To add to this: I work as a janitor, I can do the whole of my job in about 5 hours. I'm scheduled for 8 hours through the weekdays. 95% of the time when I show

To add to this: I work as a janitor, I can do the whole of my job in about 5 hours. I'm scheduled for 8 hours through the weekdays. 95% of the time when I show up is totally unimportant, nonetheless I'm still beholden to the schedule. Given that I do choose to complete the work in 5 hours, I've got about 3 hours where I have to doddle around doing either worthless make-work, or I sit on my ass in which case work becomes closer kin to a prison. And the latter is kinda breaking the rules, which is a concern because where I work now, and at basically every other facility I've worked in the last 10 years, has a surveillance system. If I leave early, I take a loss in pay and open myself to a haranguing; or I spent pretty limited vacation to paper it over - both of those cases are, frankly, bullshit. There's also just some really silly technicalities like waiting for the clock to turn to the point where it will round over. If the job is done, why make people wait an extra few minutes instead of manually entering and paying them on the per-diem basis? Who knows, maybe they can dodge traffic, which turns into a non-linear function which saves them 15 minutes. In my case, leaving 3 hours early when possible, leaves me with a lot of different options, like actually being able to study for school so I don't have to become a travelling carpet salesman. On the other side, which seems to be the dominant trend, my employer would just increase the volume of work exploiting me for 8 hours at no gain. But hypothetically I could be paid per job: one clean facility being equivalent to 8-hours worth of pay. And if we take such a scenario, that means I'd be working about 25-30 hours, which is below revised the "full-time" standard, meaning that HR could presumably rescind my benefits package and other sorts of recourse. And ultimately that sort of behavior is selected for, it "saves" the company money. A bias towards the short run, certainly, which ultimately makes the bottom line leary of sticking around. I guess that's ultimately of no concern, somebody most certainly did the math and fingered out that high turnover is cheaper than well-trained, and highly capable long-term staff. Now if we work from the logic that all of this is a fiction, from the schedule, to the time, to the considerations of the job title, it becomes pretty easy to see how it could be much more dynamic just by offering certain bargaining abilities to both employers and employees. In that scenario, there are a lot of historical indicators that point towards exploitative behavior the asymmetry between an employer and an employee is considerable. That's a cultural thing, that's what happens when you use the Hobbesian framework, when you institute acquisitive behavior as the selection parameter for social success. This is exacerbated by bureaucratic processes and arbitrary hierarchies which can extend the whole world over. Even further by creating a class of leadership that is so far removed from the daily considerations of 95% of people, so insulated from want, struggle, oppression, and legitimate work in many cases, that they simply don't seem to comprehend. It shouldn't be construed from that, that I'm saying it's purely a sociomechanical feature, necessarily. But it could also be psychopathy, or Dark Triad selection pressures, or some other form of rare derangement any of which in a state of nature would probably be maladaptive. Probably the worst part of it is that the Hobbesian mode seems to be derived from observations made in the Mediterranean and Europe which really plainly from the modern perspective aren't representative of a realistic state of nature, and are instead inductive assumptions which we have overwhelmingly shaped ourselves into by assuming we're inherently greedy, that the state of affairs, hierarchy and complexes of control are an intrinsic necessity. The irony in that, is that given the Hobbesian proposition, no matter what state of affairs we erect it's liable to be corrupted by exploitative greed - and the state itself is a mechanism which holds by its nature the greatest conceivable risk. This all feeds into a system where workers without the leverage to negotiate are constantly entrenched in a lowest-bidder situation which is patently ineffective in basically every category for the lowest common denominator. It concretes the standard hourly wage and set schedule, enforces the modal office worker. And if "Bullshit Jobs" is any indicator, there's a considerable amount of labor involved in keeping this shit turning that ultimately results in a net-negative not only for the individual, but probably through additive and multiplicative emergent processes - exponentially for society. And it's quickly adding up to nothing for most of us in myriad ways.