lol what a bunch of stupid fucking navel gazing why do you think worker "productivity" has gone down jesus christ
Truly an enigma. That will go down like a cup of vomit. I had to explain to my manager about "Quiet Quitting" as she took it to mean 'people are skating by and we need processes in place to catch them red-handed'. She thought it was a challenge to overcome with brute force and vicious management. I said, 'no, it's where they realize skating by is far better for them, compared to being hyper productive for no discernable benefit'. Then we delved into the fact that of the 60 administrative staff in our area, only 10 are getting a payrise next year. The others are either at the ceiling, or weren't considered 'good enough' to merit an increase. How exactly do you encourage people to be more productive when they know it only means more work and stress? She argued that the 'opportunity to develop and blah blah blah'. It's not enough, and we're reaping the results. I raised a similar question with her a year ago, when I realized that one of my best staff members was burning out. This member was someone I could trust to get any task done, and I leaned on her when an area was struggling. She had a hard time saying no, while I was new and didn't realize the potential damage I was doing to her energy levels. So her being talented and willing was to her detriment, where someone on the same pay scale could do half the work with no major stressors. I asked my manager how to reward her in a genuine way, what cards did I have up my sleeve? I had none. Come performance review time, I wrote a glowing recommendation for an accelerated pay rise - both the accelerated and the standard increase were denied. She left soon after. Now? I'm not asking any of my team to do more than they need to. They're tired, stressed and have been so for a long fucking time. They work with egomaniacs in academia and clinical settings. They work for an organization that has chronically underpaid it's staff for years, and it's now under massive financial stressors while being unable to backfill vacancies because they simply don't pay enough. We're possibly looking at another round of redundancies. Most have one foot out the door for their own sake, and I don't blame them one bit.The productivity plunge is perplexing.
Tech CEOs such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more.
Quiet Quitting
Yeah, I can't imagine how it looks now. Back when I was doing the night watch/human scarecrow gig, I was literally topping the charts as some employee of the month shit 14 times consecutively, because I came to work punctual, properly dressed, sober, and followed procedures. There was no benefit for it. The 50-something entitled bitch that was supposed to come after me was routinely late and reeked of booze two times out of three, but there was no penalty for making me wait 30-120 minutes. Unwanted overtime isn't a benefit. The supervisor went through some five stages of death shit when I resigned, and good riddance. Hopefully, I'll never again need to bother with that bullshit. Positive (group) incentives don't require (individual) competition. Positive incentive isn't lessening the penalties. Both are trivial realization for anyone who doesn't do management or HR.
Between quitting the shittiest job I had out of college and starting the least-shittiest job I had out of college I spent five months unemployed while Boeing was on strike. One of the jobs I interviewed for was being headhunted by a temp agency. So I came into the temp agency and interviewed. Then they made me do their office assistant evaluations. I looked at them - this is an engineering gig? Requires calculus? No fux given, nobody comes in for a job without being assessed on filing, alphabetization, typing and 10-key. So, okay, I'm here, whatever. They called me to offer me office assistant gigs for another six years. Apparently I was the fastest typist they'd ever tested. They assured me they could place me any day of the week if I wanted to be an administrative assistant. When I was a cashier doing graveyard shift at a 7-11? My boss wrote me up for reading a magazine at 3am. The fact that the person who relieved me was never sober didn't come into the equation. That was the last time I worked retail, however.
Just in case I fucked it up: I meant it like "as overqualified for junior work as veen would be for kid mazes." However killer they were, you wouldn't need a tenth of that delta, for sure. I bet that with your SQL skills, you'd probably automate 90% of one in a week-to-month.
My manager has started a DBA, which frightens me as she seems to be a walking, talking testament to poor management techniques. But is also exactly what the higher ups want in their managers. To her, we're numbers. So when I don't treat my team as numbers, she's confused and her solutions to my problems don't mesh.
