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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 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:
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.