A Glossary for the Nineties: Chapter 6 - The workplace
[Taken from A Glossary for the Nineties, by David Rowan (Prion Books, 1998), based on the column of that name in The Guardian's Weekend magazine through most of the 1990s. © David Rowan]
CHAPTER 6: THE WORKPLACE
Jobs (and being separated from them)
BIRD NEST ON THE GROUND n. US slang for a cushy job, as recorded in Lonely Planet's American-English phrase book. And if you're driving to work, and find a parking place just in front of the main entrance, you describe the good fortune as TV parking, because that phenomenom only tends to happen on TV shows.
BLAMESTORM v., n. To spend time in a workplace debating in some detail among yourselves who is to blame for some remarkable fiasco. A nineties version of brainstorming for the insecure office culture.
BOUTIQUE FARMER n. A practitioner of that modern industry which fills your neighbourhood supermarket with star-shaped, spiky and oddly camouflaged fruits. They are stylish statements about your nineties personality. And some of them even taste of food.
BOX, TO THINK OUT OF THE v. To break out of the boundaries of your job description, in management-speak, and devise more efficient ways of working. It's part of the "empowerment" movement that results when all the managers have been de-layered (qv).
BRAIN GAIN n. The new-skills version of the brain drain we were all worried about in the 1980s. This time, industries such as high-tech medicine or software design are attracting the best minds to Britain from around the world.
DECRUIT v. euph. To un-recruit; hence to fire people. It happens when companies are rationalised. And if those aren't enough "sacking" synonyms to be getting on with, see the many other examples below.
DE-JOB v. euph. To fire people. This verb for the downsizing age is particularly prevalent in Canada, where corporations are de-jobbing people, rather than simply firing them. In other words, to modernise the industrial organisation.
DE-LAYER v. euph. To fire people. This one generally involves sacking whole layers of middle management. Also known as de-levelling. The aim is to flatten the corporate hierarchy, and is accompanied by claims that employees are being empowered : allowed to realise more of their potential within the organisation (ie to work harder and for longer hours, for the same pay).
DOMESTIC ENGINEER n. A highly skilled operative at the interface between culinary and residential management provision, and in-home pedagogy. Or, in the current US euphemism, a housewife.
DOMESTIC OUTSOURCING n. The new industry - American-led, needless to say - that will perform all those time-consuming household chores for the busy homemaker. For the right price, agencies will cook your dinner, water your plants and re-furnish your living room. They will even collect your kids from school - that is, if you can remember whether or not you have kids . . .
DOWNSIZE v. euph. To fire people. The original nineties euphemism for sacking employees and so making a company smaller, which became so common that other, more intricate euphemisms were soon needed. Hence de-job, delayer, right size, etc.
EDUCATIONAL INFLATION n. The devaluation of your MBA, PhD or GCSE because the economy is no longer A-OK. Now that nobody has a job, employers can demand that shelf-stackers have degrees and shop assistants, doctorates. The Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel described the phenomenon that has diluted a million CVs.
EXTERMINATING ENGINEER n. euph. A rat-catcher, in the nineties euphemism. Similarly, street-sweepers are now known as sanitation operatives, make-up assistants as visagistes, and people who help you lose weight as thinologists. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a professional these days.
FACE TIME n. That rare aspect of modern social interaction that does not take place through emails, faxes, mobile phones, pagers or lawyers. Bizarrely, it involves two or more people talking or meeting face to face. Not unrelated to quality time.
FORENSIC ACCOUNTANCY n. A safe career for the divorcing age: this one seeks to uncover any suspicious details of a spouse's expenditure that may indicate infidelity. The job's not over yet, though: the forensic accountant then searches out any assets they have hidden as the divorce settlement closes in.
GARDEN LEAVE (also GARDENING LEAVE) n. The notice period you must serve before taking up a new job, during which your current employer will pay you but not let you into the building - hence the renewed attention you can pay to your geraniums.
GROUNDSCRAPER n. The fashionable office building of the recession era. Rather than build the sort of skyscraper that lies empty for years, architects are now designing seven- or eight-floor low-rises. And, if they then lie empty, far fewer people notice.
HAMBURGER FLIPPER n. A member of the £2-an-hour unskilled pool of labour known as the modern workforce. Kenneth Clarke popularised the phrase in an attack on lefty critics who said his "recovery" was based on part-time, low-wage jobs. Alas, soundbites being what they are, that became known as the hamburger-flipper recovery.
HEAD-SHUNTER n. The reverse head-hunter: this one is hired by your boss to find a way to get you to leave the company without the costs of redundancy. Now current in the business world.
