile just as much as any
30:20
other person. But, well, maybe not Adrian
30:22
Marie Brown or, you know, some of our heroes, Maybe they're
30:25
just kind of always calm. But yeah, I feel like, can it be
30:29
contagious if we just intentionally bring it into the
30:32
room with us? And does that then ultimately
30:39
have the power to shift things right, like the big things, the
30:45
the laws, the policies, the practices and, and I think
30:49
partly we could have laws and not the culture of just even
30:55
self enforcement. And so they're not sticky.
30:58
And we see that with lots of dimensions of employment law
31:01
already, right? But how do we how we make it
31:05
contagious so that we can start creating some virtuous cycles
31:08
now? I think it's really hard to do.
31:10
And I want to take us on a side quest for a moment that I didn't
31:13
plan for. But I saw an article yesterday
31:16
that came out, I think in the New York Times or The Atlantic.
31:19
And the title of it is actually comma Democracy dies in HR.
31:26
And the tagline said new research sheds light on how
31:31
mediocre employees help would be.
31:33
Authoritarians maintain power. And one of the things that the
31:39
article talks about is that authoritarian leaders, people
31:43
with leaders with authoritarian tendencies, let's say, just need
31:46
to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool, the
31:50
frustrated and the mediocre. And, and then it says the people
31:56
who make those decisions, the research suggests, right, The
32:00
the mediocre and the frustrated, they're neither extremists nor
32:06
victims. They're often just middling
32:09
workers looking for a way to get ahead.
32:21
It is a rough article to read the title alone.
32:27
The title alone. You've heard me talk so much
32:31
over the past year about the relationship in democracy and
32:34
workplaces. And you know, this idea that we
32:39
are getting trained to comply with an authoritarian regime by
32:43
way of how work happens. What are the structures of
32:47
workplaces? And, and I think for me all
32:52
along, like the missing piece really was the role of dignity
32:59
in our systems and in our interpersonal relationships.
33:03
And yeah. Yeah, with, with dignity.
33:07
None of none of that works. None of that manipulation works.
33:12
We really, really have to buy into the fact that that is what
33:17
you just read is the way that we can get safety and that we can
33:20
get worthiness and that we can get belonging.
33:23
I want to change gears again and I want to play some clips about
33:29
what it means and feels like to people out in the world because
33:35
we've been talking about what it means to us.
33:37
And I think because it is something so inherent, people,
33:44
yeah, people have their own experiences with it.
33:46
It's not all tech companies or some tech companies.
33:49
But as the layoffs are happening, they are hiring
33:53
contractors without benefits. And so if there's a big group of
33:57
people who are full time workers and they're losing their
33:59
benefits when they get laid off and then being hired on as a
34:01
contractor without benefits, that's an active attack upon
34:04
people's benefits. Hi, my name is Luther.
34:07
I'm with the United Video Game Workers and I would say that to
34:11
me as a worker, dignity is negotiation.
34:14
Companies go through hard times all the time.
34:17
Hard decisions need to be made, but that's a negotiation between
34:21
leadership and workers. Everyone has needs.
34:24
Everyone needs push and pull. That's how good things get made
34:27
and problems get solved. But right now it's not a
34:31
negotiation. It is a one way direction.
34:34
It is one group of people mandating to everyone else what
34:37
is going to happen, and they will always choose themselves.
34:40
The people who make the decisions that crater the
34:42
companies, nothing bad ever happens to them.
34:45
They get raises even for cutting us.
34:48
They get raises for shutting down studios that have been
34:51
around for 30 years and under their watch because of their
34:55
decisions. But do they ever suffer?
34:57
No, they get bonuses, so that's not a negotiation.
35:03
It's just a gun to your head with a different name.
35:05
To listen without judgment. To listen.
35:07
Seeking to understand versus being understood.
