Some Rants on Corporate Culture and Ideology
"Time Theft" implies Slavery
I've been wondering why employers do not seem to be held to the same standards of behaviour to which we seem to hold employees. There's a double standard at work that irks me to no end.
Consider the normal relationship that holds between a company and its clients. Acme Widgets Ltd. is negotiating a contract to supply widgets to the Products Aplenty Corporation. Acme and PAC agree, after much bickering and schmoozing, to a deal whereby Acme will sell PAC a hundred thousand widgets for $20 each, to be delivered in 60 days. Acme estimates that they'll need 40 days to fill the order, and just to be sure they asked for 80 days, and compromised cheerfully at 60 days. PAC doesn't actually need them for another 80 days, but they're eager to get the supplies soon, so they haggled down. Presumably at this point, since each company agrees to the terms, they both feel they're getting a satisfactory deal.
Now, Acme gets to work filling the order, and thanks to an unexpected improvement in productivity, they find they get the job done in 25 days! What's more, the unit cost is also lower for Acme, so at $20 each, they make a bigger profit than expected. The moral dilemma for Acme, if there even is one, is whether or not they ought to pass on some of these savings to the client.
Of course, most of us would probably say they're under no real moral obligation to do so. Hey, they negotiated a contract that the client was satisfied with -- it's not as if they're stealing or anything. Maybe it would make for better relations between the two companies and make future repeat contracts likelier, but it's pretty much up to Acme to decide whether they even want to tell PAC about the increased productivity. Right?
That seems to be the way things are handled between entrepreneurs. What the market will bear, and all that. So why is the labour market different? Why are salaried employees not considered to be entrepreneurs selling their labour to their employers?
It's easy to see where the misconceptions come from, actually. After all, when I sell you my labour, what the single biggest cost I have to face? My time, of course; the time I spend working for you, I can't spend on something I might prefer to be doing. There are other overhead costs involved, of course, such as food and shelter and clothing and education and all the other things that have to be paid for in order to make me a useful worker, but it's most natural and indeed appropriate to sell one's labour in units of time.
So, employees end up getting paid by the hour. So maybe it's natural for us to think that what we're selling our employers is our time. Certainly that's the way some employers like to look at it, which is why you get this big hullabaloo about "timetheft" whenever someone spends "company time" doing something other than company work (such as, for example, looking at this web page). But I argue that this is simply wrong, and in fact, selling one's time is morally indistinguishable from slavery.
I mean, what on EARTH could it possible mean to say that you as my employer own my next hour, except that for the next hour you own ME? What's the difference here? What is the practical distinction between owning a person and owning a person's time? Especially since no matter who is the nominal proprietor of either, it is still the person in question who must spend the time in question; your alleged ownership of me/my time only gives you the legal right to tell me how I must spend it on your behalf. It certainly doesn't represent an accumulation of time for you (else Andrew Carnegie would still be alive today, no doubt).
There's one apparent difference, certainly. Owning a person's time necessarily imposes a fixed term on that ownership; once the time has elapsed, there's nothing left to own. The normal conception of a slave, on the other hand is of someone you own until he or she dies, which is (although finite) an indefinite term. But this is an illusory difference, and morally meaningless; whether a slave is leased or bought outright is equally dehumanising. Moreover, there are many instances of fixed-term slavery laws throughout history, where a slave was automatically freed after a certain number of years as a slave. Does the possibility that a person who is now a slave might conceivably be free in the future mean he is not in fact a slave now? Of course not.
The fact is, it's NOT one's time that an employee sells; it's LABOUR. The two are very different things. As a salaried employee, I may be hired to look after my employer's interests in as narrow or as broad a scope as specified in my job description, but my time is and always will be mine. I will of course spend as much of it as necessary to fulfill the duties contracted of me, but I am under NO obligation to spend more than that on additional tasks simply because I'm there and might be able to do them. If I am able to meet all of my productivity obligations for an 8 hour day in 5 hours, how is it stealing if I spend the remaining three hours reading a novel?
I'm certainly not trying to suggest that I think employees should feel free to goof off. The employee has an obligation to fulfill the terms of his or her contract, just as anyone else. And it may happen that that contract requires the employee to be responsible for handling an indeterminate workload, such as being available to answer phones for 8 hours. If phone calls go unanswered during that time, the employee is derelict, and is justly to be punished for breach of contract. But if the phone doesn't ring, the employer has no moral right to demand additional services from the employee, any more than Products Aplenty Corporation is entitled to pay Acme less than $20 a widget when the production costs drop after the contract is negotiated.
It's ironic that even the most vociferous champions of the free market system are so unwilling to apply it to their relationship with their employees. Employers should ask if an employee is providing productive labour at a competitive price, rather than trying to micro-manage the expenditure of the employee's time on the job. This still means that unproductive workers can and should be fired in favour of more productive ones; employees must compete in the market just like everyone else. But it also means that employees are not slaves; neither they nor their time can be for sale*.
The trouble is, it's not the human part that's caught on. Managers and entrepreneurs see what they're interested in, and when they see the phrase human resources, they don't get all warm and compassionate at the first word; their eyes light up with glee at the idea of another resource they can use to make money. (And what's the word we usually use in conjunction with resources? Yep, we exploit them.) So rather than humanising resources, we've further commodified humans.