Manager, bookkeeper, housekeeper... I had many names
The company I work at is a small business with around 10 employees that imports and sells products from overseas. Since everything, from importing to selling, is done in one place, there is a lot of work for such a small number of employees.
I used to be in charge of most of the financial affairs; I also took care of a variety of office tasks, managed wages and human resources, recorded the sales volume and the total stock of the products; in addition, I was also responsible for keeping the office clean and maintaining it, supporting the employees so that they could focus on their own work, serving tea for the guests, and carrying out the role of the secretary for the representative of the company.
The company called me “the person in charge of office management.” The places we do business with addressed me by a variety of names including “manager,” “bookkeeper,” “accountant,” and “business management support.” Although they are all originally different jobs, since the company is small, one person takes on multiple jobs. And if I were to summarize these tasks, I would say I was in charge of housekeeping for the office.
In fact, my unofficial title was the “office housekeeper.” It is not easy to be the housekeeper for one household, much less for an office where many people work together. Moreover, like housework, my work at the office went unrecognized even when it required a lot of effort.
Compared to larger businesses where work is specialized and each person’s tasks are clear, our company is on the vague side. All of the employees work on similar jobs together. The representative tells the employees, “Everyone, be a ‘multiplayer’!”
I also did my best to perform the variety of tasks I was given. But no matter how I hard I tried, it felt as if I stuck in that low-level job. The biggest reason was the treatment I received at the company and how I was perceived there.
Anyone can do the job, so it’s nothing?
Because our largest source of income comes from selling products, everyone besides me either imported or sold products. Since I was doing the work that is necessary for the whole company to function, my work had the least to do with the products themselves. Since it’s the products that earn money, it’s inevitable that the employees in charge of the products become important. All company affairs circulate around them.
At first, I thought it would be okay even if I wasn’t at the center, and that it couldn’t be helped since I had a different job from them. However, when situations such as me being the only one not knowing what was going on in the company, or information related to the products which I needed as well for my job being shared amongst all employees except for me kept happening over and over again, I inevitably felt excluded. There were many cases in which they would not teach me things in detail even if I asked in order to do my job. Was it only a matter of the particular manager or coworker I was working with?
Even when I was watering this plant called “the office,” my work was considered trivial compared to the task of bearing fruit from that soil. If I did my job well, nothing was said, and if I didn’t do it well, it immediately caused a commotion. While the mistakes of other employees were mostly shared between the people who were directly related, allowing it to be quietly overlooked, my mistakes weren’t given that privilege since I dealt with the entire office.
In particular, the representative would abruptly begin to yell at me if s/he didn’t like how I did my work. The usual routine was this: “Can’t you even do this right? Anyone can do this.”
I frequently heard that I was doing work that was “easy,” “for kids,” “requires only the ability to add and subtract.” Of course, I wasn’t the only person the representative got angry at. S/he sometimes yelled at other employees. But the frequency was clearly different, and other employees were not treated as children. Their work was not degraded as if it were nothing.
At first I thought this reaction was because I had just entered the company, and then I thought it was because I was young; after that, I endured it, thinking that it was because of the representative’s personality. Even as my mistakes decreased, though, and my skills improved as I took on more work, the representative continued to treat me like that.
Work left to young female workers
The saying “All jobs are equally respectable” probably emerged as a reaction to the severe discrimination that exists among jobs. In our society, the treatment and perception of a person is different depending on what that person does.
When I first joined the company, my mom was not pleased to hear that I had taken an office management position. “That’s what female bookkeepers used to do a long time ago. You can’t work in those jobs for a long time. They have no future.”
To my mom who was in her mid-50s, my work had the image of a young female worker taking on all of the office’s miscellaneous leftover chores. Before the office automation of today, I heard that there used to be many female bookkeepers. Their original task was finance and accounting, but I think their role of maintaining the office as the “helper” of male employees (who were usually the bosses) was more important in reality.
The problem is that at that time, those tasks were done by young women, and even these days, those jobs are habitually regarded as difficult for men or older women to do. Consider the task of serving customers tea: since people are not used to receiving such service from men, they customarily do not request it of them , and since the people who are served find it more comfortable when they are served by someone younger than themselves, it is difficult for older women to do this job.
Unless it is a very large company, or a tax and accounting business, it still holds true that the bookkeepers of the company are the “young female workers.” Ah, except for the fact that the title “bookkeeper” is no longer used that much.
Anxiety that I could be replaced any moment
Since anyone could do this work, I could not get anything wrong. Since anyone could do this job, it was given to the newest or youngest employee in the office to share with me. But if it were such an easy position that it could be filled by anyone, what was the reason for my existence in the company?
The fact that my work was regarded as trivial led to anxiety that I could be fired anytime. It seemed as if there were an overflowing number of people who could replace me, and that the company would easily replace me with someone else.
Even when the employees that joined the company later than me received titles and raises, nothing changed for me. I wanted to move to another company that would treat me better and recognize my work, but that wouldn’t be easy either. I felt that even if it were a different company, they would treat me the same way if I carried out the same tasks. I would need to transfer to a completely different job, but without any special abilities or qualifications, it would be difficult to switch to a different job. And since I needed to make a living, I couldn’t just quit the company...
And then, the company started to get bigger. The employees of each department started to feel overloaded, and finally, the decision was made to hire more people. Several new employees were hired.
My work increased as well. But no one new was hired for an office management position to share my work. Instead, the new employees of other departments were to share my work. This was an official order coming from above. The miscellaneous office work that had been the most time-consuming and cumbersome became the job of the newest employee.
However, whenever that newest employee got used to the work, another new employee came in, thus changing who the newest employee was. When that happened, I had to teach the work to the now newest employee all over again from the beginning. If that newest employee quit, then the employee right above him or her became the newest employee again and carried out the work.
The work done by the lowest worker, passed from the newest to the newest employee. Work that did not require skilled manpower. It was hardly my dream job. Like other people, I too wanted to do something that had the potential for development.
Dreaming of a work place where I can be supported and recognized
Thanks to the increase in the size of the company, my annual income and title have finally become higher than before. Quite some time has passed, and it’s been a while since I’ve stopped doing the miscellaneous office chores. Those tasks are still the share of the newest employees. If you just look at the conditions, you could say that they have improved a lot compared to when I first started out.
Just because I like some of the conditions at the present, however, it doesn’t mean that all those problems that had accumulated, layers on top of layers, are resolved. I still have doubts. Do I enjoy the work I do here?
If I talk this over with my friends who also work in offices, the answer is obvious. “How can you expect to go to work because you enjoy it? No matter how much you like it, if it becomes your means of making a living, it becomes difficult. You just go to earn money.”
I also don’t go to work because I like it. The reason I continued to work even despite the many difficulties was to earn money. But I still dream of other work. Work that lets me pursue many values besides just earning money. Work where I can be supported and recognized.
I wish there were such a place. A place where all jobs are respected and recognized. Where everyone can work with pride in their own job. A place where the employees can feel as if they were part of the company as a living being, not a mechanical accessory. What kind of work would I be able to do there?
I’m still looking, for that place, for the work I could do. [Translated by Rose]
-Published: May 14, 2014. *Original article: http://ildaro.com/6679
◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).
.png?type=nf190_130)
.jpg?type=nf190_130)