This behavior is more a response to the notion that a work day should be 100% productivity at all times, but that’s not how most jobs work nor how human beings do work.
I get paid to do a certain job, if I’m given 6 hours to do a job and finish it in 3 and then do nothing for the next 3 hours that’s not me being lazy or taking advantage of my employer.
As a tradesman, my boss would fire me in a heartbeat if i took those 3 hours. Instead the customer still gets charged the 6 hours qouted price and I’m expected to go do more work or put in some time around the shop with the extra time.
By your example are you expecting your employer to still only pay you 6 hours of work even if the job ended up taking 8?
If I do a job efficiently that doesn’t mean my boss should then get to then extract free labor out of me. It’s why hours alone are a poor way of judging labor value, and it results in a vicious cycle of demanding more and more productivity from workers with them getting less for it.
I think the work day for most types of work should be shortened with no reduction in pay because it’s been proven that many industries can reduce the work week to 32 hours with no drop in productivity, and in fact it comes with savings for the business (ex. less time running facilities and services, better use of resources).
If a customer is provided a quote before hand then that should just be the price, if the contractor can’t provide what was promised in the time frame they themselves gave then that’s on them.
There needs to come a point where the workers themselves start receiving the benefits of their own efficiency – when time is created it should be workers who get that time back for themselves, instead what we see is that the CEOs syphon up all that extra time for themselves and either work less or convert it into money for their own pocket.
How some
federalemployees are pretending to work using ‘mouse jigglers’.FTFY.
This happens everywhere that managers are more interested in warming chairs than actually being productive:
- If you measure your employees by their work done, this isn’t an issue; if they’re getting what you think should be eight hours of work done in four, you promote them, pay them more and/or give them more responsibilities.
- If you measure them by the percentage of hours they spend warming a chair, they’ll…warm the chair.
Yeah, so maybe the public service needs to take a look at say “if we have two people warming a chair for 60% of their work time, maybe we should fire two and have the third only warming the chair 10% of the time”
