The issue is far simpler than the author wishes it to be: Fundamentally, labor and industry have been judged on productivity and efficiency since the invention of the assembly line, rather than on value. It comes down to this: an employer hires an employee to "fill a position" not to "do a job." Say you hire an accountant. He's going to be extremely busy once a year, majorly busy once a quarter, kind of busy once a month and slack the rest of the time. If that accountant is an independent contractor who works off-site, you get invoices for services rendered. You see a direct comparison between money paid and value added. Let's suppose, though, that you strike a bargain with the accountant to take him in house. You'll put him on salary. And you'll see just how busy he is during his busy times, and you'll be delighted by the bargain you struck. But you'll also see just how busy he isn't during his slack times, and you'll feel annoyed that this leech is sucking down your profits with no regard for your bottom line. Worse than that, he's an employee. You own him. He has contracted with you to give over his labors for 40 hours a week (or if he's on salary, as many hours as you can trick out of him). So when he's not working hard on something, you give him something to do - something that you would never bother him with if he could bill you for the time. You and he both know that it's busywork. For you, it's busy work that adds value. For him, it's labor above and beyond what he's actually contracted for. And he knows he can avoid that busywork by appearing to be busy even when he's not. And you know that he's appearing to be busy so he can suck value from your bottom line. And you both hate each other as a consequence, even though you're getting a bargain on his services and he's benefitting from the security of non-seasonal employment. IT'S A STUPID FUCKING SYSTEM. There's this idea that since you're in the chair, you belong to the man who owns the chair, rather than that the chair is there to increase the efficiency of your labor for your contracted employer. But since it's an employer-run system, articles like this are written which cant the discussion in the direction of "those lazy, dissatisfied employees" and how - get this - "there isn't enough work to do." Check this out: Richard Branson tells his employees to take as much vacation as they need. What does the article do: 1) state the facts in an off-kilter way (140 employees out of 40,000) 2) immediately launch into the downside ("The lack of a formal policy can leave some people feeling pressured to take less time off, rather than more") 3) For some reason, mention that Netflix does the same and Carlos Slim has called for a 3-day work week. Dunno. I left the land of TPS reports in 2007. I now get hired by the day, to do a gig. When there isn't a gig to do, we do other things. There's a little bit of the "look busy the boss is coming" pantomime to it, but it really only comes out when representatives of the networks are on set. We know that they come from the land of TPS reports, and we know that they simply don't understand that "looking busy" when we "aren't busy" is an insult to both of us.
Seriously dude, sometimes you are so succinct it's beautiful. I really mean it too. I am sure you know how well you are able to dismantle a subject a put a new light on it, and then to express it clearly. But JESUS, this whole comment left me with an entirely better understanding of the worker/employer relationship. It's such an odd system and one that irritates me, to some extent, everyday. We are judged not by what we add but how much we add. It reminds me of this comic: http://xkcd.com/303/ a lot of time for me, work means using the Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think very hard.
Write down the answer.
But because my employer doesn't get to see me "thinking" it creates tension until a product is delivered. Let me give a small example: We needed to find a large amount of files over several servers, and replace one line of text if it matched. Several solutions were given for this problem which would cause a lot of headache because they were so input/output intensive. But when I sat down for a while and just thought about how things interacted on our network, I was able to come up with a solution which was both efficient and easy to track. But the thinking didn't please anyone, people were agitated, why was no WORK being done? Why can't we just do it NOW? The misunderstanding was that I am doing work, I am actually doing work very efficiently, but because I haven't started building with bricks, I couldn't demonstrate it. I really suspect at some point this is going to have to change, while I don't buy the whole "Singularity" project, we're going to be depending more and more on mathematics and algorithms to run our world which means we're going to have more hard problems to solve, and we're going to need to pay people to "work by thinking". Employers are either going to have to get used to it, get out of the way, or hold us back.