35:10
Not weaponizing open feedback and communication and leaving
35:16
space just to listen. You don't have to actually have
35:21
that same experience to validate that that's an experience that
35:25
someone is having. And to me, that's what it feels
35:28
like. So I think what?
35:29
Dignity and respect. Feel for me at work is that
35:31
folks are able to show up in authentic ways and actually name
35:36
genocide for what it is and actually be able to discuss the
35:41
ongoing systemic and systematic issues happening in the United
35:46
States but also across right. For me, dignity means being able
35:50
to show up as my true self and not having to compromise who I
35:54
am and the differences that make me, me.
35:59
I am a loud laughing, vocal Puerto Rican who will not
36:05
compromise who I am for anyone that you call.
36:09
I'm not a big fan of call out culture.
36:11
I believe in calling culture because oftentimes people's
36:15
values and beliefs are what guide them in their ways of
36:19
being. And then if we're not
36:21
interrogating those things, then we can't promote change.
36:24
There's that element of interrogation that's needed to
36:28
be able to see one another's humanity.
36:31
Lose this poem, and it's in Spanish.
36:33
It's a Mayan inspired poem, but it goes like this in English.
36:37
You are my other me. If I do harm to you, I do harm
36:40
to myself. If I love and respect you, I
36:43
love and respect myself. I'm wondering if there was if
36:46
you had kind of a favorite conversation from the conference
36:50
last week on this topic? When folks talked about what
36:54
dignity is, people tend to slow down when they talk about it.
36:58
Like there's like an internal access that has to come through.
37:05
Some people said, wait, I need to think about it before I come
37:07
back. Like there's there's something
37:08
that has to be felt to to be able to tap into what dignity
37:13
dignity is. And I think across all of these
37:16
clips, what struck with me and at the conference, what struck
37:20
struck with me too, is that it is all seen as relational, which
37:25
is beautiful because sometimes we think of dignity as, OK, it's
37:29
me, it's my inherent value. But if I have that, then the
37:32
next person does. And so all of a sudden we're
37:35
we're in almost a forcing mechanism of collective
37:39
interdependence. And all of these answers are
37:44
about how we create that together, which I think is a
37:50
really beautiful and concrete way to even take your first
37:54
steps towards living a life with more dignity is let me just
37:58
start by looking at the person across from me.
38:00
How do I like not to be overly corny, but you and me right
38:06
here, Aparna, Like, how do we really see each other in that
38:11
way while we're in a conversation?
38:13
How does that change our conversation with each other?
38:16
How does that change the way that we design an episode, what
38:19
we care about? There's a certain level of
38:24
honesty that's required. And I think with all of these
38:26
answers, it's rooted in that. It's written in honesty, and
38:31
it's rooted about thinking about other people.
38:34
What stood out for you? Don't know that I have a
38:37
favorite conversation that we recorded, but the one that I
38:42
keep coming back to is from this woman named Chrissy who worked
38:48
in K12 for 25 years. And she went from being a
38:53
classroom educator with special needs kids to being an
38:57
administrator. And she came up to me and she
39:00
said, I want to talk to you because you said that you worked
39:04
in education and now you're doing something completely
39:05
different. And I want to figure out what
39:07
the other like what my completely different future is.
39:10
And my kids are grown and they're out of the house.
39:12
And I'm I'm swirling and I'm asking all of these questions.
39:15
And then we ended up recording a really sweet segment with her
39:18
and she shared a poem with us. And in the poem, she says, if I
39:24
love you, I love me, right? If I can see you, then I can see
39:32
myself. And and we played that.
39:37
And yeah, I, I just think that so much of what this first
39:42
season has been about is naming the things that we need to
39:48
unlearn. Yes, we need to do the
39:51
structural analysis. Yes, we need to call a thing a
39:55
thing. And we've done a lot of that and
39:57
we've done a lot of that. But I, I think at the end of the
40:01
day, you're right, it is about honesty in interpersonal
40:05
relationships and consistently bringing that honesty, right?
