Maybe He Wasn't "Happy" Enough?

When I see this story (From "Toke of the Town")...

WalMart Fires Associate Of Year, Cancer Patient For Medical Marijuana

Despite medical marijuana being legal in Michigan, WalMart has fired a cancer patient and former employee of the year who tested positive for the drug, which was recommended by his doctor.

"I was terminated because I failed a drug screening," ex-WalMart employee Joseph Casias told WZZM-13.

In 2008, Casias was Associate of the Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, Mich., despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor.

​At his doctor's recommendation, Casias legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.

"It helps tremendously," Casias said. "I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person."

Casias said he went to work every day during his five years at WalMart. "I gave them everything," he said. "One hundred and ten percent every day. Anything they asked me to do, I did. More than they asked me to do. Twelve to 14 hours a day."

Then Casias sprained his knee at work last November. During the routine drug screening that follows all workplace injuries, marijuana was detected in his system.

Casias showed WalMart managers his Michigan medical marijuana card, but was fired anyway.
...

Juxtaposed with this story (From the NYT "You're The Boss" Blog)...

The Secret to Having Happy Employees
By JAY GOLTZ

About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come with her newly minted M.B.A. boyfriend. As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.

Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. “I’m sure you treat them well,” he replied.

“That’s half of it,” I said. “Do you know what the other half is?”

He didn’t have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

I’m not. I have learned the long, hard and frustrating way that as a manager you cannot make everyone happy. You can try, you can listen, you can solve some problems, you can try some more. Good management requires training, counseling and patience, but there comes a point when you are robbing the business of precious time and energy.

Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t happen a lot. There’s no joy in the act of firing someone. And it’s not always the employee’s fault — there are many bad bosses out there. Bad management can make a good employee dysfunctional. On the other hand, good management will not always make a dysfunctional employee good. And sometimes people who would be great employees somewhere else just don’t fit your company, whether it is the type of business or the company culture.
...

I don't have to wonder why sometimes we seem barely capable of talking to each other about very basic things like "work", even though we technically use the same language.

Yeah, chronically unhappy people are toxic. No doubt about it. And like viruses, most of the chronically unhappy people (as opposed to, say, the clinically depressed, or grieving, which are vastly different situations) I've ever known have been driven by an indomitable compulsion to replicate their toxicity: to spread their misery as far and as wide as possible.

Over the years, I have even had my share of (well, frankly, more than my share of) chronically unhappy people working for me. If I told you about some of them -- told you half of what a few of them had done -- you wouldn't believe me.

Basically this guy

repeating endless variations of his Misery Mantra all day, every day, while doing the absolute minimum necessary to avoid getting fired.

In the Real World, you can escape such people; in the workplace -- whether on the shop floor or in the cubicle next door -- you can't. And they fucking wear on you.

Believe me, I get it.

However it is also true that, time after time, as I tried to figure out ways to quarantine the toxically miserable, or just generally boost morale that had been obviously flagging for one reason or another, I often found the entire organization working against me.

Whether it was the supervisor who was, himself, a burned out sack of bile.

Or the managers who had made it to the top of their particular shit pile by studying long and hard

under Nurse Ratched.

Or the junior executives who clawed their way out of the cubical farm

by making sure you never forgot who holds the whip.

Or the omnipresent consultants, which belt-tightening, budget-slashing, mass-layoffing organizations still somehow mysteriously manage to scrape together enough dough to grotesquely overpay in exchange for telling management a spellbinding tale of What They Wanted To Hear spiced up with crap that every minimum-wage earner in the place already knew

all dressed up in toney Buzzword Du Jour designer threads.

Or the senior executives who kept their corner offices

by means that have long since stopped being funny.

And don't even get me started on the red-tape vomiting zombies who have been purposefully installed in the law and HR departments to make absolutely sure that any hint of creativity or constructive criticism is snuffed out the moment it is detected.

Now I have no reason to think that Mr. Goltz isn't a decent guy who, by trial and error and hard work, has found a way to make his workplace a joyful place to be.

But as Joan Crawford was famously alleged to have said:

This ain't my first time at the rodeo.

And having come close enough to peek in on the inner workings of many organizations large and small (and having read the hair-raising reports from my far-flung network of snitches and minions) there is no doubt in my mind that orders of magnitude more workplace misery is meted out to the great mass of working Americans by the menagerie of vicious, weasel-cunning, half-bright fuckers who are often in charge of those organizations, than is caused by any line worker, no matter how sullen or bitter.

Because no matter how hard some cubicle drones may try to breed discontent, their efforts pale into invisibility compared to the gut-heaving, millstone-wearing torment that can be inflicted in bulk by a management which believes that a harmonious workplace is a slave galley, with everyone breaking their backs rowing until they are permitted to stop. And any flash of color or cheer or happiness is seen as a threat to the order and discipline of the place and is stomped flat.

