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Working Hard?
Two related stories about working hard in the U.S.: U.S. workers are granted less (and take less) vacation time than workers in other industrialized nations. And if that wasn't enough, changes to the overtime laws will eliminate overtime pay for many workers.
Is it just me or does it seem like almost everything Dubya does is intended to lower the quality of life for the average American?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't work.
You can all bitch and moan all you like about no vacation time, not enough overtime pay, etc, but the more you take, the more you'll end up paying.
The only way you'll get ahead is to start contracting for yourself. But that's scary and risky!
Guess what... running a business is too. That's why they get compensated so much if they're successful.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
...and eventually, no job.
Avarice, treachery, greed, lying, gluttony, cheating and petty office politics have become their own justification in the average workplace. Unless you "fit in," you will eventually be fired. In order to fit in, you must:
1) Do exactly as you are told: no more, no less.
2) Accept every lunch and meeting invitation
3) Reply enthusiastically to every e-mail, especially if it has a colorful signature.
4) Agree, even when the people you are agreeing with are wrong.
5) Never offer an opinion, or attempt to think about your job or the company.
The educations of an entire generation are being destroyed in the rush to below-average mediocrity.
Only the very few companies actually accomplish anything truly innovative. The rest simply exist, like tree moss, consuming resources and producing very little. This better get fixed, because this process is called "eating your own seedcorn."
Someday, hope will be born of something other than a business case.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I work in 'management'. In fact all of the geeks and tech heads work in management. Who do I manage? Myself.
Why is this important? Because I don't get overtime at all, and haven't for the past 10 years. Last week I worked 4 days out of 5 0800 (8am) - 2300 (11pm). Will I get a dime more on my paycheck? No. Do I have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped get a major project up and running? Yep. Will I have a job at the end of the year? Probably.
Who is getting layed off in my company? Not 'management' (at least not the techy ones); we know too much, and are willing to work until our fingers bleed...tough luck if you can't keep up or don't have useful skills.
Just a fact of life. Of course I'm probably going to die before I'm 65 to a massive aneurism...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
All this will serve to do is increase the power base of Unions. More and more workers will find that with Union help, they can negotiate to keep that overtime and employers will find themselves caught with having to negotiate Union contracts when before they wouldn't have to. As a Republican, I find this meddling in Labor laws to go against Conservative principles in that the Government should never get in the way of a guy making an honest buck. While these laws would not currently affect me (I'm salaried already) they will affect people like my little brother that busts his hump on a daily basis as a welder (as challening a trade as any IMO) to make the cash to keep take care of his family, let his wife be a stay at home Mom, and make a better life for his kids. That is a Conservative Philosophy and Bush is hurting it with this.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Taking away overtime is just a slap in the face to every employee in that: If every worker out there puts in his/her all for their employer, and receives no benefit from it, where exactly is the motivation to continue to work hard?
"I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin"
The US also has one of the highest rates of burnout in the world. Japan who was 2nd lowest in the chart also has the same problem.
When will American compaines understand that having their workers take acations is good for the company. People who take time off, do more effecent work. It like the recent studies that show once workers start putting in more hours their productivity can increase to about 10 hours a day but an office worker that is doing 12 hr days less productive than when they were doing 8 hour days since they spend so much work time doing other things.
It will be interesting to see what happens in New Zealand. Its my understanding that they used to have a European model for holiday time but have recently removed some of thouse requirements so they are more like the US model. Maybe that explains why at least 50% of their labor pool is in Australia.
I've currently have 34.5 unused vacation days. Over the next year, I'll collect 20 more. I think its time for a round the world trip.
But not anymore. I grew up and got out of that rat race. Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
So what do I do with all of this free time?
I spend it with my family, I go backpacking, skiing, etc. I indulge in hobbies in everything from laser light shows to weaving. I donate time to non-profits like the local farmer's market, church groups, Habitat for Humanity, the Community Farm Aliance, and local theatres.
Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
Opt out!
Just as an example, as an ex-US employee and now a French one (Dubya made me flee ;^), I'd like to outline the difference in the vacation package for the approximate same work in the same company.
In the US, after 6 years in the company I was entitled to 18 days off. Each day you are sick is decounted on your vacation days. I only got a handfull of 'US Holidays' free vacation days (New year, Memorial day, Independance day, Thanksgiving and Christmas). That's it. And that's considered fairly generous.
In France it doesn't matter how long you've been in the company, we all get the same package:25 days of vacations plus another 12 days of RTT (you cannot cumulate those RTT with regular vacations days, and you can't take more than 5 consecutive RTTs). In addition there is a mountain of free 'French Holiday': New Year, Easter Monday, Labor Day, WWII veterans' day, Ascension, Whit Monday, Bastille day, Assumption, All Saints' Day, WWI Veteran day, Christmas. 11!
Total?
Us: A grand total of 23 days off.
France: 48 days off.