40:09
Like the honesty is not like sometimes I'm honest with you,
40:11
but other time I'm actually being fairly duplicitous so that
40:14
I can meet my needs as a frustrated and mediocre human
40:18
being, right. But.
40:21
And even that idea of mediocrity.
40:26
As a, as a fairly high functioning human being, I
40:28
definitely have moments where I'm like, can you be more
40:31
competent? Not you, Lars, right.
40:32
But just like the world in general, not you specifically,
40:36
not you. I'm just just naming that.
40:39
But I, I read that article yesterday and OK, I have to
40:41
first of all read it like 3 different times because it
40:44
really does require a graduate education to, to make sense of.
40:47
And I just kind of, I just was sitting with this idea of like
40:53
even the lack of dignity in calling somebody mediocre, which
40:55
I call a lot of people mediocre, but not, let's say, not
40:58
infrequently, But why can't people be mediocre?
41:05
Let's go. Why?
41:07
What is the need for excellence constantly, right?
41:10
And when I was a teacher, you know, the, the conversation,
41:14
this is 20 years ago, The Conversation was all about high
41:17
achievement culture, high expectation culture.
41:22
We should expect the most from kids.
41:26
And I'm just like, well, why can't they be mediocre?
41:30
I'm, I'm totally good with this happy kid that's not into
41:33
academics, you know, being the best plumber.
41:39
They don't. Not everybody has to work at
41:41
NASA, right? We don't need every child to
41:48
design the world's tiniest chip for supercomputers.
41:57
Maybe they just love going on walks and they can work for USPS
42:01
and deliver mail. I think that's fine.
42:04
Well, we forget and I'm, I am totally projecting on myself too
42:09
as I'm saying this because it's something that I also need to
42:11
hear is that when we are in struggle of learning something,
42:15
that is where all the juices, that's where we get to become.
42:20
It's not when you have gotten to achieve that certain access of
42:24
information or expertise. Like the process is the
42:29
struggle, the best parts of who we are in the struggle.
42:34
And I think that's where you that's honestly where we find
42:38
dignity, right? It's like when I am in this
42:40
questioning, when my shame is coming through, when my my
42:44
guilt, my fear, all of that, like that is the path to
42:47
dignity. So, yeah, we're really even even
42:53
at the beginning of our education, we're getting told a
42:56
very, very narrow way for us to be good or not good.
42:59
And dignity kind of just like breaks that apart when it
43:05
becomes a practice, when it comes something that we can
43:07
protect and and at least seek out for ourselves to like really
43:13
be in the practice to try to find it.
43:16
The best parts of who we are in our feeling.
43:18
OK last side quest for the day is as you know I have been going
43:24
to yoga now for the last 6 frigging months consistently at
43:30
least twice a week. I still really suck at it and
43:35
some days are better than others, but there's a teacher
43:37
who is a professor in her life outside of being a yoga teacher,
43:41
which is wild to me. And I love taking her class.
43:45
It's, you know, like she teaches the class at 7:00 PM.
43:48
So she's already had a full work day and she's coming into the
43:50
space and one thing. So this this idea of like, we
43:55
know when dignity is in the room.
43:59
I, I, I can't even tell you just how much of a container she
44:05
creates in her classes, and it took me a while to even get to
44:11
name why I was drawn to her classes specifically.
44:15
And I and I think it's because she walks into the room and she
44:21
ensures that we can live into our own dignity even as we're
44:26
fumbling on the mat and we're tipping over and we're
44:29
struggling with postures that, and I've been to dozens of her
44:34
classes now, and I've never had a feeling where I feel shame for
44:41
not being able to do a thing, You know, where I feel like some
44:45
of the teachers are very competitive.
44:46
You know, they're like, and you can do it and you should do it
44:49
and right. But she just brings her name is
44:51
Janine. She just is so kind.
