| WHAT MAKES THE AMERICAN WORK WEEK GO ON FOREVER ? |
http://groups.google.com |
| Robert Morpheal, Bob Ezergailis, Morphealism (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2008/12/17 05:42 |
WHAT MAKES THE AMERICAN WORK WEEK GO ON FOREVER ?
Recently Europe has moved towards reduction of the work week. Britain
has begun to debate whether to opt out or in. In North America, under
American influence, work weeks have statistically gotten longer and
longer, even during recessionary periods. In some instances work weeks
are longer during recessionary periods, providing fewer jobs than
would otherwise have been the case, worsening recession. There is a
clear trend in that regard.
There is really no real need, when adequate planning is involved, for
anyone to work excessive hours. What are the factors that lead to
longer work weeks ? What really makes the American work week go on
forever, and ever ? And why do some American and American influenced
companies frown on workers wanting time off, not working long overtime
have largely become heretical issues in the American religion of work
psychologically tortured and thrown in the fire. A significant portion
of workers never see real paid vacations, statutory paid holidays, and
quite a significant number have no hope of a retirement pension. There
What then are the dysfunctional causes of longer and longer work
weeks, and in some regards longer and longer working lives ? Not that
we can change all of them in the immediate, but over a longer period
market opportunity salesmanship. The world of work will have to change
as the society changes, and as the economy changes. Work will have to
be more shared, restructured, redefined, and given a more balanced
value within the socio-psychological context of human lives. Healthy
living requires healthy working and that is not as common today as we
might have expected.
1). Poor planning. Failure to plan far enough ahead. Lack of foresight
as to problems. Excessively rushed schedules. Stockpiling excessive
inventories of product. Shortages from poor inventory planning and
inadequate forecasting of demand.
2). Poorly trained, inefficient workers who take far longer to do
tasks than it should take for a properly trained person. This
includes an epidemic of bad, undisciplined, work habits. Self
discipline, and proper attention, is not well taught in education
today, so no wonder there are serious shortcomings.
3). Production for the sake of production. as an absolute value, is a
problem. There are always instances of producing more, and working
longer, simply to produce more, without real need. Doing unnecessary
work is epidemic in some organizations. No one really needs it. No one
really wants it. However, it is part of the culture and there is
always opportunity to do more of the unnecessary.
4). Corporate cultures that encourage killing time are commonplace.
Many managers lead by bad example. They have nothing to do, but they
have to keep doing it, long into the night. It is taken as making a
good impression, in far too many organizations. In part this tendency
comes from the belief that extending hours proves "work ethic" and
therefore assures being valued more highly. In many instances duration
is falsely valued far more than real productivity,
5). A surprising number of workers work unnecessarily long hours to
escape from personal and family issues that desperately need other
methods of resolution. In some regards the breakdown of the family and
of other forms of social relation is not only worsened but excused by
the fact of excessively long hours. Too often the job is blamed for
the divorce, and for all manner of other family issues, including
juvenile delinquency. It is convenient to stay at work, and avoid
family and personal issues, when it provides such a commonly socially
acceptable excuse. It has gotten to the point where a parent can blame
every issue that their child has, inclusive of any serious problems,
the worker.
6). Long working hours can also be an excuse for inadequate personal
development and lack of other interests in life. This is a
in avoidance of the real problem. The same workers very often gripe
about how they are overworked. In fact careful examination of what
they actually do reveals they spend a small fraction of their time in
actual productive activities.
7). The lack of an adequate nationalized public health system that
provides a comprehensive package for medical and dental care.
Employers are encouraged to reduce employee numbers and to work
employees for long hours due to the rising cost of benefits. As the
cost of benefits goes up, the hours that are sought from employees
tends to rise. This impacts both the average work week, and the
provision of vacation time.
