A few days ago, it happened that a woman of about fifty—an astonishingly empathetic and highly effective phone representative—was proclaimed the corporate equivalent of the old socialist work champions. She had arranged, by a wide margin, more meetings for the sales staff than anyone else in the department. She alone had booked more than the entire bottom half of the team combined. When these results were announced, in a surge of confidence she wrote to her young supervisor: “Please speak to me as you would to an adult.” Within an hour, she was out of a job. This occurred a few days ago at one of the largest Czech companies selling insurance.
It is hardly an unusual story. In small firms, unthinkable; in corporations, commonplace. Of course, efficiency and profitability come first, often exerting an almost crushing pressure on everyone involved. Yet that concern for results is pushed aside the moment questions of power, managerial arrogance, and the like arise. Theoretical economists will explain to you that market pressure supposedly forces organizations to favor the best workers, but it has not yet happened that this has ever truly worked. If those economists wrote instead that the mountain spirit Krakonoš appears to punish wicked managers, it would be no farther from the truth. The only difference is that we are accustomed to tales of the invisible hand of the market, while we are not accustomed to tales of Krakonoš.
But there is more. Try to imagine the reverse situation: a fifty-year-old manager dismissing a twenty-year-old woman—even one with poor results—for real or supposed insolence. Unthinkable. Generation Alpha, after all, may say whatever comes to mind. Generation Alpha need not come to work every day. Generation Alpha may break the rules. That is simply how they are, and everyone must respect it. In a dispute with a colleague of her own age, that manager would most likely not dare dismiss her. And that says nothing of the possibility that the employee belonged to a sexual minority. But a woman in her fifties has no rights in the corporate environment. You do not even need a formal decree for that. It is enough for it to become custom, or the prevailing view in human resources departments. And that is that.
How easily divisions are created—like those between blacks and whites, or between members and nonmembers of the Inner Party. At the beginning, such an intention may not even have existed. But once you unleash the demon of minority protection and anti-discrimination campaigns, you arrive at a world of ugly lawlessness. It can never end otherwise.