As, indeed, it did. Inside the envelope were a letter and a certificate - the certificate marking 15 years of employment at UCT, and the letter - personally signed by the VC - congratulating me on "celebrating" this anniversary.
I've always admired poets for their ability to transform language - to take a simple, everyday word and to turn its meaning around into something quite else, almost by magic. Watching this skill wrought on the word "celebrate" was awe-inspiring.
Aside from the offensiveness of this paternalistic practice - which I won't go into here - I find it odd that in this age of "managerialism" the lean, mean, well-oiled machine that is UCT continues to reward people simply for warming a seat for fifteen (or twenty five, or thirty five... or forty five?) years. The letter thanks the recipient for their contribution - nowhere in the practice is the quality of the contribution at all of issue. It's simply a marker of a temporal milestone - survive here for 15 years, and you too will get one.
But what exactly is being rewarded? The intention was probably to reward loyalty - the assumption being that people stay because they *want* to. An entire body of literature on "job satisfaction" (and its related concepts) distinguishes between three different kinds of commitment in the workplace:
- Affective commitment - people who stay because they want to stay;
- Normative commitment - people who stay because they feel they ought to stay; and
- Continuance commitment - people who stay because they have to stay.
Organisationally healthy? I think not.