Guess where I choose to live?
Vacations are good though, but you have to think of it this way, you should have a job you actually WANT to do, and you wont have a problem working 12 hours a day. Of course if you work at Mc Donalds you'll hate working 12 hours a day.
BZZZT. Wrong answer.
I have a job for one reason: to pay the bills. If I'm looking for something I want to do, I'll spend time at home (or maybe at Lake Powell) with my wife and kids. 12 hours a day seriously detracts from that. Therefore, 12 hours a day is out of the question.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
That's nice for you, I'm glad you are happy with your life. Some of us, however, want the satisfaction of seeing our children grow up and have other intersts. So while you voluteer to bust your ass, please don't think that's normal and that you should force everone else into your lifestyle. One day, when the non-technical managers decide to screw you in some kind of SCO like blaze of bullshit and stock manipulation, you might have regrets.
Slave driving is a bad sign. Some fields really are competitive like this. Most are not and an honest day's work brings an honest day's profits. Management that tries to squeze normal occumpations to frenzies like this are simply greedy. If your management is willing to screw you, the stockholders and cutomers are next and it's time to go.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If you want to understand genuine liberalism, read John Locke, Adam Smith, or basically anything written by the founding fathers of the US. If you want to understand the bullshit that people call liberalism today, read the Communist Manifesto.
As has been said many times -- it only takes twenty years for liberal to become a conservative, even without changing a single idea. The whole *point* of liberalism is to be avant garde. Adam Smith, believe it or not, was a *radical*. Being a Smith fan today is just as silly as being an Velvet Underground fan today -- what was once outrageous is just old hat today. Heck, even the conservative economists at the University of Chicago don't totally subscribe to the idea of the free market anymore. And Marx is over 100 years out of date, btw.
Ok, so I'm ineligible for overtime based both on my pay scale and my degree. I make what most snivelers would call "damn good money" but somehow after two years out of school, and under the crushing load of student loans, it doesn't seem like a whole hell of a lot of money to me. After Uncle Sam and the Commonwealth are finished raping me for more than 55% of my income (including all taxes, like sales, property, gasoline, income, wage, etc), I actually end up making just as much money working for $7.25/hr at the bikeshop where I have my moonlight job. The bike shop is a hell of a lot more fun, so I'm wondering why I don't just do that.
Oh yeah, those student loans... all $60k worth of them.
"Make an investment in your future" they tell you. "You'll be worth so much more money" they tell you. I drive a 15 year old car with 200k miles on it, live in a dumpy three bedroom house in the ghetto with two other technical "professionals," and have a very hard time making ends meet on what's left of my biweekly pittance.
What I've learned from the last 10 or so years of my life is that a) a college degree isn't worth it - as it will only be used to prove that you're capable of training your replacements from India and b) get a job because you enjoy it, not because it pays well. It's amazing how much I sit in my cubicle teaching the three guys from Bangalore how to do my job, looking forward to making my seven bucks at the bike shop.
Obviously you have not or you would know that only a very small amount of your taxes per year (a few dollars) goes to support welfare recipiants. Unless you count companies like Phillip-Morris and Ford who get shit-tons of money to stay afloat.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
American workers are also more stressed, shorter lived, more irate, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to murder someone else, less fulfilled, and more likely to trade their humanity for The Company than their German and British counterparts.
I wonder if there's a correlation?
Java coders are the same way. I'm all about making it easier to write good software, garbage collection and clean syntax rules. Nothing against java or the people who use it but I'm just amazed at how many of these guys call themselves software engineers and have no idea what is actually happening in the system on with the hardware. I was working with a team working on a tomcat based JSP web application, the question came up, why does this app need 512MB of RAM and a 800Mhz Pentium-III to run slowly with only 2 clients attached? We need it to work with at least 20 clients attached. Does that strike anyone as a little heavy? (It just reads a few tables from a SQL database and formats them in to html, not even fancy shit yet... it's practically serving up static HTML) silence, has anyone done any performance work? How about memory consumption, how can we improve it? silence. Do we need to rewrite this using a different technology? Panic! "Maybe if we bump it up to a dual or quad processor machine with 2GB of RAM...
I'm not a superstar. I did well at a good university, there is a lot more that I don't know than I do, I've only got about 15 years of professional experience, but there are a shit load of people who know next to nothing, and they are trying to draw down $70k, $80k, $100K a year and the job simply doesn't get done with that kind of talent flooding the workplace.
I can count the number of top notch professionals I've worked with. I care about my craft, I'm always learning and like to keep current and know about things, there just more people who like to play video games and surf the web and somehow equate that to being a professional tech worker. 10 years ago there was a lot more talent amongst the people in this biz, I looked up to people I worked with knowing I could learn from them. Now I'm just floored by the kids we bring in, they want the money, they want the sexy work, they just can't do it and they think that they can.
