You know I’m a proponent of assertive communication, standing up for what’s rightfully yours, and having the courage to speak the unspoken.  Well, a week-end visit with my brother, who is incarcerated in a Federal facility for selling pseudophedrine (which is another story), reminded me of the old maxim, “you can’t fight city hall.”   He was telling me stories about guys who had legitimate rights that were being denied to them, but who wound up losing not only the battle but the war because when it comes to the government, none of us have any rights. 

One such guy who was labeled a troublemaker for just asking for what he was due, was given a job working in the jail’s infirmary but there were no patients, there was nothing to do, and nothing to read. So he took some trash out of the waste basket looking for something to entertain himself.  Well, that got him thrown in the hole (solitary) because he was accused of tampering with confidential information.  See what I mean?  When you threaten the fragile egos of people who aren’t paid a lot but aren’t going anywhere because they have good benefits and job security (more than most of us have these days anyway) you’re going to lose one way or the other.

The real problem with our system of government employment is that these people have jobs for life.  Whether they’re guarding inmates, working for the IRS, or delivering mail, they have unions that represent them and there’s little money to train managers how to deal with underperformers, so they let them stay on.   The longer they stay on the stronger the implied contract and the harder it is to terminate them.  Who suffers?  You and me — and those poor people who have them as guards in jail. 

It somehow seems to me the government takes basically good human beings and turns them into passive aggressive automatons.  With no real power, they exercise control over those who depend on them for their services.  We wind up having to walk a thin (and not even pink) line around them.  Take the mail carriers.  I once complained that our carrier was leaving packages at the curb rather than dropping them at the doorstep where they were less visible — and for this I didn’t get any mail for a few weeks.  Now that’s passive aggressive. 

Or there was the time when the EEOC came to review the records of the company I was working for in the 1980s.  When I wouldn’t provide certain records (on the advice of our corporate counsel) they pulled out all stops and turned a simple record review into a full blown audit.  That’s passive aggressive too.   And how many times do we see cases of police brutality with citizens who resist even a little? 

I always say, if someone earns a lot less than you and has less control over his or her day-to-day activities, but has more job security, beware.  That’s the person who can hurt you most.  Since it’s impossible to avoid them, I think you need to take a lesson from my brother, who has learned to survive an inherently bad system:  smile, never suggest they’re wrong, and grovel.  I may be for assertive communication, but I’m not so foolish as to think I can beat city hall.

TAGS: dealing government agencies, interacting with the government