THE PEOPLE, NOT THE PRESIDENT WILL MAKE THE AMERICAN WAY OF WORK SURVIVE

4 February 2025 New York City

A week is a long time in politics, they say, and it certainly is in America.

I have been in New York for a week with WORKATHON and have to say the mood is mute, anxious, resigned and under pressure from its own incoming President.

America has defined the world of work for well over a century. Everything the world uses to work - from the credit card to computers - originated or was scaled by America.

So too working policies and practices: every nation’s operating policy in HR or corporate law owes something to the USA.

Many presidents and prime ministers have MBA’s and most of those MBAs are American.

A century of American art shows the veneration for work: working people, working places.

This beautiful 1932 painting “Hudson Street” by George C.Ault hangs a few streets away from Hudson Street itself in New York, in the Whitney Museum of Art, in what was the Meatpacking district and is now the most chi-chi upscale place to be.

This painting is a clever memorial to work: a street which waits patiently in what looks like early Spring or Summer sun for work to begin.

Not just any work: The American Way of Work.

Always-in and Always-on. Always making. Building. Growing. Shaping.

That may be changing.

Enter two very different swashbuckling men of the 21st century. On the left, a tech titan who says “let’s build” but is using his DOGE department to slash and burn whole departments and to undermine the operational functioning of others.

On the right, a former businessman - a man who made his fortune in New York by the way - who is using his second Presidency to threaten jobs, workers and the idea of the American Way of Work.

The American Way of Work was hardworking - and tried to reward hard work with fairness, pay and better times.

Of course let's not be totally rosy-eyed: American art and culture is littered with examples of how America has made mistakes with its workers - just listen to Billy Joel’s Allentown or Beyonce’s Break My Soul or watch Office Space from 1999 to name but a few.

But never has the Commander-in-Chief taken such a wrecking ball so quickly to both the economy and his own workers.

In introducing a nerve wracking will-he-won’t-he tariff trade war on his near neighbours (Mexico, Canada) he risks not only raising prices but he risks jobs. And he makes it clear this is the start of a global tariff regime.

“It's like Trump took a grenade and threw it into the economy, and he walked away to see what happens," Rob Handfield, professor of operations and supply chain management at North Carolina State University, told ABC News.

And he doesn’t mean a Banksy flower grenade, either.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research just estimated that tariffs alone could not only slow US growth by 0.7 % GDP this year but of course impact the global economy negatively too: https://niesr.ac.uk/blog/economic-impact-trumps-early-policies

Second, The President who is, let’s face it, the CEO of his country and economy, has waged open contemptuous war on his employees: specifically federal employees.

From outright firing to offering redundancy to shaming (inaccurately) air traffic control worker performance on DEI policies, this is someone who undermines rather than empowers, who destroys rather than creates.

All of this threatens America’s ability to show the world what it has done for the past century: what good work looks like.

THE WORKATHON WAY

Well, we do know what good work looks like: Great individuals in great companies doing great work. Here we are last week with some of them.

The antidote to a rogue individual in a company is to circumvent the chaos and show what good looks like. This is the silver lining for American work: if’s people, if not it’s President.

If you would like to be part of the change and of rising to the challenges of work - from politics and policy to AI, with people at the centre of a growing corporate community - let me know: julia@workathon.io

And if you would like a free download of our first report, The United State of Work which is published next month to mark the 5th anniversary of COVID: it’s this link https://workathon.io/usw/

All best

Julia