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This weekly thread will focus on work and work culture.
This has been a back-burnered issue since COVID came and upended many workplace traditions worldwide, but I’d really like to hear about what you all think about it!
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- What is the ideal work / life balance? Right now, the worldwide average is 5 days per week, 8-5 PM. Is this too much / too little / just right?
- With productivity skyrocketing and wages falling, what would you like to see to fix things?
- Would you accept less money and shorter hours?
- What would you feel minimum wage should do to adjust?
- Do you feel that the current resurgence of Unions is positive or negative?
I just quit my job to start a business with a friend and I thought the reaction I received from my coworkers was interesting. Most were genuinely confused, didn’t understand why I would want to quit, and were surprised that I would do so without any guarantee of employment somewhere else (somewhere that isn’t a non-funded startup).
One manager, at a loss for words, just asked (in a weirdly childlike way) “why?” And I didn’t have a good answer for him. Because I can’t imagine staying at this job until I’m middle management? Because I hate the internal corporate pressure to produce crappy software? Because I want to set my own schedule and have a shot at wealth that will give me freedom from the 9-5 before I’m in my 60’s?
I want to be free, and I want my son to be free.
I think many people have a deep aversion to being unemployed, or are scared of being in an untenable financial situation. If I have an unexpected expense in the next three months, I’m screwed, and that’s a scary place to be in. It’s not a place that most of my coworkers have ever been in. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that place, but I have been there, and rolling the dice with your home or vehicle on the line is easier when you have had the experience of doing so, failing, and recovering from that failure. If you were raised middle class or in stable poverty of some sort, you may never have found yourself with all of your belongings in a rucksack and then come back from it.
Anyway, just an observation.
I quit my job (working marketing for a tech firm) and then-career in very late 1999 without any parachute or soft landing zone. I just couldn’t pedal lies for a living any longer and had to get out. I then spent a year burning through my (stock-option inflated) savings as I thought about what I could do instead.
In early 2001 I made my choice. I would sell almost everything I owned, I would burn all my career bridges behind me, and I would go to China to teach “for a year or two” and get in touch with half of my family roots. EVERYBODY thought I was crazy making that choice, and my mother in particular was frantic because she’d spent her youth trying to escape China.
I’m now in my 23rd year of my stay “for a year or two”, 16 of which I spent teaching before stepping back into marketing for a firm run by a guy I love working for. (Officially on paper I’m his PA, but in reality I’m the de facto head of market research for our little consulting firm.)
That’s two major career changes, one at age 36, and one at age 52, that I’ve made in my life after leaving school. And in that first one I not only left without a safety net, I’d also very carefully burned all my career options behind me just to make sure that I didn’t get tempted to go back to working in Hell.
So congratulations! You did what I did, only with even MORE guts involved. Kudos!
Very cool story! Thanks!
I feel like the whole world should just have a big giant job internet where there’s just… if something needs to be done you post it on the job internet and somebody who can do it can go do it… if they fail, they don’t get accepted for that type of job again until they get trained… if they’re really good at something and they want to keep doing that thing, then maybe a contract can be signed… if somebody is exploiting the job internet and taking the good jobs over and over and over again maybe there can be some kind of cap on how many times you can accept a certain job without a contract… I don’t know, but I feel like we should be able to get up and go to a job if we want to, but also not have to get up and go to a job.
I have never ever ever wanted to work in my life and the fact that everyone around me expects that I will have to work is infuriating. And it’s not like it’s laziness, when I enjoy something, I just do it… it’s not work or labor, it’s just doing something. But I don’t want to be forced to do things on planet Earth …I didn’t ask to be here, I don’t agree with the system, I don’t agree with money, and I feel like if everybody has free will, we should be able to choose to never work. That should also be a legitimate choice.
As for unions, I can understand how they can be good for achieving things from corporate bosses or whatever… but I once worked at a place there was a union, and because I wasn’t a 40-year-old Islander gossiping with the rest of them and I actually did my job and we were over quota everyday when I was working and I was bei ng too efficient, I ended up being fired by the union because they didn’t want me around… they wanted to be lazy and sit around and gossip instead of do their jobs and be efficient. So that wasn’t very fun, I had no recourse… I couldn’t ask to be not fired because nobody was representing me because I was on probationary… I don’t really have a positive opinion on unions anymore because according to the experience, I will never be able to even join a union because they’re going to fire me before my probationary period is up.
