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American Workers: Lazy or Creative?

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "CNET News.com is carrying an article by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman of salary.com. Coleman and company have conducted a web based survey regarding how workers spend their "non-productive" time at work. Here are some snippets from the CNET article. " Click to read more. "The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time."

"The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit."

"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time."

"Not all nonproductive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste."

"[P]of the reason that this [survey] got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis."

"[O]ne of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."

Coleman is definitely on to something. I see this phenomenon, and this reasoning, all around me. How much of the reasoning is rational, and how much is rationalization?"

4 of 491 comments (clear)

  1. Case in point by ericdano · · Score: 1, Troll

    Look at Slashdot as an example. Daily duplicates, errors, misquotes. Lazy? I'd say YES.

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  2. Re:Vacation... by Arandir · · Score: 0, Troll

    By that logic, we should give workers 365 days of vacation. Think of the productivity!

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  3. I'm voting for "lazy" by meta-monkey · · Score: 0, Troll

    All I see in these comments, and in the story, is rationalization. "I don't get paid enough. I don't get enough vacation." Cry more, please. People can rationalize anything. That doesn't make it true.

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  4. Re:Labor Day by Simonetta · · Score: 0, Troll

    Or MLK day, where the government celibrates the contributions of the African-American people by paying everyone to stay home being lazy and shiftless.