Oh for sure - I'm the outlier as far as she's concerned. But the trouble is, she hired me knowing my personality. Knowing I cared about people and had the respect of the wider organization (like, 5000 staff overall). They genuinely created this role I'm in, with me in mind. I was basically strong armed into applying, and I was pleased to do it! I occasionally wind up in committees and usually someone there goes "Oh it's you! I've heard all about you! You did this thing, wow I thought you were a woman..". That last part happens a lot. Not a lot of men in our area. Anway, I'm well thought of and I thought that would carry over. Yet when I insist on continuing being the positive, affable person she hired - she's all no no no these people need an iron fist to rule them. It's my fault for not conforming to what she needs, but I really don't want to change myself. So I change the job! And the hunt continues. That's not to say I don't know how to manage people, I just don't subscribe to her methods. Which so far have encouraged people to leave out area at a phenomenally rapid rate, and we can't backfill so the remaining staff pick up the slack, get tired, and the cycle continues as the big cheese continues her power trip.
I pity the cubicle dwellers and sararimen. The last time I had a jobbyjob - going on, fuck, fifteen years now - things were bad? But there was an assumption that you worked the hours you were paid for, and if you got work done, you were good. It didn't happen that way everywhere, and it was definitely getting worse? But we acknowledged that working too hard was a mistake. The idea that you must work more than you are being paid for if you wish to continue being paid for it is every bit as toxic as AB InBev producing nothing but IPA. If you stop making beer, people will stop drinking it and you'll be left trying Pabst Hard Iced Coffee just in case those goddamn consumers put down their White Claw. I have told every receptionist we have that I wouldn't do their job for the money I'm paying them. The money I'm paying them? Is more than they'd get doing that job at any of our competitors. Would I like to get rid of that job? Absolutely. But right now, society and market custom expects that job to exist, and expects it to pay far less than it's worth, and people take the job. I don't know that there's a future there. There probably is at some limited level. We make it clear that the job has no opportunity for advancement, that we expect their time with us to be short (but pleasant) and that we're eager to help them build their skills for wherever they're headed next. I'm losing one in a month and she's ebulliently telling everyone who will stand still long enough to hear it that she's leaving the best job she's ever had. But I still wouldn't do it for double the money. It's supposed to be a trade. You give me your labor, I give you my capital. It should be even but almost never is. Really, you're trading time for money - I don't have time to do that job, but I do have money; you don't have money, but you have the time to do the job. That's where things went wrong for the capital side of things; COVID revealed that the capital-to-labor equation has an arbitrary coefficient in it and we just up'n'changed it for a good chunk of the year. Now? Now the labor side has a new coefficient to evaluate the value of their time, and the capital side is furiously insisting they forget.
i just started a receptionist job at 13 bucks an hour and despite everything else about the job being honestly quite nice, it's just still not worth putting your whole ass into it at the price the mcdonalds down the street is hiring at 15/16 dollars an hour, man, there's no reason to work as a front desk jockey anymore except for resume building for office jobs
Dude that's fucking miserable. We pay nineteen and know full well it's not worth putting your whole ass into it. It's worth putting eight hours into it, and only until you find something better. We are fully aware that Trader Joe's is paying more than we are, and also fully aware that our job is easier. What's interesting is that the people who aren't qualified for the gig really think it should start at $26 while the people who are qualified for the gig aren't entirely sure they want to keep doing reception. Having seen the parade of jewelry counter girls, rental lot wranglers and corrections officers who have applied, however, we chose to disregard their wants and needs.
would you believe i had to bargain my way up to 13? i started at 12.50 and asked to split the difference higher into the hourly wage range in the job posting it's hard to bargain when you're unemployed and have very limited work experience - i have no idea how much a college degree in ling/japanese and a few months of working as a waiter is worth to a hiring manager but apparently it's worth 12.50 it's also hard to remember now that I'm finally making some amount of money that I'm getting ripped off, because any money looks like a lot of money when you're used to having no income - i can pay my half of the monthly rent after only 2 weeks of work? :o wow poggers! honestly i don't know how long i should plan to be working here, i don't know how much time is enough to be a good resume filler and how much is just spinning my wheels.
