What does "cargo" actually mean?
In his column "What does... actually mean?", Benno Maggi looks at terms from the field of marketing and communications. This time, he takes a closer look at the meaning behind the term "cargo.
No, we're not talking about the lifestyle pants that make men and women look like they have to do handyman things and carry all the tools it takes in their pants. Nor the trucks that blocked your free passage while driving to and from the vacations.
No, the application in the business and work setting is much uglier than in the fashion or logistics industries. It comes from a corner that had previously been considered the North Star for the working world: from the tech companies. At the beginning of the year, as is well known, what was decided in the management of these hegemons over the holidays was communicated. In order to prevent their returns from collapsing after all those fat years and their share prices from plummeting, they had to throw something to the greedy (financial) market monster. And what is best suited for this: common employees. And in large numbers.
When employees become a burden
In the first week of January this year alone, it was announced that Google - or Alphabet - would be laying off 12,000 employees, Microsoft 10,000, Amazon 18,000 and Salesforce 7,000. Facebook (Meta) followed suit in March with 10,000 layoffs. When Apple at least described such measures as a "last resort" in May, but did not prevent them from implementing them consistently, it was clear to everyone that tougher times were coming. Layoffs, redundancies, layoffs, cutdowns or whatever the official wording was. Among decision-makers and analysts (sorry, still mostly very male), the order was: "Get rid of the cargo."
Ouch! For decades, these same corporations have been showing our old-school companies in Europe how it's done with employer branding and "best workplace to be" - and then this: Calling employees cargo. Freight, baggage, general cargo or whatever the German words for it are. Simply things that travel with the company and do not contribute to it.
Why does all this concern us? Buzzwords from the Anglo-Saxon tech industry or finance industry - in this case from both - have still made their way into the offices of marketing departments and agencies in the DACH region. FTE and headcount are two examples on the same topic. In an industry where fluctuation repeatedly reaches peak levels, people then talk about cargo behind closed doors and with an apologetic "excuse my french" when employees in general are meant.
We are familiar with this form of distancing and relativization of discriminatory and unsavory statements in Switzerland despite Gisler Protocol still well from the gender and/or woke discussions. The excuse usually given is that in times of stagflation, that ominous mixture of stagnation and inflation, namely the standstill of economic growth with simultaneous currency devaluation, a harsher choice of words is permitted and the cuddly language is now over. By contrast, "Bad News für dich" was downright affectionate as an opener at staff meetings in the noughties to announce a dismissal.
