Workplace Fun is Never Any Fun
Also, a bit about La Meloni's New Opponent, La Schlein
Dear readers, I’ve been remiss about posting here, and that is largely because I feel like when I write here I should write at length. And for most issues, I am wonderfully unmotivated. I post more frequently on my website about current affairs and some personal/cultural things (or the rare occasion I write an op-ed these days), because there I can just write a paragraph or link to something someone smarter than I am wrote.
There is a lot to talk about, though: I thought about doing a follow-up to my piece about Giorgia Meloni, who is frustrating her critics. We have a favourite Italian cafe where the owners - prior to Meloni’s election - professed concern about her. Now they keep saying how impressed they are with her and how glad they are that she won last autumn. I feel the same way. She has distanced herself from Salvini and Berlusconi, and, recently, made an emotional visit to Ukraine, expressing full support - including providing additional air defence systems - for the country. She has strong approval ratings in Italy and in recent local elections, results for her were high, though turn-out was low. (One could argue that low turn-out is a positive sign for her - if Italians wanted to send Meloni a message, they would have got out to the polls.) Enter Elly Schlein, the new leader of Italy’s Partito Democratico, or PD, Meloni’s opposition. It’s as though the PD said, “Oh hey, Meloni is doing well - let’s get a woman to lead us!” And they did. But Schlein is, well…let me put it this way: she is known as Italy’s AOC, which tells you everything you need to know. She is, like AOC, young, attractive, uninformed, and overconfident. I would argue she can also be compared to the appalling Jeremy Corbyn. She will appeal primarily to people on the far-left in Italy, unless she does some policy u-turns. Is she politically savvy enough to do so? We’ll see.
After saying I was not going to write much about Italy, I’ll change channels and move us over to France for this story:
In another win for workplace dignity, one of the nation’s highest courts recently suggested that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in office parties and other supposedly enjoyable activities. The case dates back to 2015, when a man, known as Monsieur T., sued his former employer, the Paris-based management-consulting firm Cubik Partners, for wrongful termination. Monsieur T.’s demand for reinstatement was dismissed in labor court. An appeals court then found that Cubik had not erred in letting him go for, among other things, failing to take part in a workplace culture that the company calls, in a bit of corporate Franglish, “fun & pro.” In its recent decision, however, the high court overturned that ruling. Citing the European Convention on Human Rights and the French labor code, the the court held that Monsieur T. had no obligation to attend retreats and Friday apéros. In fact, his bosses’ expectation that he join in violated his freedom of expression. Call it, as Arte did, “the right not to be fun.”
Guys, this ruling is the best ever. Thank you, French courts. Vive la France. Thank you, Monsieur T. Because forced workplace fun is never fun. It’s the worst. Admittedly, I am not a “fun” person. I am not spontaneous or happy to do the conga. But it is counterintuitive to mix work with fun or to make fun mandatory. I’m not talking about colleagues that you actually like and want to hang out with after work - a rare enough experience, though it has happened to me. I’m not even talking about unspoken pressure to socialize with colleagues. I worked at a magazine in Toronto where that happened - we had a colleague who was sort of a cruise director type who would perkily try and round us up for Friday aperitifs and such. I never went - I was keen to get home to my cats. But she may have taken it personally. One bit of information I shared with her was that I had the opposite of a green thumb - I could never even keep a cactus alive. What do you know? She was in charge of goodbye gifts and when I moved on to another job, she presented me with a plant. (See? Even voluntary workplace fun has negative consequences.)
No, I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about being required to socialize after work with colleagues, having to attend retreats or “team-building” weekends or functions, or even - there is no hell like it - “fun” on the job, while you are in the office. Let me tell you a story. In my university days, I had a generic office temp job. One cold winter day, we were informed that, in order to bring some summer joy to our dreary lives, we were going to have an in-office luau, a “fun-in-the-sun” lunch! Oh dear. We would be required to change into summer clothes and our company would provide a barbeque meal - all animals (this was pre-Beyond Meat). I don’t eat animals. So, a few days before this nightmare, my manager came around and asked for my order, reading off the menu. “Would you like hot-dogs, hamburgers, ribs?” I can’t remember all of the options, other than I thought they were all repellent. I said, in what I thought was a cheerful tone, “None of the above. I’m not a carnivore.” Her reaction was along the lines of, “The horror! The horror! Noooooooo!!!!” Please see my artist’s rendering of the event below.
[Why Roz Chast Need Not Fear. Cartoon: Rondi Adamson]
Long story short: I had to apologize to this woman for traumatizing her as she claimed my tone was snarky. I don’t think it was. I am not above snark, but I remember trying to be friendly and casual that day, as I did not want to deal with any drama. Fat lot of good it did me. Not long after, I got fired. Ostensibly, it was not because of my inability to appreciate a forced luau, but I know it was. It was all because of ridiculous workplace festivities. Sheesh.
A few years later, I was working in Japan. I was teaching English in a car-part factory and the company I worked for was really into workplace fun and after-work forced staff fun. There was almost always a karaoke machine involved - no matter how luxurious the resort or how many Michelin stars the restaurant had, there would always be one of those dastardly contraptions hidden away, only revealed to us once the requisite number of whisky or sake bottles had been emptied. It was Japan in the 1990s, after all. If you wonder why I love the movie Lost in Translation, wonder no more. We had to go on retreats together, and since most of us were young or young-ish, there was - in between the team-building activities - much romantic nonsense involved (team-destroying activities), tomfoolery and malarkey, dancing on the beach, cringing at every damn minute of it but always remembering your (significant - we were, at least, decently remunerated) paycheque.
We also were made to dress up and celebrate Japanese holidays. Now, part of that I appreciated - I enjoyed learning about different festivities, the things that were important to the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the food. But I think we could have learned about those things with simple lessons and no karaoke. It was asserted by our higher-ups, however, that these get-togethers would lead to cross-cultural understanding. (Apologies for the poor quality of the photo below - and let me make clear that I covered people’s faces not out of any unkind feeling but because they might not want to be on this website.)
[Me With Colleagues Sometime in the Mid-1990s. Photo: I don’t remember who took it.]
About the photo - I thought I was hideous and fat when this photo was taken. What was I smoking to have believed that? To all you young people out there - you are great! You are cute! You are fine as you are. And while I believe insecurities can be exacerbated by the images around us, the more I read the more I think the culprit is not “society” so much as evolutionary biology. But I digress. Back to Japan, where, as you can see, not only were we having forced workplace fun, we were engaging in cultural appropriation. (Oh, those innocent times when you could try on clothing from another country without being accused of pillaging and plundering.) I’m pretty sure this was Tanabata, or the Star Festival, in July. We had to do some dancing, which, for my money, beat karaoke, but not by much. I felt, and looked, pretty absurd doing both, and trust me when I tell you that none of this improved anyone’s cross-cultural understanding. Do you know what did? Daily life. Going to Japanese grocery stores and travelling within the country and making friends and chats with my students outside of work (we lived in company housing so I saw them all the time). None of which was forced.
I suppose it isn’t a surprise that the country that produced Sartre also produced this court ruling. L’enfer, c’est les autres, and all that. (Mind you, Sartre wasn’t a barrel o’laughs, either.) Of course, much of the fraternizing in the French case involved alcohol, as did some of my experiences. And that is most definitely a reason to stay away. It is bound to make things worse. Still, I do believe there can be workplace fun, in the sense that one can enjoy one’s job. I’ve often enjoyed mine. And imagine if you got to work, say, at one of those places where people play with baby pandas all day? It might even make dictated dancing and Hawaiian Shirt Day tolerable.