Cog!

In a large hotel conference room speckled with round tables, I drank my lukewarm coffee and listened to my colleague extol the great work our advertising agency had done on a recent product launch. She recounted the late nights, the weekend work, and the hundreds of advertisements routed clean by our team.

“It was hard. It was grueling,” she said. “But we did it. And we did amazing work.”

Coffee cups, deadlines, and the weight of expectations

I kept my eyes focused on the table and played with the paper coffee cup in my hand. I didn’t feel like celebrating.

Weeks earlier, I had attended a pre-launch meeting on a Monday morning. After starting the Teams call, the Accounts person settled into her seat, greeted colleagues, and then, with a sadistic smirk, announced, “I hope you all enjoyed your weekend, because it is the last one you’ll be getting for a long time.”

And in the following weeks, I watched her words come true. The team consistently worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days, squeezing in thirty-minute lunches if they were lucky. Weekends disappeared. Even the Fourth of July wasn’t spared.

Overwork, exploitation, and the people-first myth

Even though I wasn’t technically assigned to the launch team, everyone in Editorial chipped in: I clocked in at 6 a.m. on multiple Saturdays to get in half a day’s work and still salvage my weekend plans. I logged in early and stayed late on weekdays, trying to avoid calculating how much overtime I would have earned if I had stayed at my former company.

Were there other solutions rather than working the team to the bone? Of course there were. Management could have hired more temporary freelancers to reduce the burden, an option vetoed (I assume) solely because it would have cut into profits. Even if hiring extra manpower was impossible, they could have offered compensatory time to the overworked after the launch, but they didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong — I am genuinely grateful for my job. It not only provides me with a wage that meets my basic needs, but also allows me to travel and save for the future. I work remotely in the comfort of my own home, oftentimes with a purring cat on my lap. I get paid sick leave and vacation, and my agency even closes down for a week between Christmas and New Year’s. I am one of the lucky ones — truly privileged.

Yet, I can’t help but feel like I am a tool, a production piece, a tiny cog in a huge money-making machine. And perhaps I could accept this if the specific money-making machine manipulating me did not claim to have a people-first culture. If it did not insist it supports a healthy work-life balance while simultaneously telling, not asking, employees to work on holidays.

My complaint may sound like a tired one in a world that takes for granted that employees live to work, rather than work to live, a sad inevitability of a capitalist society and one many of us are resigned to. Most of us know, deep down, that no matter what companies say, they mainly care about their bottom lines and little else. 

To genuinely cultivate a people-first culture, which many corporations claim to have, companies will have to put people before profit. It is not enough to merely toss employees a bone when it is convenient or legally required. Rather, it is essential to choose to honor workers even when doing so curbs cash flow.

So, as I listened to the Accounts Team celebrate the virtues of our team at the all-agency meeting  (the amazing work we had done and how thrilled the clients were), I didn’t feel proud. I just felt sad.

I thought of my own parents, both in vastly different fields from my own, who regularly work seventy to eighty hours a week. They do so not because they want to, but because they feel that to do their jobs well and stay employed, they have no choice.

Cogs, families, and what really matters

Overwork is an epidemic in American society, and it’s often packaged as something noble. But it’s not. Employers can shout from the rooftops that working late nights and weekends, neglecting family and recreation, is something to be celebrated, but that doesn’t make it true. At the end of the day, companies — not their employees — are the ones who benefit from the sacrifices of the workforce.   

Twenty years from now, I seriously doubt most of the people who worked on our product launch will remember what they produced for a client. But I’d bet they’ll regret not attending their child’s baseball game because they needed to meet a deadline.

In the end, I’ll put in my extra hours like everyone else: to be a team player, to keep my job, and to make sure my company continues to see me as a valuable resource. Because I need the money: to live, to get married next year, and to start a family.

But make no mistake — any extra hours I’m forced to spend at my computer aren’t a credit to me. And overwork should not be celebrated. Corporate America, you can keep your round of applause.

I’m more than a cog in a machine.