Who's Your Customer?

Has the general business and commercial environment become more or less humane in the past years and decades? 

Whatever your thoughts about the current tenor of the marketplace, our language has certainly become nicer.  I remember being comforted when my first employer announced that it would be rightsizing its workforce.  No more heartless downsizings for them.  Of course employees are now associates or partners, and most job descriptions seem to have been upgraded, even if everything else has gotten worse for the poor employee/associate/partner.

So if you believe, as I do, that the reality for workers and consumers has coarsened while our labels have gotten nicer, you might wonder to what extent these phenomena are related.

I was therefore heartened to see a recent announcement by the FAA (as reported in the Wall Street Journal) that they would no longer call airlines, the entities they are chartered to regulate, customers.  Apparently someone there realized that feel-good labels can get in the way of getting the job done right.

Terminology matters, and choices that feel good sometimes obscure the truth.