The advice I give people the most often is "it is much easier to find a job when you have a job." Give 'em their money's worth and figure out what the next job is gonna be. It remains a worker's market out there, which is probably one of the main reasons stupid articles like this get written - the "take this job and shove it" mentality of the worker marketplace is crystal clear. I don't think I'm unique among employers in recognizing that the mentality is entirely justified and well-earned but there's definitely a contingent that feels anyone getting a paycheck should be grateful to be working at all. We pay a stipend towards personal advancement (which started when we decided three or four employees needed laptops, so it was either "we will buy you a laptop or we will give you the money towards something that will help your career"). One of our employees spent it on Spanish lessons. Another spent it on training to be a home health aide. I bring this up because your focus shouldn't be on "Quats' Job" it should be on "Quats Inc." and improving the value and utility of you, the individual-for-hire, pays everyone dividends. And hey, thinking about it? Brown-nosing your direct report by going "hey will you guys pay for me to take this training on MailChimp" 'hey can I do this CRM webminar during business hours" "hey will you guys pay for me to get my (insert useless HR certification here)" indicates that you are striving to be more useful to the company while also padding the shit out of your resume. Rule of thumb? It costs six months' of any given employee's salary to replace that employee (in lost productivity, retraining, onboarding, etc). It is so.much.easier to retain employees than it is to rehire them so if you set the goal of being worth vastly more than they're paying you, you basically force them to pay you better. If they're smart. If not, at least you learned early and when the next guy asks "why are you leaving your current job" you can say "they don't support my initiative and drive for self-improvement" which makes them look like monsters.
Genuine question, how does one get by on $13 an hour? The receptionist at our main hub starts on about $24 (NZ's minimum wage is $21.20). I totally get you with that realization - when I got my first job in retail I saw the salary, 40k my lawd what an amount! Then proceeded to struggle and grind just to keep on top of everything. But at the time I thought I was a made man. When I'm hiring someone, I tend to focus on the interview and only take the length of time at an organization into account, if something feels off. My generation and younger seem to stay at places for shorter stints (best way to get better pay is to leave) so a year here, a year there? Doesn't ring any alarm bells for me. Get experience and training if you can and keep an eye out for something more suitable!
By making the worker subsidize their income from other sources. NOBODY gets by on $13/hr. But, like Q says in her comment below, when she splits the rent/utilities, healthcare covered under her parents plan, and phone covered under her parents plan, then she can totally live off of $13 an hour! Phone $80/mo. Healthcare $250/mo. Rent $400/mo (just picking a number at random. insert whatever number you want, or is appropriate for your area, from $300-$2000/mo.). Utilities at probably $100/mo. So she is being "subsidized" $830/mo. That's how she can live on $13/hr. No shade to Q, of course. This is totally common. But when you back up and look at the big picture of how communities work, how taxes work, and how businesses work, you realize that everyone in Q's life is PAYING HER EMPLOYER for the privilege of employing her for $13/hr, rather than her employer just paying her a living wage. "But I can't afford to pay my receptionist $25/hr!" the business owner cries! Then you don't have a viable business, sir. It's as simple as that. If you can't pay a living wage to each of your employees, without accepting handouts from your employee's families, or getting tax cuts from the local municipalities, then YOU DON'T HAVE A VIABLE BUSINESS. Period. That company will fail, because it has failed to adequately calculate their cost of operations, which only ever go UP. And if you have a hidden number in the cost calculations of your budget that keeps going up forever... you will fail. Eventually. This is why businesses are complaining they can't hire anybody... the working class have found out they were being cheated, and inadvertently subsidizing their shitty employers' business plan, and aren't having it anymore. And there are literally dozens of famous successful businesses that operate with integrity and pay people properly, while still providing excellent products at a competitive price. Dick's Drive-In and Gravity Payments are just two of them, employing different methods to achieve the same result. "Genuine question, how does one get by on $13 an hour?"
