By Jonathan Rivett
Question
Everyone in my family has COVID at the moment. We’re very lucky in that none of us are seriously ill, but all of us are (or were) feeling poorly. On a personal note, I feel better than I did a week ago, but don’t think I’ll be ‘back to normal’ for a while.
I let my work team know last week. Most colleagues were supportive, but I was disappointed to receive one message with words along the lines of “it’s time to move on”. The implication was that I should be back in the office as soon as possible because the virus should now be treated like a cold, and we don’t stop the economy for colds.
Is this fair?
Illustration by John ShakespeareCredit:
Answer
I have to admit I’ve written numerous drafts of this column, and deleted them all because I kept returning to pretty… uh… unfiltered opinions on your colleague.
Instead of concentrating on what they said and what those words say about them, it might be better to look at why they said it.
In truth, there could be many reasons. They might have watched too many YouTube videos about global conspiracies. They might have been having a terrible day and said something they now regret. They might just be an unpleasant, thoughtless person. But I keep coming back to this idea of “stopping the economy”. (To be clear, the reader’s colleague didn’t mention these words exactly, but did make a similar reference that I won’t repeat verbatim.)
“The economy” seems to loom large in so much discussion these days, especially when it comes to business and work. Sometimes it’s a way of introducing commerce into a conversation, but more and more it seems to be employed as a method for sidestepping difficult or complex problems.
“Won’t anyone think of the economy?” would be a tolerable response to a serious point of debate if the economy was some life-giving entity entirely separate from broader society, and at the same time at eternal risk of collapse. But that’s not even close to what an economy is.
At the start of the pandemic, a Work Therapy reader asked what “the economy” was and independent economist Saul Eslake’s short answer was “the set of arrangements by which people and entities are able to create, acquire and exchange things that they value”. Implied in this definition is the fact that there are economies everywhere, some that exist between small groups of people, and some that exist throughout or across entire nations or continents.
‘By taking sick leave you might be depriving ‘the economy’ of your labour, but you’re also reducing the likelihood of infection in your office.′
So the first point to make is there is no single economy. And even if you assume people use “the economy” as shorthand for the largest one of many - the collection of commercial networks that make up the global economic system - that doesn’t change the fact that it’s highly complex and completely inseparable from systems and decisions unrelated to commerce.
It is also, as Eslake told me a couple of years ago, “constantly changing, exhibiting both short-term fluctuations and longer-term trends”. We’re not talking about some kind of statue, static and fragile, just waiting to be pushed over and broken.
If we wanted to be unnecessarily generous here, we might assume that your work critic knows all this but maintains that your ‘bad’ decision has a small but adverse affect on one tiny part of “the economy”. And that when many people make that same decision, there’s a large problem. But even if this is true, how can they be so certain about your particular decision?
By taking sick leave you might be depriving “the economy” of your labour, but you’re also reducing the likelihood of infection in your office. That means fewer sick people.
And that brings us back to “the economy” as some kind of impossible standalone entity. Unless you believe that people’s health and “the economy” are two entirely unrelated things that never affect one another, it’s very difficult to make such black and white pronouncements as “you should be in the office as a matter of economic necessity”.
Your colleague’s words were not fair in any way. They were inexcusable, really. But people will continue to make such silly comments for as long as we persist with the myth that “the economy” is at the same time an omnipotent, unknowable god worthy of our dutiful service and a tiny motherless bird requiring our constant protection.
I hope you and your family are all back to their best very soon, and that your time away from work makes your recovery much easier.
Send your work questions to Work Therapy: jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au
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