44:54
But the way that she lets us live into what you said, the
44:58
best parts of who we are in those moments of processing, she
45:03
creates the container for that. Yeah.
45:07
And every time I leave her class, I feel like I just feel
45:13
complete, which is not something that I ever would have said
45:18
about a yoga class, you know, taught by a white lady.
45:26
Shout out. Shout out to Janine Yoga 6
45:29
Redmond. It's in a mall with studios.
45:32
Is it a? Mall.
45:33
I love that. It's in the Redmond Town Center,
45:37
which is maybe they'd like to think they're not a mall, but
45:41
it's it's giving like open air mall vibes.
45:44
We'll take the third spaces that we can get.
45:50
Yeah. Do you want to bring us into
45:56
sort of possibility? Yeah, and this, this is an
45:59
episode of Hearing from others. And I'm, I'm just like a geek
46:03
with a stack of books next to me on my desk today, which feels
46:06
really sweet. So this is Prentice Hemphill's
46:09
book, What It Takes to Heal, and Prentice's words around what
46:17
possibility would look like if we were in a society that wants
46:23
to heal with each other. Yeah, this is this is what they
46:27
say. So healing ourselves is not the
46:31
end of the line, but brings us into relationship with others
46:34
and allows us to do the work that brings healing to the wider
46:37
world for society and movements. It could mean that safety,
46:41
belonging and dignity become our metric for the well-being of our
46:46
organizations and the people inside them.
46:50
We could make room for authentic connection, timely repair, and
46:54
intentionally build more trust and transparency.
46:58
We might study the resilient and life giving aspects of our
47:02
cultures and practice while being aware of what drains and
47:06
depletes. We could be careful about how we
47:10
bring in the most traumatized of us, making sure we scaffold them
47:15
with care. We could use how we gather
47:19
together not to numb ourselves from the pain we face, but to
47:22
build a collective resilience that carries us over the long
47:26
term. And we could source our work
47:30
with our visions, not our pain. How we work is as important as
47:35
the work that we do. Can you imagine HR designed that
47:39
way? No, but can you read that last
47:41
sentence again? Source.
47:43
Our visions. Yes, we could source our work
47:46
with our visions, not our pain. How we work is as important as
47:52
the work we do. Yeah.
47:56
Thank you, Prentice. Thank you, Prentice.
47:59
What a powerful human ancestor. Yeah.
48:06
Can I imagine HR being designed that way?
48:11
Yes, I can, I can. And you know, just in our, in
48:16
our lifetimes of being in the workforce, 15 to 20 years, we've
48:20
seen all of the different shapes and forms of this particular
48:25
entity, right? Like human resources, human
48:28
capital, employee experience, people experience, people and
48:32
culture. And yeah, I, I, I do think that
48:41
there is a world in which there is an entity inside every
48:45
organization that exists to care for its people, because there is
48:49
no organization without its people.
48:53
There is no work without people, without workers.
48:57
There's no innovation without what happens in the brains of
49:02
humans and the connections that they can see and their drive to
49:08
explore. And like all of the scientists,
49:11
I think about just how disciplined some of them are for
49:16
decades to solve something that feels so small and irrelevant
49:21
but has the greatest impacts on our lives.
49:25
Like the people that design vaccines, what labor they put in
49:34
and what would it mean to care for them?
49:38
What would it mean to care for educators?
49:39
What would it mean to care for the people who do some of the
49:43
back breaking, like the most back breaking work in society?
49:48
So I do think it's possible. But then I think the other
49:52
metrics that have to shift and you know, this is we've pulled
49:54
from the work of Jason Hickel and Catherine Lew over the
49:58
course of this season as well. Then we also have to change the
50:03
metrics for what a healthy economy looks like.
50:08
Yeah. And the health of the economy
50:11
can't, just cannot just be in what the S&P 500 is doing.
50:18
It's actually not like what did he know?
