#4 Don't let Wellwashing be the next Greenwashing
A critique of companies pretending to care about employee wellbeing, and insight into this worrying trend
Welcome to the May edition of Etcetera. This month I delve deep into a critique of mental health at work; I explore a new phenomenon I call wellwashing. This month you won’t be meeting any of my friends, but you will again soon! If you are new here - subscribe to get my newsletter next month.
9 days ago, Amazon published a press release that detailed they were introducing easy and affordable access to mental health care. They detailed that “the health and safety of employees is Amazon’s No. 1 priority—and has been since Day 1.” In their since-deleted tweet, Amazon posted a video showing their new “Amazen” cubicle for warehouse workers. The goal of the cubicle is to “provide a place that is quiet, that people could go to focus on their mental and emotional well-being.”
In response to the Amazen video, Twitter users hit back, calling the Amazen cubicle a box for employees to cry about the dangerous working conditions in Amazon warehouses. I’ve written about these conditions before. It’s well known that the working conditions are horrendous. Amazon workers in the UK are forced to urinate in plastic bottles because they cannot go to the toilet on shift. The warehouses in the US have incredibly high rates of injury (three times the national average for warehouses). Amazon refuses to make reasonable adjustments for disabled workers. They have unrealistically high “productivity quotas”, where workers are monitored by AI and forced to pack hundreds of boxes per hour, or face firing. Do they really expect a meditation box to improve mental health?
It isn’t surprising that warehouse workers are struggling with their mental health. But instead of making meaningful changes to the working conditions, Amazon introduced the Amazen box. Given the online criticism they faced, like Talia’s tweet that reads “I feel like liveable wages & working conditions are better than a mile despair closet”, Amazon deleted their video and… well, tried to pretend it never happened.
This episode is indicative of a problem that is becoming more and more prominent. We are now entering a new age of “washing”.
First, there was Greenwashing. This occurs when companies invest more time and money on marketing their products or brand as “green” rather than actually doing the hard work to ensure that it is sustainable.
Then, in the wake of BLM, more and more companies have started diversity washing. That is, instead of making any meaningful progress towards diversity and inclusion in their business, they post black squares on their Instagram feed #insolidarity, and appoint someone as a new D&I officer, without making any actual changes in their business practices.
Now comes wellwashing. I had hopes that wellwashing wouldn’t take root because one positive thing that I noticed happen throughout Covid-19 was that mental and emotional health was finally discussed openly. There was an honest acknowledgement about how profoundly difficult it is to work through the pandemic.
Yet, as some semblance of normality is starting to return to some parts of the world, I can already see that companies are piggybacking off the small progress we made in addressing mental health at work, and trying to leverage a few PR wins about how Zen our workplaces are now.
I call this “wellwashing”. Wellwashing occurs when companies spend more resources on creating tokenistic initiatives that make them appear to prioritise wellbeing, rather than creating systemic changes to practices and cultures that ensure employee wellbeing is prioritised.
Amazon’s recent foray into wellwashing is only one example. Companies that offer ping-pong tables, beanbags and Nespresso pods instead of a living wage, subsidised childcare, flexible working and adequate sick leave and holiday are also guilty of wellwashing. A part of my soul hurts every time I see a job ad that lists statutory minimum holiday leave, flexible working and possible career progression as a benefit. THESE ARE NOT BENEFITS. This is literally the bare minimum.
Mental Health Tech
I follow with interest a company called Unmind. Unmind is a workplace mental health platform that recently raised $47 million in investment. In some ways, I think it’s great that companies are finally talking about mental health and even offering services like headspace and unmind to their employees. But on the other hand, a 3-minute breathing exercise on your lunch break is not going to scratch the surface of the stress you will feel if you are on a temporary contract, earning minimum wage, unable to secure a mortgage and living in temporary housing because you can’t earn enough for a deposit.
I don’t want it to be either-or. Either we offer our employees a free app, a zen box to cry in over morning tea, and a free gym OR we pay them fairly and treat them with dignity. It should be both. But with the latter prioritised first, and the former coming when all workers are receiving a living wage, in stable housing, with meaningful work to do, treated fairly by their managers and not expected to work themselves to death.
