We need money to live in the modern world, to pay for food, rent/mortgage, travel, clothing, entertainment, etc. It is easy for the subconscious to identify the need for money as a core piece of our identity. Rich people are often given higher social ranking, while poor people often are lower in the ranks, and this segregation of people by how much money they have dismisses the individual value of the particular person. Is the rich person truly better quality person than the poor person? The answer is actually quite complex because examples and counter examples are all over the map on these distinctions. But this and other issues can drive the subconscious of an individual to seek money as the source of stability and self worth.
This may turn into seeking to buy brand name whatevers of prominent brand names, because wearing Gucci shoes (for example) makes ones wealth more obvious. But buying the prominent brand names means you spend more to buy your things, than if you simply bought the inexpensive generically branded items. The question is whether that prominently branded item has a real qualitative advantage over the inexpensive generically branded item.
There are a few issues here:
The more money you spend requires you spending more of your life energy earning that money.
Quality, well built, useful items, makes better use of your money than if you seek out the cheapest flimsiest item to save a few dollars.
Feeling good inside yourself about the stuff you own
That is, what's the proper balance about owning stuff that makes sense to you, the time you spend to earn that money, and efficiently using the money you gather with the time you spend earning money.
For most of 2009 I was unemployed (like many people) and (unlike many people) attempting to make a living using this blog. Recently I rejoined the workforce to have a job (and more stable income) and being employed again has given me perspective on the role of working for a living. What I want to write about today is a comment by a co-worker that represents a typical intrusion of the corporate needs into personal life. I've never liked how our corporate masters feel they can require any obeisance including neglect of our personal lives in order that the corporation flourish. Having spent a year working for myself it reinforced for me the wrongness of a corporation demanding intrusions into employees personal time.
Just now I was standing next to a co-worker, he noticed a list of corporate training classes being offered and remarked how it would be more convenient for him if the class were held at night. I think his view is he's too busy during the day taking care of job stuff, and a night time class wouldn't interfere with his job duties. Uh..
The time we have to live this life is limited by the number of breaths between our first squeal at birth and our last gasp at death. In between those two breaths we breath in and out several times a minute, and have a life to live while taking those breaths.
What's the best use of that time? Is it the best use of our time to spend 24/7 at the job or otherwise taking care of job stuff? Or is the best use of that time to lead a life of balance between work, pleasure, home, travel, etc?
Maybe you know some people who conceptualize that the best use of their life is to spend it on the job. Obviously I know at least one person with that idea. Heck, I used to live that way myself. But after some time, and after being laid off a couple times, it became clear for me: the company doesn't care about me. It doesn't matter how they dress up claims that a given corporation will take good care of their employees, the bottom line is that companies drop their employees in a moment if the money in the balance sheet says they have to cut staff.
Why then do employees give any loyalty to the company if the company has no loyalty for them?
To make a few guesses...
Adrenaline: Some people get high on working hard. Corporations are all too happy to find an employee who'll work 24/7, maybe because that person will replace hiring a couple more people.
Fear: Some people fear the unemployed life, don't know how to survive without employment, and need someone to give them something to do.
Normality: The normalthink is that people have a job and the boss can tell you to do anything. There's a lot of laws behind that normalthink.
What I believe is that my time is the period where I can pursue my own interests. The time I give to the corporation is when I have to deny my interests and do what the company says to do. At the times I've let the company intrude their demands into my time I was completely unable to pursue my interests, and that caused a lot of internal pain.
To put a boundary between my company and personal time my employment, now, is on a contract basis. It means there is a strict set of hours I'm on the job, the corporation can't demand I work overtime, and my time is my time. Speaking of which my lunch hour just ended and I have to go back. Cheers.
The word 'Sustainable' most often is used to refer to resource utilization such as sustainable farming practices that preserve soil health. However the word itself refers to patterns which sustain life over the long term. Sustainable farming practices sustain an ecosystem over the long term, etc. But what about our day-to-day lives can also be made sustainable as well?
In my day job my coworkers and myself have recently undergone a period of extreme overwork. The product being developed has a huge feature list, there is a lot to accomplish in order to achieve the envisioned goals and there is very little time to reach the goal. This of course meant the team routinely worked overtime often 80 more hours a week.
This sort of scenario happens in businesses around the world all the time. The bosses of the world seem to have worked out ways to motivate employees to work long hours. What inspires me write at this moment is the unhealthy condition this creates in employees and the employers responsibility.
It's widely known that working long hours is unhealthy. A lot depends on the sort of work being performed, as long hours in front of a computer doesn't create the same bodily stress as long hours threshing grain in a field.
The Center for Disease Control publishes Work Schedules: Shift Work and Long Work Hours , an overview of studies regarding long work hours, working at night, and shift work. It refers to greater degree of accidents and other health issues.
The impact of overtime and long work hours on occupational injuries and illnesses: new evidence from the United StatesResults: After adjusting for those factors, working in jobs with overtime schedules was associated with a 61% higher injury hazard rate compared to jobs without overtime. Working at least 12 hours per day was associated with a 37% increased hazard rate and working at least 60 hours per week was associated with a 23% increased hazard rate. A strong dose-response effect was observed, with the injury rate (per 100 accumulated worker-years in a particular schedule) increasing in correspondence to the number of hours per day (or per week) in the workers' customary schedule.
This article in the International Game Developers Association website is especially appropriate: Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 LessonsMore than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks. In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.
In the game industry the bosses routinely force employees into crunch mode working the employees for long long long hours. But this article shows decades of research into the productivity available from a workforce based on the hours of work per week. Rested healthy employees are able to do more and able to perform more reliably than ones who are worn out and punchy from working long hours. Duh..
Working Long Hours: a Review of the EvidenceThe review of the research literature shows that long hours working, especially when coupled with sleep disruption, causes deterioration of task performance, because it has detrimental effects on such things as rates of error, pace of work and social behaviour....The review of the research literature shows clear grounds for concern about the adverse effect of long hours working and (the frequency of) health and safety incidents. However, most of this research focuses upon specific occupations (eg long distance lorry drivers, the medical professions), which precludes more general conclusions being drawn. ...The review of the research literature shows that there is little robust statistical evidence on the effects of long hours working on employee motivation, absence and turnover. However, self-reporting and organisational case studies suggest that long working hours has a negative effect on motivation, absence and turnover....
Why do employers regularly ask for long work hours? Great question. Perhaps they're all skinflinting scrooges who don't care about the negative effects on their employees. Who knows? Clearly this is a pattern which has existed for centuries if not more.
In the modern societies like the U.S.A. there are laws about work hours. These regulations vary from country to country but obviously there are ways the bosses have of getting around the laws.
One way is that in my profession nobody works on an hourly basis but instead on a salaried basis. Such workers are not subject to hour limits on their work time and can be subject to extra work.
Employers are in a position of leverage over their employees. Obviously the employer is in the position of providing money, and the money is what provides food and shelter. You can easily analyze this with the hierarchy of needs, with the first rung of the hierarchy being food and shelter. Basic survival of the employee, then, is dependent on receiving money from the employer. Hence this puts the employer in the position of providing the employees survival. THAT is a crucial role to play and even subtle threats on that flow of money can appear to the employee to be a threat to survival.
Can an employee effectively choose to keep their work life in healthy balance? This seems like a difficult thing to accomplish. For example some fields of work routinely have long shifts such as in medicine or fire fighters. If every employer in your chosen field of work insists on unhealthy work hours, what can you do?
What is the ideal arrangement of working, workers, employment, employers, and sustainable survival? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
