Decide.

Ari Weinzweig on the importance of dignity in the workplace ...

The idea of a revolution in the workplace may, to cynics, sound overstated or maybe even wholly irrelevant, in a world where we all have a million things to do. I’d like to say the stakes are small. After all, what’s one more bit of philosophical framing or another “organizational recipe” in a company like Zingerman’s that already has an abundance of both? And yet, I have become convinced that dignity would make an enormous difference.

I am not alone in this belief. Twenty years ago, Wendell Berry published an essay entitled “Imagination in Place”:

We are destroying [our country] because of our failure to imagine it. … This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

Dignity, learned from the courage of people in Ukraine resisting the Russian invasion, has given me a new way to “imagine it.” The idea of a revolution of dignity in the 21st-century workplace is my attempt to offer, and adopt, a different and much more positive path forward. The choice, as Berry says, is ours to make. In the Epilogue of the pamphlet, I share this quote from Anastasia, one of the protestors on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013-4, as shared in historian Marci Shore’s wonderful book, The Ukrainian Night: 

Everyone needs to decide… It’s necessary to believe and it’s necessary to act. Today it seems to me a time of responsibility for every person, every person concretely. Every person is responsible for our future. Every one. Every person needs to decide.

If we don’t make that decision, it seems clear that, as Wendell Berry has written, we will be destroying so much of what we have created and failing to fulfill what we could become. It is, after all, a dearth of dignity that leads to misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, malice, and maliciousness. Whenever dignity is absent, antipathy is sure to follow.