In Jeffrey Pfeffer’s 2018 book, Dying for a Paycheck, he details how white-collar office jobs have become so stressful that health is impacted. Studies have found that stress at work can be as harmful to our physiological health as second-hand smoke.
All of these factors are interwoven with the way that mental and emotional health are portrayed by the media. In a recent episode of Citations Needed, they talk about mental health during the pandemic. Namely, how the media spins societal failures into personal self-help journeys.
The reporting of mental health has been in two modes. These are “awareness mode” or “self-help mode”. The former reports about the increasing number of people dealing with mental ill-health. The latter is comprised of tips and tricks for how to individually help yourself. Yet, where is the coverage of the third option? As Shirazi explains, the third option would highlight “Actionable, proven political solutions to mental health crises that operate under the radical assumption that social problems may require social solutions. Nowhere in any of these articles is the idea that socialized medicine, guaranteed income, free childcare, student debt relief, or rent and mortgage cancellations, maybe the best and most rational ‘hacks or tricks’ to actually improving the mental health of people at scale.”
Accepting the unacceptable
I often remind myself that everything we have come to accept about the labour market is a social construct and up for debate. The 40-hour working week, the fact even before covid Jeff Bezos made 1.2 million times the median Amazon employee, the increasing level of stress and anxiety people are feeling at work - these things aren’t naturally occurring phenomena, but rather a product of our capitalist system that we can actually change.
The way that we currently perceive mental health is framed in such an individualistic light. If you feel depressed, you can use the company funded meditation app, and teach yourself how to handle the stress associated with your role.
But, now more than ever, on the back of a huge cultural shift away from traditional working hours in traditional offices, we need to shift the perspective from mental health as an individual’s responsibility, to perceiving mental health as a collective responsibility.
As Mark Fisher writes in “A Rare Pandemic Silver Lining: Mental Health Startups.” Stress has been privatised: “The privatization of stress has been part of a project that has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public—the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organized around the problem of public space.”
We are collectively grappling with huge issues in the labour market, and as more and more workers become displaced through AI and automation, we have some existential questions to ponder. The world of work exists within the public space. And we shouldn’t be made to feel that needing more money, more time, more space away from work makes us lazy or ungrateful. We should be expecting our lives to be materially improving, considering the ever-increasing profit we are collectively making for the upper echelons.
Removing dissatisfiers first
A well-known theory in organisational behaviour is Herzberg’s hygiene factors. These factors show something important: the things that make us dissatisfied at work need to be fixed before we can become satisfied. At the minimum, we need adequate salaries, support and friendship, safe and flexible working conditions and job security. Without these factors, we will be dissatisfied. But with them, we are just neutral, not satisfied. The opposite of Dissatisfaction is No Dissatisfaction. We know that engaged and satisfied workers are more productive, hence more profitable. Workplaces need to double down as we emerge out of this covid haze on removing factors for dissatisfaction before they can then prioritise factors for satisfaction.
Ultimately, we need to keep the pressure on companies themselves to make systemic changes to improve the dignity, engagement and living conditions of their workers. As workers start returning to their offices, companies need to shift from seeing flexible working as a nice to have. Through necessity, we have seen it is entirely possible. We need to become familiar with systemic changes in how and where we work, changing our working conditions to optimise our lives, as workers. I honestly don’t think we need any more listicles offering hacks on decreasing our stress or how to hate our job less. Companies need to step up and learn more about the keys they already hold to improving working cultures and practices that will make people’s lives better. And in turn, when we as workers are making enough money, have a stable and fulfilling job, and not dealing with chronic stress and burnout, maybe companies won’t feel drawn to wellwashing their corporate image. Perhaps the company culture will speak for itself.
Thank you for being one of the readers who read my writing in May. This month 10% of the profit made from my readership was redistributed to Wellington Homeless Women’s Trust, a charity dedicated to providing support and accommodation to homeless women in central Wellington, NZ.
Some things I consumed in January:
Haley’s newsletter on Cope Culture, which inspired my own thoughts on the topic (and this newsletter).
The Vanishing Half, I have been really vibing fiction this month, and considering both me and my mum loved this one I can rate it as a good read.
This enormously good podcast I immediately send to everyone I knew: Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon with Dr Rahul Jandial
I love everything on Aeon, but this was a particularly good read: the socially warped self. Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back
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