Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This

Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"

Comments

Low-Wage Jobs

[Gman14msu]

While it's interesting to see the statistics for the workforce as a whole, I think it's interesting to point out that this is another major disadvantage for low wage workers. The types of jobs where you can slack off for 1/5th of the day aren't things like janitors, factory workers, or other lower level service personnel. If you factor that into the amount of work done per hour paid, the disparity between salaried office type work and low wage service work is even greater.

When I first started at my office job during college, I was so used to being in the basic service industry that I didn't fit in right away. I was used to just taking a task, doing it, and immediately going back to the boss for the next thing. I didn't realize that the culture I was in was for slower progress on tasks and there wasn't a need to rush and be essentially managed by the boss every second of the day.

Just some things to think about. A lot of people don't realize that for a lot of American workers, and 8 hour day really means 8 hours.