There’s a lot going on in Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery’s piece on “The Great Speedup” and the disjoint between productivity growth and wage increases. But I’m not sure I buy the implicit message of this factoid about people using information technology to keep themselves tethered to the office even when they’re not at their desk...
Obviously, this kind of digital overtime happens. At the same time, looking at our traffic stats here at ThinkProgress it’s evident that an awful lot of people are reading blogs when they’re supposed to be at their desk working. Not that I mind, you understand, it’s just a noticeable trend. And traffic really falls off during that week between Christmas and New Years when relatively few people are working. That’s not because nobody can access the Internet when they’re not at their office, it’s because the flipside of using digital technology to work even when you’re not “at work” is using digital technology to slack off when you are at work.
Sure, got me pegged. For the record I don't work from home at all and I'm not expected to. I understand that's because as a contractor I'm required to be supervised by a government employee. "Supervised" is a vague term in this context, but never mind that; working from home isn't an option for me, so there's no expectation of being reachable on days off, let alone producing anything. But obviously I do read blogs and do other things while at work.
That being said, Yglesias is missing a few things himself.
First of all, I heard somewhere or other (no source for something as vague as this, sorry) that going digital didn't actually affect white-collar productivity much, because downtime has been replaced by time-wasting. People used to spend lots of time walking to the mailroom or pawing through long-term file cabinets or waiting for something to arrive in the mail. Now all that stuff is instantaneous, but people waste just as much time reading blogs or watching YouTube whenever their minds wander. People need downtime. Blue-collar workers often get it naturally (construction workers spend time waiting for machinery to be moved, repairmen get it driving from one job to the next, etc.) and more importantly they often get explicit breaks in any place where sweat-shop conditions are not considered aspirational. In the pre-digital age, white-collar workers used to get it naturally by all those little kinds of downtime, but now that's greatly reduced. White-collar jobs obviously have lots of benefits, but one problem with them is the expectation that if you're at work, every minute is spent on something that your boss considers necessary. This is a pretty laid-back office, but it seems very rare to see or hear people acknowledge non-work stuff happening at their desks, even though it obviously does.
Also, being "on call" is an imposition of time and stress and scheduling around it, as an EMT or non-full-time fireman could tell you. Sometimes you'd have to change plans at the last minute, sometimes you'd have to drop everything and go, and very often you'd just choose not to schedule certain things at times that are convenient for other people. It's obviously not as big an imposition as actually being at work is, but it's built into the direct and indirect compensations for any such job. My previous job, for example, wasn't a life-or-death thing like those examples, but there was still the expectation that I would sometimes have to work long hours, late hours, weekends, and hypothetically even holidays, sometimes on short notice. In return, there was explicit flexibility in my schedule: I could take off early or show up late if I had some personal reason or had a late meeting I'd be going to that day or just had got enough done ahead of deadline for once.
So Yglesias seems to be saying "well, people have to work from home and don't get paid for it to keep their jobs, but they also goof off at work, so it seems like it all evens out." Except it doesn't. Reading blogs or newspapers at work doesn't even come close to being expected to regularly take work home with you, certainly not to the degree discussed in the MJ article.
Disclaimer: like I said above, the idea that anything unfair is going on doesn't apply to me, since I'm not expected to take work home with me. But it does to lots of people I know.
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