HOT-DESKv. A version of musical chairs for the modern office, especially in newspapers and City dealing rooms. No longer do workers have their own desks; the game nowadays is to get in early enough to grab whichever workplace is free.
McJOB n. A junk job - one with a low wage, no prospects and all the enjoyment of the fast-food production line. First spotted in Douglas Coupland's book Generation X . See hamburger flipper (above) to work out where this one came from . . .
MISSION STATEMENT n. A self-important and vacous set of goals every nineties company has taken upon itself to proclaim. That fast-food joint, for instance, might decide that it seeks "to further the culinary pleasure of nations", or a public lavatory "to fulfil the bowel needs of the excreting public". All in a Total Quality Management kind of way.
NANNY-TRAP n. The dilemma whereby working mothers can only go out to work if they employ a nanny, which means they need to earn £25,000 to cover the costs, which means they need work every hour that they can, which means they need to employ a nanny, etc. etc.
NEGOTIATOR n. What used to be called an estate agent. Then along came negative equity, and simply no one would admit to being one of that unspeakable tribe. So, in typically creative form, they have now become sales-and-lettings negotiators (with potential for development into more spacious euphemisms).
OUTSOURCE n. To fire people - this time by farming out those services previously provided by a company's employees to cheaper outside contractors. The American writer Russell Baker calls it a "claptrap word" designed to hoodwink the public: next, he warns, expect upsourcing, downsourcing, upsidedownsizing and rightsideupsizing. In an ongoing sort of fashion.
PLUG-AND-PLAY adj. Able to fit into a new situation (such as a job) and get right on with it. Just as the best computer games are designed to be used instantly without instructions, so the best new workers in the nineties are those who won't need the inconvenience or expense of being trained.
PORTFOLIO CAREER n. The nineties alternative to the job. It means simultaneously trying a number of ways to make a living: selling a skill here and there, selling a shirt when that doesn't work out. Naturally, not all portfolios have anything in them.
PRESENTEEISM n. The nineties' antidote to absenteeism. We're all so insecure about our short-term contracts and our feel-bad factors that we're terrified of appearing keen to leave the office. So we're present rather more than is healthy - which is useful to bosses, who in the meantime have rightsized the rest of the staff.
PROCESS RE-ENGINEER v. euph. To fire people, but in the name of improving services. The term re-engineer means to radically reorganise working methods - usually resulting in a slimmer company. The movement started with a Harvard Business Review article in the early 1990s by Michael Hammer, called Don't Automate, Obliterate. In other words, back again to downsize and right-size . . .
PRODUCTION SCHEDULE REARRANGEMENT INITIATIVE n. euph. Yet another euphemism companies have used to get around the fact that they are sacking people. There are so many, indeed, that (with the help of the GMB union, which collected 50 of them), we can offer prospective downsizer employers the following suggested ways of justifying their sackings, all of which have been used in all seriousness. Just explain that you are:
-- concentrating on core activities;
-- equalising the payroll to manpower requirement;
-- reconfiguring the business, or refocusing the business strategy;
-- creating a career realignment scheme;
-- rerating the employees' future;
-- increasing capital effectiveness;
-- allowing democratic streamlining; or
-- making a PPEA (that, of course, is a personal premature exit agreement).
And if these terms sound a little too honest, you can always revert to dehiring, skill-mix readjustments, unassigning, core-reemphasising and finding avolume-reduction window. In other words, to fire people so efficiently that they have no idea what's going on.
RESUME INFLATION n. A growing tendency among job applicants to exaggerate, or even lie about, their past experience and, most notably, their salary. One London agency that vets applicants' job resumes estimates that a third of CVs for £50,000-plus jobs contain deliberate errors.
RIGHT-SIZE v. euph. To fire people. Another recession euphemism for getting rid of workers, as used by Louis Gerstner, head of ailing IBM - because downsizing evidently did not convey the message that this was a good thing to do to someone: well, it was right for the company, anyway . . .
RIGHT-SPACE v. To take away your employees' workstations so that they have to hot-desk (qv). Perfect for that culture of short-term contracts and job insecurity, and one degree less than right-sizing, when the job itself is removed.
SKILLS-SET REFOCUS v. To fire people. The chief executive of the American company EJV Partners laid off 19 staff and called it a "refocusing of the company's skills set". If you hadn't noticed by now, the big growth industry of the nineties is coining ever-newer euphemisms to hide the fact that you're sacking staff.