The "subsidy" idea is backwards. The financial support Q gets from roommates and family means her employer has to pay her more, not less, to keep her as an employee. Suppose that Q works at WLOG, Inc for the pay, not for professional networking or for experience or anything else. Her real dream is to be an artist and spend all day painting, writing and composing music. But housing, food, and art supplies cost money and for now she doesn't think she can earn enough from art to live on. So she works at WLOG to pay the bills. She gets a roommate. That helps with rent. She still can't quit and do art full time, but she feels more financially secure. Then she gets healthcare through family. That helps too! She's not comfortable enough to quit, but if for some reason she got a pay cut now she would quit and see if maybe she can make it in the art world. With rent-sharing and family healthcare, she doesn't need the job badly enough to accept $10 per hour! Then she gets the family phone plan, and a distant relative dies and leaves her a monthly annuity. Jackpot! She gives notice at work. With all her financial advantages, she doesn't need the income from WLOG enough to justify giving up her art dreams. How does WLOG respond? Do they say "We see you don't need income as much as you did before, therefore we invite you to continue working for us at a reduced salary"? No, if WLOG wants to keep her services now that she has outside income, they must offer her a raise. Imagine how much you would have to offer a millionaire to work as a receptionist.
We are, in practice, saying the same thing, and in agreement I believe. If the employer was paying a living wage, then Quats (or any other receptionist) wouldn't need to rely on outside sources for life essentials, like rent and healthcare. She'd pay for those out of her earnings, like anyone else. The reason why the employer can pay less, is because there are other people that are better subsidized by their support network, rather than paying for their own expenses. It depresses the price point at which people will trade their time for money, down to Quats $13/hr, which nobody anywhere can live on alone, without support. This is kinda sensitive to me right now, because I am helping a friend out in NYC, whose parents have both passed recently, and she and her boyfriend just broke up. She's a successful actor (extra) and makeup artist and glass artist and musician and and and and... her money comes from a lot of different places. But she is completely alone. She has to pay her rent. She has to pay for her own healthcare. She has to pay for her own internet/phone and utilities. Etc. It's hard. It is panic-inducing. She's constantly on the verge of losing everything, and she's in her 40's. But she does all of these things because it keeps her solvent. She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black. She gets her $600/day for being an extra on a TV show or movie, then goes home to make a glass commission, before going to DJ at a roller rink, and applies for art grants and other opportunities while laying in bed at night before going to sleep. It's vividly clear when working with someone who DOESN'T have those subsidies to fall back on.
Wallerstein again: - Subsistence includes gardening at home or assembling Ikea furniture - it's stuff that you would have to pay for but you aren't. - Piecework is selling shit on Etsy, breaking up cartons of cigarettes to sell on street corners, babysitting for your neighbors, anything you make money at but not regularly. - Work-in-kind is anything that you would normally be doing except you can't because you're earning wages so someone else is doing it for you. - Wages are paid employment from a regular employer, either by hour or by item. - Influence is anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community, family or larger social unit, or that makes your community, family or larger social unit more valuable compared to others. These are not exclusive categories. Wallerstein's argument is that everyone's existence is some blend of all of this, and that they are interchangeable. For example, if you eat a lot of stuff out of your garden, babysit your kid brother and make dinners, you are participating in an economy even though you aren't drawing wages. Further, the more of a wage economy you wish to have, the more of the non-wage economy you need to address through other means. For example, the invention of washing machines, supermarkets and other labor-saving creations released a lot of potential wage-earning by freeing up work-in-kind. This tedious article presupposes that at some point in the near future, "anything you do that makes you more valuable to your community" will replace everything else. It doesn't take much of a sense of anthropology to see that the more "first world" your economy, the more emphasis is placed on wages and the greater the de-emphasis on everything else. So it should come as no surprise that as the available wages decrease, the utility of other forms of income come to the fore. and if you are "completely alone" your alternate income streams are thin. And here's the thing. Civilization concentrates in cities because of network effects. The opportunities are greater. This is why cities tend to fill up with the young, and the higher the inequality, the more likely those young are sucking down someone else's wages from the hinterlands. There simply aren't many places where you can make a living as a makeup artist. Full stop. Unfortunately, those places tend to be the ones where out-of-towner rich kids suppress everyone's earnings potential. ...she bloody well could in Akron, Ohio. But she doesn't want to be in Akron, and I don't blame her. 'cuz the "being an extra" thing ($600? Friend of mine bought Alfred Molina for $1250; I've never seen extras paid more than $150 a day) and the "DJ at a roller rink" thing and the makeup artist thing are donezo.There are five kinds of income: Subsistence, piecework, work-in-kind, wages and influence
She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black.
