Never Log Off
Never Log Off
In the future, you will always be expected to be on the clock.
Before the pandemic when everybody with fake email jobs got relegated to working from home, people always assumed it was awesome not to have to commute to work every day.
And make no mistake, not wasting any more of my life in a stupid little automobile was a blessing. So was not having to shave every day, wearing shorts or sweatpants when I labored and being able to go to the gym during uncrowded off-hours.
But as a lot of Americans have found out, working from home is not always glamorous. Living by myself, it’s possible to go days without talking to anybody other than my cats. It gets monotonous working and living in the same space.
Burnout was one of the bigger reasons I retired from Eleven Warriors back in 2018. There are only so many ways to say “I think Ohio State will be good this year,” and it felt like I spent every waking hour chained to notifications on Slack. One time, on my day off, I was cooking breakfast with my laptop open. I heard that famous “ping” sound that every Slack user knows, and I dropped everything and walked over to the computer like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
My nocturnal boss had a knack for hitting me up at 10:45 p.m. to relitigate some off-handed crass joke I buried in an article that I posted three days ago. Next thing you know we’re going back and forth for 20 minutes and I’m going to bed plotting a murder.
France is far from a perfect country. But it did get rid of this problem over four years ago because their populace has no problem rioting.
From Alanna Petroff and Océane Cornevin of cnn.com in January 2017:
A new labor law that took effect on Sunday gives employees the "right to disconnect" from email, smartphones and other electronic leashes once their working day has ended.
"These measures are designed to ensure respect for rest periods and ... balance between work and family and personal life," the Ministry of Labor said in a statement.
I’m sure the try-hard nerds that populate every company would cry tears over a pro-worker law like this, and that’d be half the fun in passing the law.
Of course we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. For some reason we’re all psychotic enough to live in Ohio, a state that makes no secret of its willingness to fellate whatever hobgoblin Monopoly Man that comes through those doors.
In Ohio, State Senator Andrew Brenner, perhaps the dumbest State Senator in all of America, wants us to go the opposite way of France. Brenner wants to protect business owners from having to pay overtime for working outside of traditional hours. It’s an idea he tried to pass last year only to get stonewalled by his colleagues.
From Anna Staver of dispatch.com:
Supporters say Senate Bill 47 would give employers clarity and protection from lawsuits in this new COVID-19 world where thousands of people work unsupervised from home. Opponents say federal labor laws provide adequate protection, and these new rules could create a system that harms hourly employees.
"The idea behind this is to get everybody on the same page so they know when the employee is actually working," Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Powell, said.
If passed, the bill would exempt Ohio employers from paying overtime when employees travel to and from work and for "activities requiring insubstantial or insignificant periods of time beyond the employee’s scheduled working hours."
No, Senator Brenner, the bill is about keeping as much money as possible in the pockets of bosses.
I can only imagine how Business Tyrants would define “activities requiring insubstantial or insignificant periods of time beyond the employee’s working hours.” Especially if their workers haven’t taken the poisoned pill that is salary compensation.
And even if workers are salaried, that doesn’t entitle the bosses to a slave. Hell, labor unions in the 1930s saw a 30-hour work week as an inevitability. But then the capitalists got together in the ‘70s and decided Americans were the most overpaid workers in the world, and they set out to swing the pendulum back in their favor.
Judging by how production has long surpassed wages, I’m guessing they’re winning the battle:
Now capitalist flunkies like Brenner want to nickel and dime us. Because that’s how it starts: Answering a couple emails at your kid’s birthday party. Then out-of-office availability becomes normalized by more and more coworkers and sooner or later it becomes an office-wide expectation. And how much free labor would the average worker perform if all those minutes on nights and weekends got totaled at the end of the year?
It’s already ridiculous we still have 40-hour workweeks after the advent of the personal computer. Brenner should shove this bill up his ass, and if he needs help I will gladly assist him on that matter. At some point workers have to push back against the bosses’ attempt to control more and more of our lives. Because it ain’t like they’re paying us what we’re worth in the first place.
THOSE WMDs. 75% of Columbus police don’t live within the city… Texas pays the price of the Culture War… Bowling Green’s robot army… New evidence linking FBI and police to the assassination of Malcolm-X… The government needs to find Big Tech a new business model… Tired of living through extraordinary times in Texas.