Slacking Workers of the World Unite

[marmar]

(In These Times) Seventy percent of porn viewing and 60 percent of online shopping take place during business hours. Studies indicate that worldwide, the average employee spends about 1 to 3 hours a day goofing off at work.

In Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance, Roland Paulsen, a scholar of business administration at Lund University in Sweden, sets out to understand what he calls empty labor, which includes anything a worker does on the clock that isn’t work—be it surfing the web, sleeping, organizing the office football pool, or writing a doctoral dissertation on the sly.

Paulsen focused on the most extreme shirkers. He interviewed 43 Swedish workers who claimed to spend less than half of their work hours actually working. He tracked down these hardcore non-performers through friends of friends, web ads and the Swedish website maska.nu, where people share slacking stories and tips. Most were white-collar workers, but a construction worker, a security guard and several house cleaners also participated. He tracked down these hardcore non-performers through friends of friends, web ads and the Swedish website maska.nu, which caters to hardcore time-wasters by publishing slacking stories, work-avoidance tips and political essays on the labor market. Paulsen's interviews were designed to answer two basic questions: How do you get away with this? and Why do you do it?

.....(snip).....

In the end, the most Paulsen can say about empty labor is that it underscores the absurdities of an economy where people are paid for their time rather than their output. Huge numbers of people are working significantly fewer hours than they're getting paid for, and the system grinds on just the same.

This is the shoddy reward that workers get for dramatically increased productivity: The work of an 8-hour day now fits comfortably into a 6-hour day. Corporate profits are skyrocketing, but the average worker is still obliged to sit around for 8 hours, on call for the boss. So, who's stealing time from whom? ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17448/slacking_workers_of_the_world

[marym625]

1. interesting

Personally, I hate that kind of slacking. Never did it, never will. I can count the number of times I went on Facebook, personal email or even made a personal phone call in 6 years on a job, on one hand

However, I would be interested to see how many hours are worked for the majority of light offenders. I know very few people that don't receive overtime and work much more than a 40 hours in a week. I would bet that they still put in more than 8 hour days

[redgreenandblue]

2. Probably depends on the work, but I think consistently working more than 6 hours is not realistic.

I do a lot of mathematical work, and I've noticed that my focus comes in waves. In between technically I'm slacking
(sometimes I actually do take "video game breaks&quot . If you add up the time I'm actually working is probably less than 6
hours a day, but I don't think I'm considered an underperformer by my employer. If you take a close look at people who spent more hours at work than I do, often they have more idle time.

I'm currently doing an experiment: I spend an actual hour less at work. The result so far has been that I am more content and more productive during the time I'm actually there.

[marmar]

3. Agree on the focus coming in waves

I know for a fact that I drift off between 1 and 3:30 or so.

[CrispyQ]

4. I've seen this.

A web developer told Paulsen that her team gave inflated time estimates for projects they didn’t want to do, and nobody could contradict them, because only the web team knew how long it should take to build a website..

Sometimes the cause of this is management who don't know technology. I've worked in a couple of large IT departments where the person in charge didn't know much technology. But hey, they had an MBA.

[KentuckyWoman]

5. Getting paid for what you produce seems to require working for yourself.

When I was corporate there were 3 of us in the department.

1 guy was a friend of the boss. Actually worked about half the hours he was paid to be there and got away with it by shoveling a good bit of his work load to me.

2nd guy always looked like he was working.... did snag the big sale....... and then handed off all the time consuming and brain draining processing to me.

They were coming in late, leaving smack at 5. Taking 2 hr lunches on a weekly basis. Meanwhile I was coming in early, skipping lunch and staying late. Only to be scolded for my work not all being done fast enough.

I stuck it out until one day they went full on abusive on a receptionist making just over the minimum and got mad and quit. Opened up my own thing in direct competition and stole a good bit of their business.

They are closed up. I'm still going took on a partner to run the day to day when my sister got sick with the cancer.
Employ the receptionist and 19 other people now at about 20% above what similar jobs in this area pay. Finally getting to where I make more money than I did there.

[hfojvt]

6. except that you cannot pay "service workers" for what they produce

I used to have a white collar job and one thing was - there wasn't really enough to do. That was probably one of the reasons I foolishly quit. The whole job sorta felt like a fraud and it felt like someday it would get caught.

I used to stay reasonably busy, as much as I could though. Heck, a number of times I would go set one computer to printing out a report, then go to another office and get another computer printing out a report. Okay, now TWO computers are working and what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Float between them, making sure the printers don't jam?

Further, there really was NO clear metric on exactly WHAT I was supposed to be producing with my time.

I was working for the USAF.

Now that I do janitorial work, there is again, no way to measure output. No good way. I mean I suppose a camera or some kind of "total account measurement" could do it. Square centimeters of surface wiped off, number of chairs stacked, square meters vacuumed or mopped, number of tables moved, number of light bulbs changed, number of chairs cleaned, and so on, so on. And unlike an automated factory, like the Kraft plant where I worked, there are no machines in the janitorial field to really boost productivity by doing most of the work. The janitor of today is no faster at mopping than the janitor of 100 years ago.

Of course, there are some days, when you are going like a maniac, because you have to, and you get more work done than on other days when you (or the stinking job) don't push yourself as hard.

But then the basic question is, what is the employer paying for? A sprint? A jog? A fast paced walk? If you sprint for a while, are you then entitled to stand (or sit) around a bit to catch your breath?

I think slackers make excuses though. They say things like "all of MY work is done" as if they are NOT part of a team. Yeah, they're the part of the team that is getting carried by the rest of the team.

[Brickbat]

7. Businesses that are in industries where it makes sense to pay for output rather than time sat in a

chair are slowly, very slowly, learning about the benefits of paying for output. If work doesn't get done, you have a bad employee, so fire him or her. If work gets done when you need it done, why worry about whether it takes 1 hour or 4 hours?

[hunter]

8. In some fields the slack, relaxed times make up for the insane rush times.

From polishing the fire truck, watching television, to utter high intensity lives-in-danger catastrophe.

Some days in the hospital delivery rooms are slow, other days all the rooms are full and women are having babies in the hallway.

I'm not sure I want any more people to be abused as farmworkers, sweatshop workers, telemarketers, and many others doing low income piece work.

Anyways, "economic productivity" as it is currently defined is directly correlated with the destruction of earth's environment and damage to the human spirit. The more "productive" we are, the faster this train to hell travels...

Fuck that kind of "productivity."

Everyone should just chill out. If you're not taking care of children, sick people, and the elderly, if you're not providing people with food or shelter, maybe then you're just not that indispensable to any sane sort of civilization.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Working is highly overrated as a pastime.