50:21
Like that's that is not the real metric of the health of the
50:23
economy. Yeah, final thoughts.
50:32
Yeah, there's another, there's another piece.
50:34
And I love that you brought us wide and just bring bringing us
50:38
back in. And if you have a second, I
50:41
don't know if you're, you know, listening to this and you're
50:43
moving or if there's stillness available, but I want to offer,
50:47
you know, dignity. What consciousness around
50:49
dignity came into my life through somatics.
50:51
And there's a foundational practice in the lineage that I
50:56
learned that both Prentice and Stacy come from and have
51:00
supported building called centering A centering practice.
51:06
And this is a way to feel dignity, safety, belonging, and
51:09
purpose through your body. And the way that dignity is
51:13
taught is through the length of your body.
51:18
And so even just as I'm saying that, just take note of how
51:21
you're holding your body right now.
51:24
I'm noticing for myself that I have kind of a natural lean
51:27
forward. There's like a bid of connection
51:31
that that I carry in myself that can collapse me a little bit.
51:37
And in fact, if I were to adjust myself of like, how do I
51:40
actually feel, feel my length here?
51:44
I'm allowing my my spine to, to just gently grow my neck to just
51:51
be held in its upright position. And just from like a biological
51:56
perspective, now I have more blood flow, I have more access
52:00
to information because I haven't curled myself in.
52:04
So there's something here in regards to what do we actually
52:06
physically have access to when we choose to think about our
52:09
height through our dignity. And so we've been in our head
52:15
about this for years together in this, in this work and designing
52:21
this, this podcast, part of this episode was also heady of like,
52:26
what is it? How do we do it?
52:27
Can we scale it? And at the same time, our body
52:31
is telling us right now, what, where's dignity?
52:35
So just feel yourself a little bit.
52:37
What does my body know about dignity right now?
52:39
If I just thought about my length.
52:44
And part of this too is knowing that.
52:48
And and these words might feel hard to hear, but it's truth is
52:52
that when we are overwriting it, we are participating in our own
52:57
extraction of ourselves. And the question is not do we
53:01
survive it? It's knowing what is the cost
53:04
and just thinking about it from the physicality of your body.
53:07
For me, if I'm leaning in this whole episode, what's the cost
53:11
on me to sit back to be able to, to create more space and more
53:16
room for possibility in front of me to trust the fact that
53:20
dignity is still here. I don't have to bid it while I'm
53:22
on this wonderful episode with my dear friend.
53:28
We can feel it. So that's the offer from a
53:31
somatic standpoint. And thank you to to my teachers
53:34
for for the wisdom of that because it's right here.
53:39
Yeah, yeah, we've spent almost an hour naming, right, feels
53:46
like, and the fact that it's both personal and individual and
53:49
exists between two people. And in some ways it's also
53:53
structural. And I think about the person at
53:57
the conference last week who said we have to break systems
54:00
and create something totally new, not yet imagined.
54:04
They weren't being nihilistic as well.
54:07
They're right. And that's what the quote that
54:09
you brought forward from Prentice Hemphill, what's the
54:13
source? What's the source?
54:16
Well, my friends, wow. This season we built.
54:21
We built the case. A structural one, historical
54:24
one, embodied one for why work in America and in other places
54:30
makes us feel small, makes us feel the way that it does.
54:35
And I hope that this episode gave you the word for what we've
54:38
been building towards, which is dignity, not as corporate value
54:43
statement, but as a demand, as a calling, as a inherentness that
54:48
exists in ourselves that we can be with literally today, right
54:53
now. So if this first season was
54:55
about naming the problems and renamed so many of them season
55:00
2, we're going to be talking about building alternatives.
55:04
And I invite you to stay tuned. We might have some fun little
55:09
mid season drops coming this summer and we're so grateful for
55:16
you to have been on the journey with us this spring.
55:20
I'm a Parna. I'm Lars.
55:23
And we'll circle back.