SQUEEGIE MERCHANT n. A window-wiper who throws a dirty wet cloth on your car windscreen at a traffic light and expects to be paid generously for the privilege. The nineties job most likely to annoy a politician.
SURPLUS v. tr. euph. To downsize somebody; ie to delayer somebody; ie to rightsize your organisation. Need we explain that this is yet another euphemism for firing somebody?
TERMINATE euph. v. Not merely to kill someone - now, according to the bank JP Morgan, it also means, as if you couldn't guess, to fire them. After losing £350,000 because Stock Exchange rules were broken, the company announced that "two individuals hvae been terminated in the London office". Plenty of blood on the carpet, then.
UPSKILLING n. The process, according to a Daily Telegraph letter-writer, which enables the remuneratively challenged to attain the prosperity needed to acquire a pre-owned car from a de-hired executive whose company has been downsized following a period of negative profitability. Clear?
VERTICAL DISINTEGRATION n. euph. A further euphemism for the downsizing age. Whereas under vertical integration a company would pull its various components into one building, the disintegrated company subcontracts many of its tasks (such as catering) to an outside provider. Fewer workers, fewer commitments and another chance to decruit staff, as they say in these post-recruitment days.
VIRTUAL DESK v. To use computers linked to modems to perform your job away from the office. Formerly known, technically, as "working from home".
VOLUME-RELATED PRODUCTION SCHEDULE ADJUSTMENT n. euph. How General Motors described scakings when it closed a US factory. Almost as good as Chrysler's explanation of its 5,000 sackings in Wisconsin: this, it claimed, was all part of a career alternative enhancement programme.
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY n. The slower, less stressed, more quality-conscious lifestyle that results when one chooses to downshift: to swap a certain level of income for more pleasure. Also known as planned crossover , it is the nineties response to the longer hours worked in jobs that fewer people have.
WORKCHURCH n. bus. The corporate focus of the new downsized, hot-desking workforce: it is the company headquarters which workers employed in diverse locations identify as their spiritual home.
WORKPAUSALS n. pl. That small but influential group of women American marketers have just discovered: mothers who decide to put the career on hold. As one trend-spotter puts it, "the power wife-mother is our latest status symbol - more important than a mink coat".
ZERO-HOUR CONTRACT n. euph. The modern equivalent of an employment agreement, except that this one guarantees you no work and no pay. Increasingly popular among companies (from burger bars to car-makers) that want your labour only when they need you - without paying you for those idle moments.
CHAPTER 6: THE WORKPLACE
Jobs (and being separated from them)
BIRD NEST ON THE GROUND n. US slang for a cushy job, as recorded in Lonely Planet's American-English phrase book. And if you're driving to work, and find a parking place just in front of the main entrance, you describe the good fortune as TV parking, because that phenomenom only tends to happen on TV shows.
BLAMESTORM v., n. To spend time in a workplace debating in some detail among yourselves who is to blame for some remarkable fiasco. A nineties version of brainstorming for the insecure office culture.
BOUTIQUE FARMER n. A practitioner of that modern industry which fills your neighbourhood supermarket with star-shaped, spiky and oddly camouflaged fruits. They are stylish statements about your nineties personality. And some of them even taste of food.
BOX, TO THINK OUT OF THE v. To break out of the boundaries of your job description, in management-speak, and devise more efficient ways of working. It's part of the "empowerment" movement that results when all the managers have been de-layered (qv).
BRAIN GAIN n. The new-skills version of the brain drain we were all worried about in the 1980s. This time, industries such as high-tech medicine or software design are attracting the best minds to Britain from around the world.
DECRUIT v. euph. To un-recruit; hence to fire people. It happens when companies are rationalised. And if those aren't enough "sacking" synonyms to be getting on with, see the many other examples below.
DE-JOB v. euph. To fire people. This verb for the downsizing age is particularly prevalent in Canada, where corporations are de-jobbing people, rather than simply firing them. In other words, to modernise the industrial organisation.
DE-LAYER v. euph. To fire people. This one generally involves sacking whole layers of middle management. Also known as de-levelling. The aim is to flatten the corporate hierarchy, and is accompanied by claims that employees are being empowered : allowed to realise more of their potential within the organisation (ie to work harder and for longer hours, for the same pay).
DOMESTIC ENGINEER n. A highly skilled operative at the interface between culinary and residential management provision, and in-home pedagogy. Or, in the current US euphemism, a housewife.
DOMESTIC OUTSOURCING n. The new industry - American-led, needless to say - that will perform all those time-consuming household chores for the busy homemaker. For the right price, agencies will cook your dinner, water your plants and re-furnish your living room. They will even collect your kids from school - that is, if you can remember whether or not you have kids . . .
