Various Veins - Why are health care costs growing like weeds?
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Harry Levinson lived a long life, 90 years, and left a body of discoveries that will never be out of date.
Levinson was an American psychologist who found connections between job conditions and mental health. This should hardly need a study. It is just common sense, but as some wise person said, anything is obvious once you make the connection.
Human resource officers realized that money isn't everything in motivating employees. President of this newspaper, Harvey Johnson and his successors gave a Christmas party for staff and their families that made everybody feel valued as part of the company. Even advertising and editorial people put aside differences for a few wonderful hours.
When I joined the staff as a stringer for Straffordville in the 1950s Mr. Johnson sat in his little office just inside the front door off Broadway, a grey eminence. When he asked me to step in one day and enquired about me and my family, I felt as if I'd been summoned into the presence of God.
Levinson was led to propose the existence of a psychological contract of expectations between employers and employees which, when violated, results in underachievement and depression.
What happens when employees find they are going to lose part of the wage, salary or percentage of earnings they have been promised by contract? If the change is sprung on people, what would you think it would do to their mental health and productivity?
Bob Rae, who is laying aside his political office in the fall, can answer these questions. When his party won the election in Ontario by default, he was forced to resort to making people work for nothing a certain number of days – Rae Days. His party has never recovered.
Levinson would have said, "Told ya!"
Another violation of expectations that has created masses of depressed, angry, potential rebels, especially among the cream of Canadian youth, is the outsourcing of jobs. Why wouldn't Canadians expect to be first in line for jobs in Canada?
The convulsion of guilt set off by the deaths of needleworkers in Asia has moved many customers to say they are willing to pay more for clothing to bring safe working conditions to near slave labourers in Asia. Would the extra money trickle down to the line workers? Will we make that choice as we paw through shirts?
Do we realize people are wearing twenty-year-old shirts that were made in Canada while Asian shirts fall to shreds in a season? Does it pay to be stingy?
The failure of a giant meat packing plant in Alberta has resulted in consternation, both for customers and for the inspection system designers. Customers expect foods to be safe, manufacturing and building construction to be under the eyes of supervisors. Crumbling highways, collapsing overpasses and shopping malls pull our blinkers off.
In Alberta the plant was enlarged with government help and encouragement in response to the mad cow disease that killed beef exporting. The inspection staff was not beefed up to fit the greater burden. Who gets fingered for the violation of expectations? What repercussions, physical and psychological, hit the health care system?
Lack of training is a large factor in such calamities. The people who design inspection protocols lack the knowledge left by Harry Levinson. Fiscal managers, framers of tax systems, criminal law and correctional systems, all suffer the same lack of preparation for their allotted work.
Modern Jeremiahs like Tarak Fatah warn us of dying Western supremacy. Will we wake up? Did the Greeks, the Romans, the Dutch, the British?