So why do we work long hours? Well now the teams are twice as big if not bigger than they were in the 80's and early 90's, the expenses are higher, the costs are higher, we have to produce more. The talent is dilluted. The expectation is there but there isn't the talent to deliver on it. Result? Fewer people can actually do the work, you'll be damned if they will stand by and let you cut out after a rough 6 hours or web browsing. We're working dumber. People do shit manually. People write code that get's rewritten because they can't read their own damn perl. People do things the only ways they know how and then they get redone completely because the web based calendar system takes the biggest computer in the client's office to serve up 2 calendars at a time... I hope 4 of the 50 employees don't want to see the vacation schedule too close to the same time.
Maybe I'm getting too old for it but the people in this biz aren't as good as they were as a whole, there are just more of them and they make a lot more money. You do the math, why don't we get overtime pay?
QUOTE: "Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living." END QUOTE
Hmmm, I found this which states that "overtime leads to an average drop in worker productivity of about 15 percent for work weeks exceeding 40 hours." from the Penn State College of Engineering.
Increased time at work != increased output.
-> Increased time at work != cheaper output.
-> Decreased time at work != more expensive output.
~Tetravus
He's just as proud and ambitous as anyone -- your SO wrong.
The problem with everything you replied too? Your assuming that people in lower wage jobs don't like thier job. Actually, my brother-in-law likes his job very much and is very good at it (he's a grocery manager). He has pretty good hours too, he's up at 3am and back home by noon ot have the rest of the day to do the things he enjoyes in life (golf, woodworking etc.). He makes about $60-75K a year and has a great house and three kids. A very typical American if you ask me.
Your assumption that people in blue-collar jobs are miserable. You forget, people actually like to do these jobs and enjoy it.
Not everything is high-tech, and not everything is geek related. When you buy a gallon of milk, remember how that milk got to the store and got priced. Someone had to do it, last time I checked the 2.4.20 kernel couldn't actually move mile from a dairy to a store (yet).
Every job I do, I do to the best of my ability.
I appreciate your idealism, but very few people in the world, including the hard-working Japanese, take their jobs that seriously. It's just human nature. Many people are motivated by the fear of being unemployed.
What you experience in America also does not hold for the rest of the world. When I lived in Germany, it was common to see or hear about worker strikes on TV, both in and outside of Germany. Firemen, sanitation workers, you name it. And the public supported them (Cologne went for two weeks without a trash pickup. It was nasty.)
Not everybody views work as their life. For some people, it's family. For others, it's about experiencing the world. What you get paid for is not necessarily your life's work; sometimes, you find your life's work in a hobby, even though nobody pays you for it.
There just isn't enough room in the limelight for everyone to be remembered for the profound contributions they made to society - and it's also unlikely that a grocery clerk's contributions were that profound. If you want to have a profound sense of satisfaction for your time wasted on earth as a grocery clerk, then more power to you.
Life is about the little moments. A sunset enjoyed with loved ones while camping out at the local lake can be a far more profound and beautiful experience in a couple of hours than you'll ever find in stocking the peas on aisle four for the next twenty years.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Adam Smith was a naive economic and political theorist who overestimated human goodness, and underestimated human greed when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, aka, the capitalist manifesto. Capitalism is an economic theory, not a religion. Those who have made it a religion, and made the 7 deadly sins virtues, are destroying society.
How ya like dat?
so...
there are 2080 hours in a work year (40/week). you mean to tell me, that for a mere $0.36 an hour that i work, i can ensure a social safety net that catches people ebfore they crash into oblivion?
damn, where do i sign up?
... hi bingo
Have you seen the welfare numbers?
Yes. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 3.3 percent of Americans are dependent on welfare.
Have you seen the unemployment numbers?
About 6 percent.
And let's go back to your opening statement:
I'm willing to bet that there is a small percentage in this country "working hard" and shouldering the economy while the rest of the nation "rests and relaxes".
You'd lose that bet. You're not basing this on any actual knowledge or experience, you're just making huge assumptions because by God you have to feel superior to everyone. So your insecurity and paranoia leads you to suspect that somehow you're getting a raw deal, that you're supporting some massive army of lazy, unemployed welfare recipients, a horde that exists only in your delusions.
There are people receiving welfare who work full time, at jobs you wouldn't last a day in, doing backbreaking work that you couldn't possibly imagine.
So show a little humility. As much as you'd like to believe it, you're not some square-jawed Ayn Rand hero supporting ungrateful parasites. The vast majority of the rest of us work just hard as you do; the only difference is most of the rest of us have a little freaking compassion and empathy. We know that we're all in this together, and if the guy down the road lost his job and needs to feed his family, then hell yes I'm willing to give up some of my paycheck to keep them off the streets. If you don't like it, then you can protest with your vote. If you can't change things with your vote, then you can emigrate. You can find a nice little country with no government. But be careful, true anarchies do exist in this world, but they're not very pleasant places to live.