DOWNSIZE v. euph. To fire people. The original nineties euphemism for sacking employees and so making a company smaller, which became so common that other, more intricate euphemisms were soon needed. Hence de-job, delayer, right size, etc.
EDUCATIONAL INFLATION n. The devaluation of your MBA, PhD or GCSE because the economy is no longer A-OK. Now that nobody has a job, employers can demand that shelf-stackers have degrees and shop assistants, doctorates. The Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel described the phenomenon that has diluted a million CVs.
EXTERMINATING ENGINEER n. euph. A rat-catcher, in the nineties euphemism. Similarly, street-sweepers are now known as sanitation operatives, make-up assistants as visagistes, and people who help you lose weight as thinologists. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a professional these days.
FACE TIME n. That rare aspect of modern social interaction that does not take place through emails, faxes, mobile phones, pagers or lawyers. Bizarrely, it involves two or more people talking or meeting face to face. Not unrelated to quality time.
FORENSIC ACCOUNTANCY n. A safe career for the divorcing age: this one seeks to uncover any suspicious details of a spouse's expenditure that may indicate infidelity. The job's not over yet, though: the forensic accountant then searches out any assets they have hidden as the divorce settlement closes in.
GARDEN LEAVE (also GARDENING LEAVE) n. The notice period you must serve before taking up a new job, during which your current employer will pay you but not let you into the building - hence the renewed attention you can pay to your geraniums.
GROUNDSCRAPER n. The fashionable office building of the recession era. Rather than build the sort of skyscraper that lies empty for years, architects are now designing seven- or eight-floor low-rises. And, if they then lie empty, far fewer people notice.
HAMBURGER FLIPPER n. A member of the £2-an-hour unskilled pool of labour known as the modern workforce. Kenneth Clarke popularised the phrase in an attack on lefty critics who said his "recovery" was based on part-time, low-wage jobs. Alas, soundbites being what they are, that became known as the hamburger-flipper recovery.
HEAD-SHUNTER n. The reverse head-hunter: this one is hired by your boss to find a way to get you to leave the company without the costs of redundancy. Now current in the business world.
HOT-DESKv. A version of musical chairs for the modern office, especially in newspapers and City dealing rooms. No longer do workers have their own desks; the game nowadays is to get in early enough to grab whichever workplace is free.
McJOB n. A junk job - one with a low wage, no prospects and all the enjoyment of the fast-food production line. First spotted in Douglas Coupland's book Generation X . See hamburger flipper (above) to work out where this one came from . . .
MISSION STATEMENT n. A self-important and vacous set of goals every nineties company has taken upon itself to proclaim. That fast-food joint, for instance, might decide that it seeks "to further the culinary pleasure of nations", or a public lavatory "to fulfil the bowel needs of the excreting public". All in a Total Quality Management kind of way.
NANNY-TRAP n. The dilemma whereby working mothers can only go out to work if they employ a nanny, which means they need to earn £25,000 to cover the costs, which means they need work every hour that they can, which means they need to employ a nanny, etc. etc.
NEGOTIATOR n. What used to be called an estate agent. Then along came negative equity, and simply no one would admit to being one of that unspeakable tribe. So, in typically creative form, they have now become sales-and-lettings negotiators (with potential for development into more spacious euphemisms).
OUTSOURCE n. To fire people - this time by farming out those services previously provided by a company's employees to cheaper outside contractors. The American writer Russell Baker calls it a "claptrap word" designed to hoodwink the public: next, he warns, expect upsourcing, downsourcing, upsidedownsizing and rightsideupsizing. In an ongoing sort of fashion.
PLUG-AND-PLAY adj. Able to fit into a new situation (such as a job) and get right on with it. Just as the best computer games are designed to be used instantly without instructions, so the best new workers in the nineties are those who won't need the inconvenience or expense of being trained.
PORTFOLIO CAREER n. The nineties alternative to the job. It means simultaneously trying a number of ways to make a living: selling a skill here and there, selling a shirt when that doesn't work out. Naturally, not all portfolios have anything in them.
PRESENTEEISM n. The nineties' antidote to absenteeism. We're all so insecure about our short-term contracts and our feel-bad factors that we're terrified of appearing keen to leave the office. So we're present rather more than is healthy - which is useful to bosses, who in the meantime have rightsized the rest of the staff.
