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>In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common a
by claudiawerner 8y ago
>In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low-paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.
This is fascinating and very interesting from a radical point of view. A while ago there was a thread on HN about if it would be bad for a workplace to have bunks and a kitchen such that employees can sleep there. To me the whole idea felt incredibly dystopian. In the end, though, some authors have observed a kind of cultural shift, in which we are no longer told what to do at work, but rather the workplace tries to align our desire to theirs, the analogy Frédéric Lordon[0] uses is that desires can be expressed as vectors, and the modern workplace, lacking the old methods to make us work (because they are culturally inappropriate, or illegal) must use such a method which seems a whole lot less pernicious at face value.
It's not only the time to make the lunch which counts as unpaid labour, it's also the time and expense to travel to work (and according to some stories on HN this can get to absurd levels) and due to the phenomena I mentioned a lot of time spent around work doing non-work activities (though this is more common if there is a "workplace culture").
[0] "Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire"
- xte 8y agoTake it with veeery long fireplace tongs but IMO any living being, not only human try to have the most he/she want at the least "cost" so we humans during our evolution we do various kind of effort with various kind of success to have more working less. Nowadays we struggle a lot less to accomplish many tasks we need, for instance we can cut wood with machines so quickly and with very little fatigue, we can dig ground with an excavator in minutes instead of hours and hours of manual work with shovel and pickaxe etc. Naturally for us it's still "fatigue" so we want do automate more, work less. That's natural nor positive nor negative (we may say that avoid struggling and have much free time is positive and counterarguments that we discover obesity, diabetes and many other disease due to that) but trying to bend it to have people work is a subtle form of slavery. For instance Google classic "game-fill workplace" to me is more a way to "capture" workforce than a nice way of work... Of course I'd like to work in my favorite field so work seems more pleasure than work but with some limits: work is work, play is play. Even if they seems to blend work have expiring dates, require a certain kind of attention and do not require other kind of attention. Play have normally no expiring dates, no guarantees etc. Long story short my own personal "best compromise" way is being responsible adults that try to play together for our own sake. The modern idea of reject individual responsibilities and so being directed like sheep in the flock happily ignorant is not really different than ancient slavery and it certainly not a thing I like.
- ForrestN 8y agoYou shouldn’t have been downvoted. This is an interesting perspective that’s relevant to the article.
- xte 8y agoPerhaps that's due to my terrible English... However I see few "downvote trends" not against me but against certain "families of arguments", normally without zero accompany comments to explain why, counterargument etc Perhaps it can be a nice analysis to made on whole HN comments to "track" the trend and discover why...