If I ever get a second life, maybe I shouldn’t apply for a position as a lawyer at Pels Rijcken, the renowned Hague office of the state lawyer. It’s not very cozy there, I understand from the coverage of Camil Driessen and Philip de Witt Wijnen in NRC.
Well, you will no longer encounter board chairman and civil-law notary Frank Oranje, because he ended his life after the revelations that he had robbed his clients for many millions of euros for twenty years. Better in Hades than in jail, he must have thought. But even without him, it will still take some time at Pels Rijcken before all employees can get through one door.
There is a remarkable amount of yelling, cursing, swearing and crying in this office. Racist, discriminatory language with terms such as “faggots”, “slit eyes”, “niggers” and “lazy Surinamese” is not uncommon. “Little bitch,” a female executive known as a “notorious screamer” calls her young lawyers. “You have to be on your guard all day,” says a young lawyer about such a raging boss, “it’s the fear of tantrums at unexpected moments.” A secretary was told: “This is how we work here: we first tear them down and then rebuild them.”
So go to another law firm? That is not so easy, because the NRC reporters were also told: “That’s the way the legal profession is. It is the same at the large law firms on the Zuidas.”
Would this be an exclusive trait of expensive lawyers: making life impossible for each other swearing and screaming? That assumption seems too limited to me. Anyone who has worked longer in an office has had unpleasant experiences with colleagues and bosses. It may not have been as bad as with Pels Rijcken, but an office life without sharp conflicts is unthinkable. A matter of characters, humors and ambitions.
What happened and is happening at Pels Rijcken and elsewhere was already penetratingly described in 1974 by Joseph Heller in his novel Something happened, in the Dutch translation by Guido Golüke translated as An incident. The protagonist is Bob Slocum, head of department in a large sales company. He has a princely salary, a spacious house in New York and a family.
‘There are five people in the office where I work that I’m afraid of,’ says Slocum bitterly. “Each of those five people is afraid of four people; that’s twenty in all, and each of those twenty is afraid of six people, so that there are a total of 120 people who are feared by at least one person. Each of those 120 people is afraid of the other 119 and all those 145 people are afraid of the twelve at the top […].”
Just like with Pels Rijcken, the hierarchy in Slocum’s company is based on that fear of the other. Also, discriminatory language is often used.
If it’s better not to work for Pels Rijcken, why? I thought for a moment about Arnold Karskens’ new broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland. But the chairman of the Supervisory Board, Taco Dankers, appears to have made anti-Semitic statements. How unheard of would Karskens think that? I haven’t heard from him yet.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 5, 2021
#company #full #fear