But her skills aren't worth $25/hr. in Akron, and the people she is competing for work with in NYC ARE subsidized, so they CAN take $25/hr. She's in every slot on Wallerstein's list of income categories. (I'm actually going to commission a large stained glass window from her, to help her through the holiday season.) She literally can't take a 40-hour a week job for even $25/hr because she has zero support/subsidizing from family/partner to keep her finances in the black.
...she bloody well could in Akron, Ohio. But she doesn't want to be in Akron, and I don't blame her.
"Worth" is the wrong way to look at it. She could bag groceries in Akron for $17 an hour. Maybe she can't earn $25 an hour anywhere doing anything except New York and LA. Like I said, civilization concentrates. But if she's making stained glass for someone on the other coast, a proximity to New York isn't a factor in that aspect of her business at least.
I'm not sure if we agree or not. I don't feel like we are saying the same thing. I said That is pretty clear to me. Do you agree? Sorry to hear about your struggling friend, it sounds very stressful, and reminds me how fortunate I am to have reached a point in life where I don't have financial anxiety, thanks in part to support I've received from family and rent-sharing roommates.The financial support Q gets from roommates and family means her employer has to pay her more, not less, to keep her as an employee.
A lot more businesses could afford to pay their employees 25 an hour as long as all their competitors had to pay the same thing. You can’t really pay folks 25 when your competitors are paying 13, or when UW outsources to India and can cut costs that way.
ROFL. No. That's not how competition works. If you are a welder and being paid $14/hr and the shop down the street is paying $25/hr, you leave your job and go get one over there. I tell you what ... I'll start a business as a call center doing tech support for Microsoft Office 365. All of my workers get paid $5/hr, and I am going to charge customers $25/hr for our services! The banks and investors will throw money at me! How can I NOT make $$$$$?!??
The thing I hate the most about economists and economics is the condescendingly simplistic way economic models work. Anyone sheep-dipped into engineering or, to a lesser extent, physics and chemistry will tell you is that your model should include everything relevant to the system and exclude everything that does not aid you in answering the question you're posing. Economists? The model should only include the stuff that proves your point and anyone who questions your boundary conditions is a heretic who should be burned at the stake. This is what drew me to Wallerstein. His whole point is that the only way you can study sociology in a limited way is by analyzing stunted little failurecultures that don't fucking get it and if you aren't analyzing the Triangle Trade AND everyone involved in it you aren't analyzing you're fearmongering. This whole 'who's subsidizing who' thing. It's overly simplistic. LA Times did an analysis back in 2016, 2017. The majority of people in LA under 30 were getting an average of $3k a month just to fucking live in LA. That was the beforetimes so good luck finding the article now, but USA Today wants you to know that the number of adults under 30 living with their parents has gone from 52% to 47% since 2020 so... obviously shut the fuck up. LA was a real wake-up for me. I was paying $800/mo for a shithole in North Hollywood and mixing reality TV so I could afford to go to meetings. Buddy of mine flew out from Hawaii, immediately moved into a $6000/mo penthouse and proceeded to work for free, 90 hours a week, for 18 months in various writer's rooms. Guess which one of us got staffed on Private Practice? Granted, he also nearly destroyed his marriage and did two stints in rehab but I mean... you can get a lot more done if your parents are subsidizing you $10k a month. Some industries are just.fucking.full of shit like that. Whenever we were having a miserable time on some show or other I would say "hey we could be wearing bags in Victorville at $350 for 12!" 'cuz the thing is? Those gigs exist, they're about half what they should be paying, and people take them because their parents are paying their rent and they are living the dream until they get sick of it, at which point they're going to go work at Daddy's bank anyway. Ask me about the Kings season opener I saw from the corporate box seats because a screenwriter friend's daddy couldn't find anyone to use the tickets. The reception gig is $13/hr because at any professional or legal organization with any kind of prestige, it's done by unpaid interns now. I knew a production company with five of them at any given time - people paying $20k a year to go to school at Emerson, then paying $8k a month to live in LA, so they could get "work experience." And because they were at Emerson, they worked for Emersonians, and got the gigs that