«Who would you leave at home?». It’s not a bad joke that came out at an aperitif after the third spritz. It’s a company questionnaire, headed paper, the air of a “listening tool”. «Whose listening?», one might ask. About the worst side of people?
We live in a country that has a complicated relationship with work: we criticize it when it is there, we regret it when it is missing. And now we discover that, to “test the corporate climate”, it is enough to transform employees into competitors of the Squid Game, business version. The green overalls are missing, but we think in human categories: young, part-time, without children, recently hired. Who would you send away? You do it. Pilate in Human Resource version.
The point is not whether the questionnaire was filled out by ten people or by just one, perhaps by mistake. The point is, someone thought it was a good idea. That in an already poisoned historical moment, someone has decided to put a microphone under the noses of the workers and say: you choose who must disappear. An elegant and cruel way to wash your hands of it, pewr decline all responsibility.
They tell us that it helps to avoid layoffs. Curious method: to avoid cutting, one wonders where to strike, giving rise to potential spite, antipathy, work revenge, hatred towards the colleague, antipathy, convenience, corporate scandals. And meanwhile suspicion creeps in: today I judge, tomorrow it will be my turn, as in the famous poem by Bertold Brecht.
Reducing work to a competition of exclusion is a moral impoverishment even before a productive one. Because the value of a person does not lie in the children he has, in his age or in his contract. It’s in what he does. And often he does it in silence.
But work is not a reality show, and the company is not an arena. When you start asking “who would you leave at home” you’ve already got it all wrong.
