purplehost:

nultemp:

tilthat:

TIL the average worker in the US today would only have to work 11 hours per week to be as productive as his fellow worker in 1950.

via reddit.com

hey fuck capitalism

I had a job at an insurance brokerage once.  I was in a grunt administrative role that involved me handling all incoming business for the entire company.  I looked over everything that came in the doors for accuracy/completeness & then I had to enter them all in the database.  if something was incomplete it was my job to track down the missing information.  long story short, there was an expectation that I handle nine cases a day (about one per hour).  anyway, I got really good at my job and managed to meet the standard.  but, pretty understandably, I felt overwhelmed.  I was busy every moment I was at work and felt on the edge of burnout within a year.

I talked with someone who’d been in the industry since the 80s and they told me about how technological changes had revolutionized the industry.  waiting for a fax or the mailman throttled the amount of work you could get done in an hour.  there would be days where salaried people could simply go home because they needed to wait to hear back from someone.  if you lost a form or simply didn’t have it, you’d have to, you guessed it, call someone and wait for it to arrive.  the same was true if you were trying to track down information.  you’d better hope that whoever called was near their desk or checked their messages that day.  

now, don’t get me wrong.  I love email and having access to the internet.  however, one of its effects is that the standards for employees have gone up in exchange for nothing.  the reasoning goes that if you can get twice as much done in a day, you should.  in industries and occupations with high turnover, people will blame everything but the workload.  oh, it’s the hours.  it’s the pay.  certainly it can’t be the constant interruptions in your working day brought to you by email saps concentration all day long.  it can’t be that a workload once distributed onto two employees is now placed on the back of one.

the conclusion to all of this was that I was handling twice as much work in a day as my predecessors from the 80s and 90s for about the same pay.  due to the increased efficiency of email and the internet, bosses could effectively double the amount of work they foist on one person. employees have bigger workloads because of technological advances and lost pay through inflation and wage stagnation.