Page 43 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

22 CHAPTER 1

Another aspect of sustenance and security worth dwelling on briefly is the notion of
long-term employment, which is something of an anachronism in this day and age,
given the high turnover rate among companies and the corollary notion that many of
us are likely to hold on to any job no more than 3.6 years over the next forty years.
This alarming aspect of globalized trade has even strong supporters of globalization
such as Thomas Friedman suggesting in a clever verbal sleight of hand that American
companies, while they cannot provide lifetime employment, should provide for life-
time employability. 34
We certainly support this notion of lifetime employability, investing money each
year for the continuing education and training of everyone on staff. But here’s the
kicker: We hope that lifetime employability is with us. Such an approach to long-term
employment provides security for our staff and also provides security and stability for
the company. Our turnover rate is practically nil. There’s considerable value to be gar-
nered from such stability.

2. Belonging: Drift has become a household term these days, conveying the sense
that most of us have of being unmoored from a sense of community. There are two pri-
mary sociological interpretations of this fact of contemporary life. Richard Florida, who
writes about people he terms “cultural creatives,” numbering some thirty-eight million,
tends to celebrate the loose ties these cultural creatives have with their social context:

In place of the tightly knit urban neighborhoods of the past or alienated and generic
suburbs, we prefer communities that have a distinctive character. These communities
are defined by the impermanent relationships and loose ties that let us live the quasi-
anonymous lives we want rather than those that are imposed on us.... The kinds of
communities that we desire and that generate economic prosperity are very different
from those of the past.... Where old social structures were once nurturing, now they
are restricting. 35

Where Florida celebrates the autonomy that comes from such loose-tie communi-
ties, the sociologist Richard Sennett bemoans the lack of connective tissue:

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in mod-
ern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of
human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between
risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organization of absence of trust, where
there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in
which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish
the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others. 36

Interestingly, while Florida embraces our latest, bravest new world and Sennett criti-
cizes it, both acknowledge the powerful yearning for a sense of belonging.
Constructed from this strong sensibility, our company might be best described as
“intimate” or “familial.” We try to be looser-knit than the claustrophobic small-town
ethos of a generation ago but tighter-knit than the drift that seems so pervasive these