By the martinets of America's strip mall and city hall autarchies, where managers rise based on how successfully they can subsume every lesson they learned in kindergarten --

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
...

-- and throw themselves with grim enthusiasm into the task of squeezing another erg of work out of their exhausted, dispirited fellow human beings.

So if by his firing patterns, the Boss lets it be known that if you want to keep your job your had Better By God Be Happy, then you can bet'cher ass the survivors will quickly learn to hang a Happy Face on the front of their heads every time the Boss Proximity Detector goes off.

Just as surely as millions have already learned in the most Darwinian way possible the value of Dockers and Hawaiian shirts on Casual (But hey, let's not get Too Casual) Thursdays.

Of smiling and small talking through Mandatory Social Drinking Fridays.

And of the ability to spontaneously regurgitate passages from "Who Moved My Cheese?" on command.

Hizzoner Declares New Golden Age

Of Crappy Jobs for Marginal People!

(h/t Frank Chow for breaking in on my debauchery to tip me to the story)

From the Tribune:

Daley calls ending impasse on Wal-Mart a 'priority'
Mayor wants retailer, unions and aldermen to find common ground

By John Byrne and Hal Dardick

Tribune reporters

December 17, 2009

Wal-Mart stores offer a rare opportunity to create jobs in a city desperate for work, Mayor Richard Daley said Wednesday, turning up the heat in the fight over expanding the retailer's presence in Chicago.

Union leaders have met privately with aldermen in recent days to try to agree on what wages and benefits Wal-Mart would have to offer for organized labor to stop its fight against the company. Aldermen sensitive to the union case have refused to pave the way for new stores after approving just one in 2004 for the West Side. Ending the Wal-Mart impasse is "a priority coming up," Daley said.

After the City Council meeting, Daley called on aldermen, the community, the unions and Wal-Mart "to sit down and come up with some common ground as quickly as possible."

But significant obstacles remain.

Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon expressed frustration that Wal-Mart executives have not participated in the talks. Wal-Mart spokesman John Bisio said the company won't negotiate on wages and benefits.
...

Up until October 2, 2009, Da Mare had one-and-only-one, big-time jobs program.

It was called "The Olympics".

He went 100% all-in on it, going so far as to declare that, if we didn't get it, there was nothing that could save the Great City from collapsing into a vast hobo jungle hell ruled by knife-wielding gangs of superrats. Or something. Da ‘Lympics were gonna make all of his friends crazy-pirate-rich, with enough overflow dribbling out of that Deep Tunnel-sized hog-trough to hire a bunch of people and buy a lot of forgiveness.

But it was not to be.

Of course there are other, viable paths back to rebuilding Chicago's middle class, but they’re all boring, requiring years of plodding patience and consisting of a lot of invisible, unglamorous battles won in little rooms and factory floors, over bad coffee and stale donuts. None of them are big, whiz-bangy and sexy enough to attract Da Mare's jaded, imperial attention.

A mistake Chicago voters and reporters make over and over again is that Hizzoner is not a man of the middle class; he is, at heart, a feudal lord and plutocrat.

And a damned petulant, tantrum-prone one at that.

He is a True Believer in the Chicago School/Radical Downsizing/Bubble Economics cult of the last 20 years, and his long-term vision for the City always looked far too much like a Dubai By The Lake, ruled by real estate and banking moguls and built on the shifting sands of a hotel, convention, barista and money-manager-driven "service" economy.

If he can't cut a Big Ribbon in front of it or put fireworks, a hundred teevee cameras and a ten-mile-long parade behind it, he ain't interested. And so when the Big Shiny Thing fails, we've got nothing in reserve. And instead of a coherent industrial and urban policy,

we get WalMart. (h/t Blue Gal for the timely graphic awesomeness)


Of course, to be fair, WalMart is succeeding because it is targeting neighborhoods that haven't had any serious money or political capital spent on their grave economic and social problems in at least the last 20 years. Neighborhoods that have been cheated. So while Liberals like me may whine righteously about the predations of WalMart, if I'm living in an economic wasteland that offers me no genuine alternatives other than real-albeit-crappy jobs and another generation of empty promises...I'll be taking the jobs. Every fucking time.

To be even more fair, perhaps someone other than cranky, little bloggers might want to take note of the fact that you-know-who

-- friend to CEOs, Presidents and Princes of Industry -- has been the undisputed Overboss of Chicago for those 20 years during which economic foundation of Chicago was being replaced with cotton candy, and the neighborhoods that WalMart is now targeting were being systematically screwed.