PROCESS RE-ENGINEER v. euph. To fire people, but in the name of improving services. The term re-engineer means to radically reorganise working methods - usually resulting in a slimmer company. The movement started with a Harvard Business Review article in the early 1990s by Michael Hammer, called Don't Automate, Obliterate. In other words, back again to downsize and right-size . . .
PRODUCTION SCHEDULE REARRANGEMENT INITIATIVE n. euph. Yet another euphemism companies have used to get around the fact that they are sacking people. There are so many, indeed, that (with the help of the GMB union, which collected 50 of them), we can offer prospective downsizer employers the following suggested ways of justifying their sackings, all of which have been used in all seriousness. Just explain that you are:
-- concentrating on core activities;
-- equalising the payroll to manpower requirement;
-- reconfiguring the business, or refocusing the business strategy;
-- creating a career realignment scheme;
-- rerating the employees' future;
-- increasing capital effectiveness;
-- allowing democratic streamlining; or
-- making a PPEA (that, of course, is a personal premature exit agreement).
And if these terms sound a little too honest, you can always revert to dehiring, skill-mix readjustments, unassigning, core-reemphasising and finding avolume-reduction window. In other words, to fire people so efficiently that they have no idea what's going on.
RESUME INFLATION n. A growing tendency among job applicants to exaggerate, or even lie about, their past experience and, most notably, their salary. One London agency that vets applicants' job resumes estimates that a third of CVs for £50,000-plus jobs contain deliberate errors.
RIGHT-SIZE v. euph. To fire people. Another recession euphemism for getting rid of workers, as used by Louis Gerstner, head of ailing IBM - because downsizing evidently did not convey the message that this was a good thing to do to someone: well, it was right for the company, anyway . . .
RIGHT-SPACE v. To take away your employees' workstations so that they have to hot-desk (qv). Perfect for that culture of short-term contracts and job insecurity, and one degree less than right-sizing, when the job itself is removed.
SKILLS-SET REFOCUS v. To fire people. The chief executive of the American company EJV Partners laid off 19 staff and called it a "refocusing of the company's skills set". If you hadn't noticed by now, the big growth industry of the nineties is coining ever-newer euphemisms to hide the fact that you're sacking staff.
SQUEEGIE MERCHANT n. A window-wiper who throws a dirty wet cloth on your car windscreen at a traffic light and expects to be paid generously for the privilege. The nineties job most likely to annoy a politician.
SURPLUS v. tr. euph. To downsize somebody; ie to delayer somebody; ie to rightsize your organisation. Need we explain that this is yet another euphemism for firing somebody?
TERMINATE euph. v. Not merely to kill someone - now, according to the bank JP Morgan, it also means, as if you couldn't guess, to fire them. After losing £350,000 because Stock Exchange rules were broken, the company announced that "two individuals hvae been terminated in the London office". Plenty of blood on the carpet, then.
UPSKILLING n. The process, according to a Daily Telegraph letter-writer, which enables the remuneratively challenged to attain the prosperity needed to acquire a pre-owned car from a de-hired executive whose company has been downsized following a period of negative profitability. Clear?
VERTICAL DISINTEGRATION n. euph. A further euphemism for the downsizing age. Whereas under vertical integration a company would pull its various components into one building, the disintegrated company subcontracts many of its tasks (such as catering) to an outside provider. Fewer workers, fewer commitments and another chance to decruit staff, as they say in these post-recruitment days.
VIRTUAL DESK v. To use computers linked to modems to perform your job away from the office. Formerly known, technically, as "working from home".
VOLUME-RELATED PRODUCTION SCHEDULE ADJUSTMENT n. euph. How General Motors described scakings when it closed a US factory. Almost as good as Chrysler's explanation of its 5,000 sackings in Wisconsin: this, it claimed, was all part of a career alternative enhancement programme.
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY n. The slower, less stressed, more quality-conscious lifestyle that results when one chooses to downshift: to swap a certain level of income for more pleasure. Also known as planned crossover , it is the nineties response to the longer hours worked in jobs that fewer people have.
WORKCHURCH n. bus. The corporate focus of the new downsized, hot-desking workforce: it is the company headquarters which workers employed in diverse locations identify as their spiritual home.
WORKPAUSALS n. pl. That small but influential group of women American marketers have just discovered: mothers who decide to put the career on hold. As one trend-spotter puts it, "the power wife-mother is our latest status symbol - more important than a mink coat".
ZERO-HOUR CONTRACT n. euph. The modern equivalent of an employment agreement, except that this one guarantees you no work and no pay. Increasingly popular among companies (from burger bars to car-makers) that want your labour only when they need you - without paying you for those idle moments.
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