nobody else could get when they were out. A lot of it? Script reading. I know a guy who did that professionally, had been doing it long enough to reject Being John Malkovich for HBO (I know). For reading your 20k word screenplay and writing up a 2500 word analysis of it, he made $25. He'd do five or six a day. And that's about all he did. So let's get back to the welder. If you are a welder and being paid $14/hr and the guy up the street is a "maker" who mostly herds packets at a data center but bought a MIG welder at Harbor Freight last week? He's going to take your business for practically free, right up to the point where he's decided he's bored with it. Let's get back to Quats. She's making $13 an hour because half of the jobs she could do have been taken up by children of friends doing it for nothing. "low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples" is a misrepresentation and he knows it and that's why we have each other blocked - so much easier to keep making your fallacious points when nobody calls you out on it. It's disingenuous to say that Quats is being subsidized by her family because we're talking about wages. It's more accurate to say that Quats' workplace is being artificially suppressed by every other family out there. There's a photographer in our building, or will be until December. She's 20. She has absolutely fucking no idea what she's doing, but she rented an office for $800 a month so that she could look professional. Lo and behold she's going through "family difficulties" and asked to be let out of her lease. She's the reason I stopped photographing for money - not her personally, but the legion of bored white women with an Amazon DSLR rig who basically need to earn a dollar to justify to their husbands that they're not hobbyists, they're professionals. The pandemic did a big, important thing - it pushed young professionals back in with their parents. And now? All those parents are saying "get a job." Whenever people who need the money to live compete against people who need the money for validation, wages go down. Libertarians don't see this because their boundary conditions are whatever justifies their hatred of their fellow man.
on god this is the truth - i live in a college town and work on a street adjacent to a campus of 50,000 -that's a lot of kids who will work for piss wages for spending money and a lot of kids who don't need any money but will work for free for "experience" i am making 13 dollars an hour because companies are entirely satisfied with being critically understaffed and paying peanuts to monkeys, just as long as the big number on the balance sheet gets bigger - when i see a motherfucker talk about the real world like everybody has perfect knowledge of all their options and a perfect ability to carry them out my eyes glaze over because it's a pitiful cardboard cutout of the world that gets trotted out to win cheap points - hint: if every economics 101 alum agrees with you, that's more of a knock on you than a benefit every kindergarden class agrees: 5 minus 6 is 0 because when you take away 5 apples from 5 apples, there aren't any left to take away. libtards destroyed with facts and logic
Excellent clarification. When looking at broken systems, it's important to be precise with our speech, and I wasn't. Thanks for that! I definitely didn't want to seem to be placing the blame on Quats or her family... they are doing what anybody would do to help their kid/partner get along. It's disingenuous to say that Quats is being subsidized by her family because we're talking about wages. It's more accurate to say that Quats' workplace is being artificially suppressed by every other family out there.
And when I need welding services I call around, get quotes for $30/hr and $40/hr, and support the business that has minimized costs and passed the savings on to me, because that's how competition works. You might be willing to spend more money on a business that you know pays employees better (even if you get exactly the same service from them). If there are enough customers like you, a business can get some market advantage with a pro-employee reputation. I doubt there are many such customers. The most vocal critics of Amazon on Hubski are also Prime members, paying $139 a year for the privilege of patronizing Bezos. They even admit that low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples, as if low prices and minimizing labor costs are completely unrelated. I shop at Trader Joe's all the time. I believe staff there is well-compensated; they seem loyal as I see the same faces week after week. I look for two francophone workers and try to chat with them. Their compensation costs more than what they would get at Walmart, and that extra compensation comes out of my pocket, obviously. I have a comfortable budget for groceries, so I am willing to pay more for the pleasant atmosphere. If my budget were tighter, I would save money by giving up on charming staff and shopping elsewhere.