The question you have to ask yourself here is why you felt compelled to be so productive for an employer who literally holds you in lower regard than they likely hold office furniture.
You may think this is a rhetorical exaggeration for effect.
I assure you it is not.
In one (tech, naturally!) firm I worked for (in marketing) we had a huge crush of workload over a period of about six months (because management fucked up, but that’s neither here nor there: we all fuck up sometimes). There were twelve of us working long hours six days a week to get everything that needed to come together to do so on time for a product launch. Some of our work was specialist work that required our unique skills. About half of it, though, was stupid drudge work: making copies, filing papers, etc. Stuff that was time-consuming and could literally be done by anybody who had about two days’ training.
We were running ourselves ragged. There were health issues (mental and physical both) from the extended high workload. The team shrunk by two people over that time, increasing the workload on the ten remaining. And that’s when I memoed my boss with a recommendation we hire a temp for the duration of the crisis to take the drudge work off of our shoulders so we could concentrate on the productive work, get it done faster and not have to work overtime. (A single temp dedicated to those tasks could easily have taken the extra non-productive work off of the shoulders of 10-12 people, yes, just by economies of scale.)
Sadly, though, my boss had, shortly before my memo, broken his “manager chair”. And he had money in the budget either for replacing the manager chair or for hiring a temp. (That should give you an idea of just how overblown that chair was.)
So he was faced with a choice:
- Use an “engineer chair” for a few months to keep his workers happy and productive; or,
- Continue to let his workers suffer, burn out, and eventually quit—making things worse on those left behind—so he could sit in a fancy chair.
Guess which one he chose. (Hint: I told you the answer in the first sentence.)
That’s when I realized just how little corporate types care for their workers on average. A dozen people suffering was better than him sitting in a less grandiloquent chair.
Fuck management. Unions forever.
I was productive because I like work and I like putting the little wires into the little thingy and make it work good… I liked every single station they put me on I like the one where I had to test the circuit boards, I like the one where I had to put all the little pieces together and make the stuff float, I like the little wire part, I like the work. And I liked that I could go to a work, do the work, and then leave the work at work and go home at the end of the day… it was fulfilling… it also paid me more than I had been paid to that point.
I was perfectly happy, and the stupid Union thought that I was not good enough for them so that’s great.
I understand that jobs are shitty and that’s why I don’t work now at all. but I miss that job because it was the most productive I have ever felt. And a union fucking ripped it away from me.
Oh, I’ve also been a temp worker hired as temporary work… you know what they do to Temporary workers when the job is done? They fire them… that shit fucking sucks too, by the way. I’d rather see your shitty manager get an office chair then hire me for a couple months and then fire me because I am temporary labor. Being a temporary laborer sucks. And even though we’re lightning workloads and all that, we still get treated like shit by the actual long-term workers too so there’s also that.
So I guess my perspective is, fuck all work. fuck work entirely. Fuck managers fuck presidents fuck CEOs fuck unions fuck laborers fuck everything that has to do with work at all lol it’s all a damn waste of time
I’m with you on “fuck all (forced) work”.
UBI would change the face of employment: you’d work only if you felt like it was something you wanted to do. Or you’d live frugally a while and try to learn things, or start your own business (knowing that if it fails you didn’t just kill your family) or …
Myself? I like working. But I don’t like working for pennies so the owner can make millions. I don’t like being threatened with starvation if I choose not to work 60±hour work weeks.
What is the ideal work / life balance? Right now, the worldwide average is 5 days per week, 8-5 PM. Is this too much / too little / just right?
The ideal work/life balance is the one that works for your circumstances and temperament. A “one size fits all” solution is doomed to failure because people are radically different not only from person to person, but within a single person’s life.
With productivity skyrocketing and wages falling, what would you like to see to fix things?
Greedy CEOs beheaded and their heads placed on pikes outside their company headquarters as a warning to those who come afterwards.
No, I’m not joking. Much.
The fact that the ratio of mean CEO salary to mean employee salary is closing on on 400:1 right now¹, vs. 20:1 in 1965, is laughable. As someone who has lived through part of the '60s, and all of the '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, and up until now, I can guarantee you that things are not 20 times better now for society than they were 50 years ago. Indeed starting in the early '80s (about 1983, give or take) things have been taking a steady downward turn that is accelerating for most people.
