A common idea is that an employer sends an amount of money into an employee’s bank account each month, and in exchange the employee dedicates a number of hours to working for the employer. Through my decades as a member of the workforce, I have seen examples of this in practice. But more commonly, in my experience, the salary is not given in exchange for services rendered to the employer, but just to keep the employee off the street and away from the library.
I have mostly worked for private companies, all pretending to be for-profit organisations operating on capitalist and rational principles. If the companies were really operating on those principles, they would look very different from what they do. If you visited the offices of one of my former employers, you would rarely find anyone doing productive work. You would find people pretending to work, and people not bothering to pretend. You would find people arriving late, taking an absurd number of breaks, and leaving early.
The least productive employees have the highest probability of being promoted to management roles, but it is not enough to be unproductive. You also have to be comfortable sitting in management meetings, pretending not only that you are doing the very things you were promoted for not doing, but also that every other manager is doing the things they were promoted for not doing. Management teams at the companies I have worked at, over the past 15 years or more, have all been these cult-like groups whose members have no other function than to uphold the fiction that the managers are necessary to the operation of the company, and that they are working very hard and therefore deserve better salaries and more time off. They also conspire to enforce the idea that lower-ranking employees are hopeless, incompetent, and untrustworthy, and that the various teams would not be the least bit productive without their managers. Another aspect of this conspiracy is to pretend that the teams are in fact productive — thanks to their own leadership — while ignoring that the teams are not productive at all: in part because of the managers’ counterproductive way of pretending to manage them, and in part because the employees react to those conditions by not even bothering to try.
When I was a young person, I was taught to have a strong work ethic: to work hard, be loyal, do the right thing, and so on. I have done that, at times pushing against the limits of the organisations I worked for in order to follow through on it — working harder and doing more than my employer expected of me. This work ethic is rarely appreciated or even recognised. I even get the impression that it is looked down on, as though I am an idiot for making an effort. Sometimes my employers have been actively annoyed by the work I’ve done, for reasons I have not fully understood — though I suspect it may be because solving a problem is a way of pointing out that the problem existed, which, to the thin-skinned manager, reads as an accusation. The work ethic I was taught has not resulted in any material advantages or rewards. It seems that it is merely a mental condition that makes it easier for lazy people to dump their workload onto the person foolish enough to carry it for them, so they can spend their time scheming for promotions and salary increases.
I have been at companies where 75 percent of the employees were let go, and the company continued to operate just fine, even though the remaining 25 percent didn’t work very hard either. The addition of more employees has rarely, in my experience, had any practical reason behind it. Hiring more people, giving them impressive job titles, and scheduling meetings with them is mainly a method of making senior management feel more important and successful.
Where the money to pay all these people comes from, and why companies hire more people than they need to keep their business running, I haven’t the faintest idea. I wish I knew. I speculate that the money comes in the form of investments from optimistic rich people, support and tax benefits from the government, and bank loans. I am quite sure that the companies are not simply making a profit and using that profit to employ people who don’t contribute anything — at least not in economic terms — to the company. That would be a kind of mad charity, and given the sociopathic nature of management culture, I cannot believe the circus I’m describing is paid for by the profits of the business owners. The money has to come from somewhere else.
In my case, I spend around forty hours a week at an office. At the office, I do very little — not because I enjoy sitting idly, but because there isn’t anything to do. There are short periods, months at most, which are busy. But when times are busy, it is not because there is much to do; it is busy because, due to the neglectfulness and incompetence of the managers and owners, we don’t have access to tools that would allow us to perform our tasks at a reasonable rate. So when something needs doing, I spend a week on something that would take an hour if I were allowed simple and relatively inexpensive tools. These companies, which pretend to be capitalist and rational, prefer to pay a week’s salary rather than buy a tool at a small fraction of that salary — a tool that would allow the employee to work many times faster and with greater precision. They pretend to have rational reasons for their priorities but will never explain what those reasons are. I cannot believe they would make these so-called judgements if they were playing with their own hard-earned money. It is all a game with fake money, or other people’s money. The inefficiency becomes very visible when times are busy, because anyone with an IQ above 20 can see the stupidity of the way things are done. But as I said: the norm is to do very little. To sit passively, waiting for something to happen, while pretending there is always something to do — as though the purpose of my job, and the jobs of my colleagues and my manager, were to invent fake reasons for why we are there at all.
Some days there really is nothing to do. Some days there is something to do, but not enough to occupy me for even half the day. Almost every day, I have at least five hours of idle time. These five hours per day — twenty hours per week, eighty hours per month — belong to my employer, because they are paying for them. At the same time, my employer does not ensure that I have something to use those hours for. That raises the question: may I use those hours for my own projects? The employer would obviously say “no.” It would be illogical to say anything else. But in practical reality, via their actions, they say “yes” — at least as long as “my own project” means sitting around, stewing in my own juices, and not causing trouble. There will never be any conflict as long as I spend the idle time doing absolutely nothing. But conflicts may arise if I use that same time for something constructive or creative, such as writing or studying.
It is maddening to spend hours, days, weeks, months, years sitting idly in an office, being actively prevented from doing meaningful and productive work by the very organisations which pretend to have hired me in order to do meaningful and productive work. Is the responsible thing to continue sitting around and deteriorating just because the time belongs to the employer? Or is the responsibility to do something with it — not to spend time which would otherwise go to productive work for the company on my own projects, but to spend the time which would otherwise be wasted on something which may contribute something to the world while sustaining my own body, mind and soul?
I have resisted thinking these things for most of my professional life. And I’m coming to what I believe is a realisation, that whether someone has bought my time or not, the time is still mine. My life consists of those hours. The right thing to do is to retain the right to my own time, even when it has been paid for with money by someone else, at least when those who purchased it choose not to fill it with anything, turning employment into a form of captivity. After all, that is not what I signed the work contract for. I signed it to work, not to be locked away to do nothing. I will reclaim all the time that my employer wastes. I reframe the relationship: the employer is paying me to work, they are not buying my time. My time belongs to me, and the salary is merely an option which gives the employer the right to instruct me to do work for them for a given number of hours. And when they don’t take advantage of their option, I will use the time as I see fit.