The Enshittification of Employment (yet again)

“Our employees are our greatest priority, and we are committed to providing a best-in-class work experience.”

—Statement by Chipotle's chief corporate affairs officer Laurie Schalow to Business Insider.

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

—Cory Doctorow, coiner of the neologism enshittification, as quoted in Wired magazine.

That’s what they all say: “Employees are our greatest priority;” “Our people make the difference”; “We take care of our people so they can take care of you.” It’s tempting to cry bullshit in the face of such obviously false lines from the mar/comm department, but the fact remains that human beings are something of a necessary evil in the life of most managers, regardless of the sector in which they work. Notoriously hard to manage (employees have free well, after all), and expensive since 70% or more of your operating expenses in the education sector are salaries and benefits, people are simultaneously a problem to solve (to human resources and accounting) and the key to your success as a leader (when it comes time to report to your boss). Reconciling this duality is at the core of mid-level leadership.

Employees can sabotage the best strategies. Our colleague, Steve Graham, who works mostly in the higher education sector, says that “faculty have a thousand ways to mess with you and they will use all of them” when you do something that they don’t like. And there is much not to like about the emerging zeitgeist around employer employee relationships in the United States.

For a time, during the dark days of the pandemic and immediately afterward, employers were obsessed with countering “quiet quitting” and “the great resignation”,  but all pendulums eventually swing, and the employer-employee relationship recalibration is no exception. Entry-level hiring in the formerly red-hot tech sector is down 25% largely due to the potential for AI to replace humans as coders. Suddenly, but predictably (pendulums do swing), employers are regaining the upper hand amid a slowing hiring economy. The pendulum has swung.

What does this mean for independent and international schools? If past experience is a lesson, it will take some time before the brutality of the surrounding employment market takes hold in education, but we can expect that governing board members from the corporate sector will expect their schools to follow suit. This is more evidence of a swinging pendulum.