Jobs are dumb.
I say this a lot.
I really don’t want a job.
But when things are really slow with freelancing, as they currently are, I sometimes start to contemplate looking for one. My main problem with jobs, though, and the thing that always stops me from pursuing one, is the same thing that makes freelancing so appealing: control over my time.
I am an adult. And yet, as an adult with a job, I would not be in control of my own time for much of the week. I would be told by someone else when I should be working and how much. I would be told when I have to be at my desk and, at least to some extent, when I am allowed to step away (regardless of how nice of a day it is outside). I would have to ask permission to take time off, and would be told by someone else how much I am allowed to take off.
The problem is this: I am a GODDAMN ADULT and do not need someone to tell me how to spend my time!!
Although it’s been changing because of the rise of remote work since the pandemic, it’s still standard for employers to tell their employees how much they need to “be at work” and during what hours. This is the case even for salaried employees, who are paid the same amount regardless of how many hours they work. Employers believe that they “own” their employees’ time.
I recently copy edited an employee handbook that explicitly said that the organization’s salaried, at will employees are not paid for the amount of time they work, they are paid for completing their tasks; yet, later in the document, the organization laid out strict guidelines for how many hours people had to work each day, how long they could take for lunch, and how many days a week they had to work. So which is it—are their employees paid for their output or for their time?
When you tell people they’re paid for their output, or completing their tasks, regardless of how many hours it takes, and, simultaneously, that they have to work a certain number of hours, it sure sounds a lot like you are: (a) trying to avoid paying overtime or ensuring reasonable workloads, and (b) trying to control your employees like they are untrustworthy children.
If you can’t trust your employees to do their work without exercising tight control over their time, then why are you employing them? Find someone better. Or, even better, just trust your damn employees.
The concept that employers “own” employees’ time is so ubiquitous in our current approach to work, most people don’t even notice it. Of course it’s reasonable to tell salaried employees they have to be at their desk at certain times; how would the company function otherwise?
But at the same time, even though we may not realize it, we intuitively know this is bullshit. This is why, having gotten a taste of slightly more freedom during the pandemic, (salaried) workers are increasingly demanding more flexible work. The flexibility to fit their work hours around their personal and family schedules. The flexibility to work from wherever they want. Freedom from surveillance and micromanagement. We know, deep down, that it’s absurd and de-humanizing that another adult should be telling us when to be where and for how long.
It’s frankly pretty weird that we’ve accepted that employers have so much control over our time. It’s also a relatively new concept in the history of work. Until recently, most people worked for themselves, growing food or making barrels or bowls or whatever and selling them. A simple exchange of a product for money. Or maybe they rented out their labor to do seasonal labor on someone else’s farm or shop for a defined period of time. Historically, the only people whose time was “owned” by someone else were enslaved or indentured people.
David Graeber explains how we got from that standard of work to one where employers “own” employees’ time in his book, Bullshit Jobs. For most of history, people worked when there was work, and were idle when there wasn’t work. The morality of the time warned that in idleness you might get up to no good, but otherwise, it was fine. However, "The modern morality of ‘you’re on my time; I'm not paying you to lounge around’ is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he's being robbed. A worker's time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it and so far as an employee is not working, she is stealing something for which the employer paid good money.…"
Graeber continues, "This is important to underline because the idea that one person's time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar. Most human societies that have ever existed would never have conceived such a thing. As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter—slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter's time.… How can you buy time? Time is an abstraction! The closest he would have likely been able to come would be the idea of renting the potter as a slave for a certain limited time.... But…he would probably find it impossible to locate a potter willing to enter into such an arrangement. To be a slave, to be forced to surrender one’s free will and become the mirror instrument of another, even temporarily, was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly be fall a human being. As a result, the overwhelming majority of examples of wage labor that we do encounter in the ancient world are people who are already slaves..."
"So how did we get to the situation we see today, where it's considered perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent themselves out in this way or for a boss to become indignant if employees are not working every moment of ‘his’ time?"
Graeber goes on to explain that the rise and widespread adoption of clock time, as opposed to natural time like sunlight or the time it takes to boil an egg, along with the rise of the Protestant work ethic that labeled idleness as sin, allowed us to place a monetary and moral value on a set unit of time, a value that was then adopted by factories as the industrial revolution took hold, and lives on to this day in our offices and warehouses. Unlike most of history, today, employers are seen to be in the right when they control workers’ time.
And maybe it was bearable, a fair tradeoff, when hard work and loyalty to a company meant a secure job, a secure income, and a secure pension for retirement. But as work has become more tenuous, as companies become more and more willing to lay off employees for the sake of increasing shareholders’ profits, as productivity increases but wages stagnate for everyone except CEOs, as so many people find themselves working basically meaningless jobs—maybe giving up control over our time has become less bearable; not a tradeoff we’re willing to make. Time, after all, is one of the few truly finite resources. Giving up control over how we use this precious resource is a big deal.
What if we went back in time a little bit and started viewing work as an exchange of goods and services for money again? This is more like what freelancing is. I do a service for you and you pay me in exchange. That’s it, nice and (fairly) simple. Even in an employment situation, we could move back to being closer to this model. You do tasks for your employer, they pay you. Nice and simple. Otherwise, your time is yours.
This would require workplace culture changes, and maybe some policy changes. We would need to normalize a company culture where people understand that some people need more time off than others. We would need to normalize (as some workplaces do seem to be doing already) the idea that some people will work in the morning, take the afternoon off for childcare, and then do more work in the evening, or whatever (though, of course, fewer hours overall would be even better—but that’s a different post). We would need a workplace culture where every email isn’t treated as urgent and immediate responses aren’t expected for everything. We would need to normalize the idea that on a slow day, employees can just get up and to the park, or read, or take a nap—without feeling guilty or anxious that their employer will be upset if they find out. We would need policies that set guidance about core hours and communication without being absurdly prescriptive.
Essentially, as with so many things, we need to simply treat each other like people.
All of these things are extremely doable, once we break free of the belief that it’s ok for an employer to own an employee’s time, that somehow we own our employers not just our skills, output, and productivity, but also our time.
This would be a huge step forward in making work not just more bearable, but more humane.
This is so potent! A few years ago, I was freelancing after being laid off, and one client offered me a full-time position. A few months earlier, that would have been a godsend, but after the freedom of freelancing, the idea of requesting time off was so unappealing that I turned it down and negotiated continued contract work. Folks thought I was being ridiculous; why don’t more people see the absurdity of employers owning your time?