I mean you pay the bare minimum that you can or you find some way to show your customer value in the fact that you can hire significantly better talent for 25 than I can for 13. Business leaders (professional management class not small biz owners) are Penny wise and dollar foolish so more often then not my shitty 13 dollar high school drop outs look equivalent to your 25$ professionals. In your example I’ll undercut you with people that get paid 5$ a day in India because that’s business. That’s how we ended up in the shitty support situation we’re in today,
13 dollars american is about 22-23 dollars NZ apparently so that might make it seem a bit more feasible i can live where i am because i live with my boyfriend and we split the rent, otherwise rent and utilities per month would be more than my total income beyond paying rent, I'm lucky enough to be on my parents' healthcare and to have my phone bill be part of a family plan, so that saves a significant amount of money per month beyond that it's pretty much as you would expect
So... an alternative view. Let's start by looking at the data everyone is quoting. A reasonable statistician might look at that and say "that data looks noisy, yet consistent." You can look at it another way and go... "dafuq are they bitching about." Especially if you pair it with its usual counterpart But clearly, work sucks now. So how do you make it newsworthy? They tried talking about "healthcare worker burnout." That shit's real. We know more pediatricians retiring this year than pediatricians staying in business. Our local hospital tried to shut down their labor and delivery unit because they're having to hire travel nurses at 200% wages because all the locals are fucking sick of it (the hospital district reminded Providence Corporation that they aren't allowed to do that, no part of their contract guarantees them profit, suck it up corporate trash). But at the end of the day, most people aren't healthcare workers. They tried talking about "essential worker burnout" but it only took a few union movements being shut down and put out of business before everyone saw "essential worker" as the euphemism for "expendable human" that it is. Besides, most of them are a shade of brown and us wypepo know they hate us already so... best not empathize too much. What's funny is if you're in a trade union, the negotiation is very simple: "I work these hours, and you pay me for them." "striving for the extra mile" or "hustling" or whatever euphemism you choose to use for overwork is laughed at - no, I do this job, for this rate, and if you would like more work, you will pay for more hours. As the NY Electrician's Local told a project manager of mine, "Lady, we got two speeds and you don't wanna see the other one." But trade unions are dead until something truly radical happens and boy howdy, very, very few cubicle dwellers are in one. And the people we're talking about? They're the ones who got paid for three to six months of not working, in many cases more money than they would have made if they were actually doing a job. It took me four hours to pick up my mill in mid-2020. State unemployment was higher than the going rate to drive a forklift at the loading dock. The forklift driver who eventually helped me was very angry about this, because it caused most of his friends to "catch COVID". I think part of it was he realized he was the dumbass still pushing pallets around for $13 an hour when he could have been drinking beer and playing Madden. This contagion started in the WSJ. They pushed "quiet quitting" like it was "fetch" in Mean Girls. They could never quite get past the "no it's the children who are wrong" of it all but they're the WSJ, they live there. Watching the Washington Post stroke their chin about it is something else. If you dig down into their reporting they don't have much, and what they have is embarrassing: ...okay, assholes being assholes. Quick, without looking it up, which is down more in 2022, Meta or Ethereum? Gotta do something to make the papers think Zuck has been doing more than creating pants for Second LIfe. ...but did they even follow their own link? Microsoft coined the term "productivity paranoia" to indicate something that DEFINITELY IS NOT HAPPENING. Except they're not, because nobody wants that, and nobody is looking for it. The rest of it is navelgazing, including from the World's Wrongest Economist. There's no there there. The actual data, aside from one down quarter moderately, vaguely more down than this time last year, is that everyone is busting fucking ass. But there are a bunch of pointy-haired bosses who are certain that their remote workers aren't grinding it hard enough, so fire up the Wurlitzer.Tech CEOs such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more.
Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said his company coined the term “productivity paranoia” to describe employers’ anxieties about whether their employees are working hard enough.
People are working more than ever, while leaders—already worried by signals of macroeconomic decline—are questioning if their employees are being productive. The majority of employees (87%) report that they are productive at work, and productivity signals across Microsoft 365 continue to climb. This spring, we found that the number of meetings per week had increased by 153% globally for the average Microsoft Teams user since the start of the pandemic, and there is still no indication that this trend has reversed, suggesting this peak could become the new baseline.
Many employers have started using software to track employee activity.
My employer “We care deeply about the mental and emotional well being of all our employees . . . unless we have to do anything that actually costs money. As an aside, since we’re starting a new quarter, now is a good time to announce both pay raises and cuts to work hours. Enjoy that extra $.25! You earned it! 😊 👍 🎉”