Undercover Boss

Thirty-eight million people—38,000,000—watched the first episode of Undercover Boss, a new CBS reality series that tries to humanize CEOs by placing them on the front lines of their companies to learn how everyday workers cope with the dogma that gets filtered down from the executive suite.

Thirty-eight million. It helped that Undercover Boss debuted after the Super Bowl, the most watched TV show ever. Thirty-eight million. I was not one of them.

I’m not into so-called reality shows. I’m no survivor, not a bachelor, have no need to lose a ton of weight, and am not from the Jersey Shore (sorry, Marianne, couldn’t resist).

There’s nothing wrong with a CEO wanting to gain a better understanding of his workers’ lot. But I question the long-term value of these exercises. Unless these “reality” shows are total whitewashes, the honest and alert CEOs will soon discover that many of their employees earn less than a living wage, toil far harder than the “suits” do for less money, and struggle to provide adequate shelter, proper health care, quality education and upward mobility for their families.

What are the bosses going to do? Immediately raise worker salaries? Improve benefits? Hardly realistic to expect during a time when efficiencies—that’s corporate speak for making workers do more for less—is the corporate mantra. Hardly realistic to expect even during times of economic success.

Retail and restaurant companies have a history of promoting from within, of naming CEOs who began in the stockroom or as hamburger flippers. Rare is the CEO who remembers the poverty of his (they’re mostly men, so forgive the gender bias of the prose) youth, how difficult it was to make ends meet on minimum wage or slightly higher salaries. They seem to relish their bootstrap provenance, in some honest but callous way believing that if they could rise from the challenge, any of their workers could as well, if they just applied themselves.

That’s why CEOs like Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Jim Sinegal of Costco are exceptions, leaders who made a commitment to provide health care benefits even to part-time staffers despite pressure from Wall Street, and other retailers, that their bottom lines would improve immediately if they implemented standard industry compensation practices.

Undercover Boss might mean well, but it’s a sugar-coated picture of reality. Rather than help their workers, CEOs willing to go on the show are usually looking for positive PR (http://adage.com/article?article_id=142119). For a more accurate portrait of life on the minimum wage “assembly line,” I again recommend to you Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2009/12/stories-of-times.html).

Escapist TV fare is okay, but not at the expense of the reality too many of our fellow citizens have to endure.