All employers are in the extraction business, not just those in the ‘resources’ industry. The resource all employers mine is their people – specifically their ideas, energy and time – ‘just’ the most personal and precious of our resources which define us as human beings.
Some workplaces have a culture where this mining is done less aggressively, without significant negative impacts on their employees, and where employees might even feel their role provides an opportunity for contributing to broader society. Other employers mine their employees harshly and destructively in a culture which shows all employees that they are commodities alike machines – soulless and replaceable – used up in their production of profits.
As our system of capitalism has become more and more extreme the latter type of workplace has predominated increasingly.
Workers in our current system of Extreme capitalism have largely accepted the ‘reality’ of modern workplaces continually going through restructure and ‘right sizing’ (i.e. downsizing) of workforces driven by executives’ striving to meet KPIs (to achieve personal material rewards, i.e. bonuses) at the behest of owners’ unquenchable thirst for greater capital returns for their own wealth accumulation.
More specifically, workers have come to perceive futility at attempting to exert influence over employers as worker protections – actual and cultural within our diverse citizenry – were continually undermined by compliant politicians as the influence of wealth bought the political class, the (former) left as much as the natural home of the ‘greed is good’ credo on the political (now far) right.
Adam Grant is absolutely correct when he says that workplaces are not composed of families but of communities. That is especially so the harsher the workplace. Whether people connect on an authentic level more than on a perfunctory or performative level has more to do with the conditions under which they meet than their own innate characters including desire and ability to connect with others.
That is why people feel more isolated in modern workplaces than 50 years ago, and it is a major factor in why they feel more isolated in their broader lives as work continually encroaches into what should be their personal time. If anything work from home arrangements ameliorate this isolation rather than exacerbate it.
The consequences of this increased aggressive extraction from people are being felt already, and increasingly. For instance, besides increased observation of deteriorating measures of mental health, in the unexplained increased incidence of certain types of cancers in younger people there is likely a (at least partial) causal relationship with increased anxiety and stress.
But let’s not defer to amorphous and nebulous ‘corporations’ or ‘organisations’ to blame. These are indeed communities of human beings and it is human beings who are continuously and actively deciding to mistreat and do harm to other human beings within their communities in the mistaken belief that aspiration to ‘win’ or ‘profit’ justifies just about any means to achieve those ends, just as it is human being not corporations and organisations that will attend this round table.
Even people who give the appearance of having empathy but still, when it comes down to it, knowingly load stress upon others are in effect using their social competence at feigning compassion for personal gain or at least feel equally victim to the culture. For many managers, their expression of empathy and protestations at lacking agency is in fact a strategy to lessen the guilt that they would otherwise feel.
The higher the status within the community the greater the advocacy potential, thus the higher the personal enticements to managers to compromise what it is that makes us human.
It is everyone who must make the decision to treat each other with dignity, compassion and equality, putting the wellbeing of those within our communities above our personal gain and profits.
The role of societal leaders, especially of politicians, is absolutely critical. It is they who set these key societal conditions through laws and enforcement of them, and it is they and their Governments where ultimate credit or blame resides for the consequences of those conditions.
The globalisation of the latter 20th century need not have caused the major social problems it has. These problems were in reality caused by the concomitant increasingly Extreme capitalism meaning that the wealthy Extreme capitalists (Xcaps) were able to garner the great majority of the benefits while workers in developed countries were disadvantaged and became aggrieved, and conditions for workers in poor countries advanced them little away from their precarity if at all.
It was above all else the legal corruption of the political class that foisted increased societal inequality in developed nations and perpetuated it in many developing nations.
The threat of AI replacing jobs adds greater stress upon workers through recognition of greater power shift away from them towards employers. But those efficiencies can improve work conditions and permit (restoration of) work-life balance to all workers if lawmakers are proactive and refuse to be conflicted by the wealth that buys influence over them in a break from the trend of recent decades.
We all need to recognise that societal wealth and technological progress is worse than self-defeating if it comes at the expense of our health and wellbeing rather than enhancing it.
We must, then, make it clear to our politicians that we understand this and will act accordingly, prospectively in the ballot box and retroactively potentially through the legal system (perhaps involving large class actions by those injured in and by Extreme capitalism workplaces).
To facilitate transition (back) to more compassionate workplaces required for healthier work-life balance Governments must lead. Besides there being a moral imperative on politicians to commit to improving the mental health of people in workplaces through legislation and regulation, there is an economic imperative in terms of prospective productivity and to reduce future health costs and risk of legal action for injury done in workplaces allowed to be toxic by permissive Governments.
Every health system acknowledges that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, and that is especially poignant at this current juncture where far right political actors are doing the work of Xcaps in trying to tear down national medicine procurement programs to increase profits for big pharma.
Personally I consider it a sad indictment on our current Extreme capitalist society that there must be an economic reason for everything including caring. Still, there it is …
Finalised and published in an oncology radiation waiting room
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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2025
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