Consent of the Governed

Salty lessons on the reality of work culture from a man who knew what he was talking about

When Sgt. Dale Carr made his way home to central Ohio in 1969, his body was broken by malaria. But his spirit was intact.

He recovered, and within a couple years found himself working the processing line at the local Quaker factory, where he would spend the best part of two decades.

In 1989, the factory closed. The company moved the operation somewhere offshore where it could pay a cheaper wage.

My Dad and a few hundred of his buddies were called together on a Friday afternoon and given a couple weeks to find new jobs in a factory town with a rapidly dying economy. The situation was grim.

Dale was within a year of vesting a pension with Quaker. He had always bragged about what a great employer he had. A good day's work for a good day's pay, he’d tell people. He respected his boss and team. It was hard work but well paid, and the company kept it simple and no-nonsense.

After 19 years, his severance was a couple months pay and a form letter signed by his manager verifying he had worked there.

He had two kids and a mortgage. He drove a Chevette. Our vacations had a combat radius of 50 miles. He had scrimped and saved and always been responsible. We wore Wrangler jeans and plastic sneakers from Payless.

And after all that frugality, he still found himself financially insecure through no fault of his own. So he drew on the one thing he had left. The indomitable spirit that had pulled him through as an anti-war draftee trapped in the mortally serrated chaos of a war gone wrong.

The Monday after he’d gotten his notice, I came home from school to find him sitting in his rocking chair, sipping milk from a Mason jar, chucking dry roasted peanuts down his gullet and watching TV at 4 in the afternoon. It was very un-Dad.

I was shocked to see him. I normally beat him home by a few hours.

I queried what he was doing home already. I knew he was getting laid off, but I also knew he was paid by the hour. And I had never seen him miss a day of work before, for any reason.

Not when he was coughing hard enough to spit blood. Not when he was going through a divorce. Not when he was fighting a broken down truck, or racked with grief over a death in the family.

Not even when the blizzard of '78 dumped three feet of snow on his driveway. He was up an hour early, shovel in hand, paving the way to do his duty.

The answer he gave in response to my query has never left me.

"I learned something in Vietnam. Authority derives from the consent of the governed. When our officers abused their authority, we revoked our consent. People dragged their feet. They malingered. Ammo went missing. Transmissions got garbled. Radios got lost in the river. Nothing got done and they had to explain to the generals why they couldn’t get us moving."

"Today, we're teaching our GM that lesson. A huge shipment was due out today. 150 people called in sick. Nothing will get done today. It'll cost them a lot of money. Probably what it would cost to pay all of us for a week. They’ll adjust, but today caught them off guard. And we'll screw ‘em again if we get the chance."

There was no doubt in my mind that even if my Dad refused to be a foreman, much less a manager, he had been the ring leader organizing this protest. Underneath it all, he was a leader. I could sense it despite his own self-deception.

And with zero education beyond high school, he had delivered me a powerful life lesson with sufficient eloquence and gravitas to legitimize his presence on any throne of wisdom.

In that moment, he projected defiance. But later it became obvious the layoff had dented his spirit, and contributed to breaking it. In the years that followed, he grappled his way to retirement. But he never trusted an employer again. He never relied on an employer to provide for his family again.

Prior to 1989, my Dad gave everything he had to his job. All of his energy. He gave as many hours as his body would yield. That was normal for the time and place.

After 1989, he always maintained side hustles. He rebuilt muscle cars. He and his brother did paint jobs. He did plumbing jobs and home improvement tasks for friends and others. He was an expert woodworker and churned out pieces of furniture.

And when given the option to take more hours and help the company, he politely declined every time. He wasn’t giving them an inch more than contractually required. He worked overtime when it was in his interest.

He didn’t worry about getting fired, because he knew that would happen anyway. And it did. He went through seven jobs in the same time he’d spent in a single job previously. He was never accused of under-performing, and yet never left a job voluntarily.

It was the same for his buddies. They were the vanguard in a changing relationship between American employers and the workers who generate their value.

Taking care of employees used to be a thing.
Job security used to be a thing.
A trust relationship used to exist between workers and their bosses.
They didn't surprise one another. No one tried to get over.

And a working class person was able to build a life, raise a family, and be a provider.

Dale was in the middle of all that changing. And it broke his heart. By the time he died in '19, he'd given up on the "American Dream" and encouraged me to think carefully about how that “dream” was trending for the working class. He worried about me forgetting my roots and becoming part of the problem.

He also predicted many things which have since come to pass, and many more which I sincerely hope never do.

But more than anything, he gifted me two lessons which have stuck, though I have been occasionally naive or arrogant enough to believe I could prevail without heeding them.

1️⃣ Authority depends on the consent of the governed.

This is true in government. It’s true in policing. It’s true on every university campus. It’s even true in counterinsurgency. And it’s definitely true in any employment domain. The governed possess power, and they lend it to their leaders.

When they get exceptionally pissed off and revoke it, the functioning of the organization will be fundamentally impaired.

What I've noticed in the years since is that organizations expend a lot of effort to prevent the governed realizing they have the right and power to revoke their consent. Because once that penny drops, the balance of power shifts radically.

2️⃣ Employers are presumptively untrustworthy.

That presumption is rebuttable. Some employers will prove it wrong, albeit usually in a manner more fragile than durable.

But the bottom line is that workers, and by that I mean all of us who are not executives, must realize they are in a transactional, commoditized, and shallow culture when they set foot in any workplace these days.

Failure to grasp this reality leaves them vulnerable to having their heart and psyche fractured by the inevitable betrayal of reptilian employers. Executives who command as much as they can get for as little as they can give, and will readily injure legions of lives for a marginal increase in profit.

The “Protestant work ethic” Americans long cherished is dead. You cannot trust companies with no principles that behave purely on financial interest. That’s not far removed from a Feudal mentality. And they will turn on you the instant they are financially hungry and you are the most suitable victim.

When you believe any rhetoric or propaganda to the contrary, you open yourself to a betrayal that will hurt for the rest of your life.

But with all that said, today my heart is full.

Today, I am thankful for Dale. For his hard work. For what he provided. But most of all for his example, in all its coldness.

At 17, I learned realism and pragmatism from a guy navigating the realities of a changing world.

But it's also important to me that his wisdom be shared coincident with Black Friday, which has come to symbolize conspicuous consumption and its cancerous impact on our work culture.

I'm not sure what Black Friday is doing for us. But it's increasingly clear what it's doing to us.

We've seen the trajectory for years, and nothing changes. It's possible we've had our collective head held in the toilet while billionaires flush it for so long that we've forgotten we have the right to revoke our consent and dissolve their authority until they earn it anew.

Dale would be pissed off about that. Be he wouldn’t be surprised.

Tony is an American writer living in the UK.