I recently viewed this thought-provoking video in which Brett Arends, American writer and journalist, compared and contrasted today’s work conditions with that of 20^th century workers. He focused on US workers and used the world of Daisy Mason, the assistant cook at Downton Abbey, as the point of comparison. He concludes that Daisy is better off than the modern-day American workers in spite of all the technological advances that we have at our disposal.

Some of the factors that led him to this conclusion include:

• Daisy has greater job security than most US workers. There is no chance that Daisy’s job will be outsourced to a foreign company.
• Daisy doesn’t work in a honeycomb of cubes.
• Daisy doesn’t have to commute to her job. She merely walks a couple of flights of steps and she’s at work and just as easily returns to her employer-provided accommodations.

The one factor that I found most amusing is that Daisy doesn’t have to cope with management consultants. Ah, those young MBA’s hired to enter organizations and ask employees bothersome questions about what they do and how they do it with the ulterior motive of making jobs more efficient. “Efficiency” is a word that often strikes fear in the minds of workers because they sense changes is underway that might include job elimination.

View the video here or click above and hear Mr. Arends’ lively argument on why Daisy’s work world is better than ours is today. Let me know what you think – is he right or wrong?