8). The lack of an adequate nationalized, government run, pension
program for all workers. Employers similarly are encouraged to reduce
work force, and particularly permanent work force, working employees
for longer hours, due to the cost of pensions. When pensions are
government managed this objection to shorter working hours, and to the
provision of vacation time, disappears.
and the available work still expands to fill the same amount of time.
10). Laziness. Many occupations and many jobs today provide a
relatively leisurely environment and pace. Laziness concealed under
the guise of work ethic is more common than it might seem to be.
Laziness also in terms of the more demanding activities of household
chores and a more active life. Work is less demanding than a family
outing, cleaning the yard, washing the kitchen floor, or any number of
common activities. Work can be avoidance of those activities, even
when there are routine physical demands involved in the job. Peculiar
as that seems, you have to study people and how routine versus non
routine (less frequently performed actions) tend to affect choice.
Doing the same thing and avoiding less frequent tasks which offer
different challenges, can be a form of laziness, as much as it can be
a matter of habit. Avoidance of those other tasks, and their different
demands is a factor.
11). Familiarity. People tend to put in more time with what they are
familiar with and tend to avoid things they are unfamiliar with. Long
term employees fall into this category. They often like to spend
endless hours of the work they know best, even if it is unnecessary.
They are less likely to invest that time in anything else, and
particularly in anything unfamiliar to them. This varies somewhat from
habit, because habit is about how the work is handled, not so much
about the preference for types of activities.
12). In some instances the social options outside of work have largely
been eliminated. The only social expression, other than sitting in an
audience passively watching something happen, or shopping in
depersonalized shopping environments, is more and more often work.
Corporate culture is often the only culture, even if it does not
really meet most social needs outside of the need for income. When
there are no real options, workers tend to remain within the one
situation that offers some, even if vague and inadequate, sense of
social connection.
13). Use of drugs, either illicit or prescription. Time sense is
altered by many drugs and so is the element of obsessive fascination.
While productivity falls, time spent on the task can increase very
substantially, with significant loss of connection with surroundings.
The worker too absorbed in his or her job might easily be on drugs.
14). Bad management. In some instances management can be abusive, even
sadistic, assigning useless tasks, deliberately frustrated tasks, or
tasks deliberately made excessively complicated, including issues they
already have answers for, such as acquiring complex arrays of
difficult to obtain data and its analysis when all of that already
nefarious practices. Bad management also leads by bad example. Another
15). The false belief in specialization and irreplacability requiring
someone to do a task for excessive hours when someone else could
easily and relatively quickly be trained to fill in for the same
function. That false viewpoint of many jobs is one that many workers
tend to promote as a form of job security. After all if no one else
can do it, the job must be secure. Often careful examination of the
job and its real activities reveals that the assertions about it are
far from the actual truth. Failures as to better division of labor,
and cross training, can also be bad management. All too common a fact.
is
often a problem. Worker and bad management hiding of the knowledge
becomes more of the job than the job itself, wasting even more time
and extending the work week even further.
16). The belief in some organizations that workers must be at their
duty posts, on stand by, even if there is no work to actually do.
Probably a carry over from the military model of troops standing in
defense, on sentry, or in action, but usually very inappropriate and
quite avoidable in the world of most types of other work. (This very
same factor can sometimes be used by bad management to actually
frustrate and bore employees out. Boredom can be a very destructive
element, damaging motivation, and ruining potential. Insecure bad
management is among the worst, but so are some insecure co workers,
particularly in dysfunctional organizations, who seeing competence
seek to destroy it using tactics such as imposed boredom. This adds to
wasted working time in many companies.)
Not all of the factors are at work in every instance, but they are all
at work somewhere. In many instances a mixture of those factors
conspires to extend the work week and working hours into the limits of
human physical and mental endurance, or perhaps even beyond. Taken as
a form of heroism, that social, and psychological, dysfunctional again
gains value, while other lifestyles are deprecated and demeaned in
favor of the increasingly one dimensional, Marcusean, work place.
Robert Morpheal
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