Toil, Tame and Burnt Ass.

There have been a spate of articles of late about a general disillusionment, especially among people under 40, with the way work works, or more accurately, doesn't work.

On Monday, Labor Day in amerika, The Wall Street Journal reported on the breakdown in the relationship between hard work and career and financial success.

This is bad. It has a why-bother-ness to it. A merely going-through-the-motions. When people no longer find a linkage between effort and success, who cares enters the picture. Who cares is the enemy of progress.

When I was the head of a major ad agency, much of my bonus was based on keeping our attrition rate below 16-percent. That means, btw, that one out of six people leaves your agency every year. 

Today in an industry that says they believe in "transparency," you can't find data on such matters. When I was a boy, the advertising trade press often reported such details. Like the number of employees an agency had, agency revenue and their revenue per person. Today, the trade press merely reprints agency press-releases and calls that news.

On Thursday, I got a copy of apress-release via WPP from their new CEO, Cindy Rose. The release included this paragraph nominally about putting people first.

As a copywriter who made a good living for many years because I was able to write convincing copy (because it often included facts) I find this statement as shallow as a noon-day puddle in Dubai.

There are some simple realities to consider, that I believe, and I'm not being negative just honest, go against the platitude of putting people first. (No company in the entire history of the world has ever issued a press release by the way where they said, "We're putting Knoll furniture first. Carpet tiles second. People third."

The central problem with how agencies run is simple to reveal. Agencies expect you to be committed to them as if you are a valued employee with security, timely raises and bonuses and a genuine stake in the success of the business. 

When it's convenient for agencies, they expect people to work roughly thirty-percent of their time without being paid for it. That is, you get paid for forty hours, even when you work fifty-five. You can't bill and get paid for all the hours you work, but your agency can. You're working for free.

That arrangement worked when you were truly an executive. Because with your dedication came benefits. A presumption of a secure job, an assistant, an occasion perk, and an annual wage increase. Also, and perhaps I'm being naive, when the industry was healthy, the C-suite made about 20x the wage of a median-salaried worker. Today, the CEOs of IPG and Omnicom (the only holding companies I could find data on) make something like 200-300 times what their median-paid employee makes.

It's hard to feel a fealty toward a place that demands, essentially Corvée, that gives one-percent increases every thirty-six months, and fires people the moment there's downtime. In other words, there's little relationship--and this is enforced by corporate behavior--between how hard you work and how well you are treated.

Who cares.

The second objectionable bit of Rose's statement contains the words "help you grow as professionals." I have no data to back this up, only anecdotal accounts, but most agencies have eviscerated their learning and development programs. They offer little or no training. And many of the older people who used to help bring younger talent along have been kicked to the curb.

How do you learn if there's no one left to teach?

There are a host of other structural exigencies that make agencies unwelcome places to work. There's more stuff to make in less time and often for lower client fees. Much of the work that appears before people, ostensible to induce them to buy something, reeks of bad mass-production and clip-art taste. It's hard to have pride in producing shoddy merchandise that annoys rather than enlightens people.

As for being the home of the "world's most exceptional talent" that's hard to fathom without a proper sense of what sent the place into a down-spin in the first place and the economic drivers that have turned advertising into a low wage, low security, low future industry. What's more the reliance of so many agencies on freelance crushes the morale of staff. And freelance is how agencies function today. Not a single agency entity understands that downtime is the recharging people need after a giant push. 

There are substantive, and yes, costly, steps a holding company or an agency can embark upon to make the industry good again and to make an agency a place people want to work, sweat, and toil.

But none of that will happen without some sense of and commitment to fairness. Fairness in wages. Fairness in security. And a relationship between hard work and more money.

Who cares?