In 1978 my neighbours had a nice bungalow in a decent suburb of Edmonton, all paid for by a single income: specifically a milkman’s income. A single, lower-end blue-collar income was enough to have a family of four live quite comfortably in a three-bedroom home with a finished basement and a decent-sized yard. (My own family of three had two incomes, both white-collar, so we were living high off the hog in comparison—but our neighbours were by no means impoverished; not even slightly!)
Today, that same family, presuming you can even find a blue-collar job of roughly that calibre of income (most of them have been destroyed, see), there is absolutely no way that family could live in the house they did. They’d be relegated to some crappy one-bedroom apartment in a mediocre neighbourhood (or maybe a two-bedroom apartment in a shithole slum). And my two-white-collar-income family with only one child? We could likely barely manage to pay for the house we lived in at the time, but it would be really spartan inside and we’d have little to no disposable income after food, shelter, and clothing.
Would you accept less money and shorter hours?
No. I accepted the same money for shorter hours. When CEOs are making 300× (or greater!) my salary for visibly doing far less work, they can fuck off and hand over the share that I contribute to their bottom line, or they can let me work less. Anything else and I’m just warming up the guillotine.
Of course I have that privilege. I’m good enough that I can set my terms in my job and if they don’t like it, I change my employer and set my terms there. Sadly not all my fellow labourers have that ability.
What would you feel minimum wage should do to adjust?
I don’t think there should be a minimum wage. I think there should be a universal basic income that covers the essentials of life (food, shelter, clothing, all at basic levels)² and then if people want more than that they can find jobs. With a UBI companies have to contend with the fact that they can’t literally threaten the lives of their employees any longer to force them to work for less than they think they’re worth. If the basics are all adequately covered, the salaries paid by companies will have to be high enough to motivate people to work for them. Which may mean that CEOs will have to return only earning 20 times as much as the average worker again. This is my sad-for-the-CEOs face: 😐
Do you feel that the current resurgence of Unions is positive or negative?
Absolutely a positive. When one side of an “agreement” has a monopolistic amount of power over wealth, the other side needs monopolistic amount of power over labour to combat it. Anything else is indentured servitude, not employment.
If the CEO can literally threaten my life to accept unpleasant jobs for inadequate pay, I should be able to literally threaten his ability to earn enough to make that power. If CEOs can destroy lives, labour should be able to destroy companies.
Until we get UBI and have companies finding out that they need to pay people to motivate them.
¹ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
² Paid for by taxing the shit out of billionaires instead of going on knees before them to service them orally.
What is the ideal work / life balance?
I agree with you that one size doesn’t fit all, but I feel there has to be some kind of baseline standard. When I was looking around, I was unable to find when the current standard in North America changed from 9-5 to 8-5, but that shit needs to stop. A large amount of work is now decentralized due to computer and data storage, so there’s no reason hours have to be (with in-person requirement exceptions like restaurants and stores). Given the productivity increases of the last 50 years, we could work one day a week and still be more productive than equivalent work week 50 years past.
Greedy CEOs
I strongly believe that income ratios would be one of the most impactful things we could do. No person working full-time at a company deserves more than, say, 5 times more than any other full-time employee and should factor in “perks” like dividends and such. This kind of thing should be legally mandated.
UBI
I adore the idea of UBI, but we have to make sure the implementation is solid. I love some of the ideas I’ve seen from economists for them (and no, economists are not interested in growing bottom lines, they’re interested in how economic systems function). I also feel the economy has to be made more cyclical which would assist in this.
Unions
I like the resurgence as well, but I’m wary of power and sway over things not related to the unions. The leaders of these unions need to be kept honest just like corporate leaders should be because the ability to abuse the power is also possible (see many union leaders in the 1970s). Open books to members of the union should be the minimum required.
… I’m wary of power and sway over things not related to the unions
I’m wary of power. Period. Anybody’s: government, management, union, whatever. All people in positions of power should be carefully scrutinized and all books should be open.
I also feel the economy has to be made more cyclical which would assist in this.
We have to get away from the whole “line goes up” mentality. Eternal growth is not sustainable. It is literally physically impossible.
