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A proper day's work

Permabear

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thegreatgonzo

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Yep, these city slickers can pontificate all they want, but until you're on the side of a hill in the pishing hailstones in the middle of January with a ewe with the reed out, you haven't a clue what a hard day's work is.

Ye call it the reed up there? It's the lu or the bearing down here:D

The Backwards Man

thegreatgonzo wrote: »

Ye call it the reed up there? It's the lu or the bearing down here:D

We should probably the proper terminology for the proletariat, a 'prolapsed vagina':eek:

the evasion_kid

FizzleSticks wrote: »

If only I realised that before I took a job that involved many a hard days work and a lot of cleaning chemicals. It gave me dermatitis for life but at least I can brag about having done a real days work. Its something.

And your reward is...Jesus you're a great worker altogether...here's more to do

The Backwards Man

the evasion_kid wrote: »

And your reward is...Jesus you're a great worker altogether...here's more to do

There's an old saying here in Donegal;

There's fcuk all wrong with hard work as long as you're getting paid for it

Old School Husqy

Not while being baloobas though. No one likes workers having hard ons. It's a health and safety issue at least, how does one do a risk assessment on co workers being baloobas and erect?

FizzleSticks

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The Backwards Man

Old School Husqy wrote: »

Not while being baloobas though. No one likes workers having hard ons. It's a health and safety issue at least, how does one do a risk assessment on co workers being baloobas and erect?

As I once said to a young pup that thought they were too smart for me, 'I'll be sober when I have to be, you'll always be an eejit whether you like it or not'

the evasion_kid

The Backwards Man wrote: »

There's an old saying here in Donegal;

There's fcuk all wrong with hard work as long as you're getting paid for it

Sounds like something the farmers who drink in my local would say....in between talking about the price of turnips...

Shint0

the evasion_kid wrote: »

And your reward is...Jesus you're a great worker altogether...here's more to do

Never work too hard because the goalposts will keep getting moved. That's if you're an employee of course.

The Backwards Man

the evasion_kid wrote: »

Sounds like something the farmers who drink in my local would say....in between talking about the price of turnips...

Turnips are like common sense, fcuk all wrong with them as long as you have enough to do you

Old School Husqy

The Backwards Man wrote: »

As I once said to a young pup that thought they were too smart for me, 'I'll be sober when I have to be, you'll always be an eejit whether you like it or not'

As I once said don't ever argue with an idiot. You know the rest.

The Backwards Man

Old School Husqy wrote: »

As I once said don't ever argue with an idiot. You know the rest.

An idiot is someone who gives a fcuk what anybody else thinks of them.

Nobody told me that, I just figured it out for myself!

Here, let's not fight, do you like vodka and . . er. . orange juice?

Lyaiera

tl:dr - most jobs are bollocks - stop finding validation in the very idea of working

There's a lot of academic work being done on this. Especially with regards to technology and how it has resulted in huge amounts of people being laid off, with robotics replacing them. Or manufacturers, paper/digital based transaction inspection, auditing, etc. having hugely reduced numbers of employees with a lot of functions automated only needing minimal supervision from one or two people who are kept on.

It comes down to a pretty simple idea; Is it really necessary for everyone to be employed?

On the Phenomenon of Bull**** Jobs by David Graeber.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

http://strikemag.org/bull****-jobs/ [you'll have to change the text of the link because Boards' filter will star part of it out, it's pretty obvious what it should be]

Our idea of what work/jobs are, is pretty modern. It's only come about after the industrial revolution. Prior to that for "poor" people what they did was simply a way of life. If they were subsistence farmers, providing a certain amount of crop to a landlord, and maybe trading another little bit of it, farming was their life. But their farming wasn't what we think of as work. It was just what they did, and if they had all day to do something, they would mix enjoyment, fun, playing with their kids, talking to their wife, neighbours or other farmers, with what was basic toiling to survive. There was no distinction between work and pleasure/recreation. It was all mixed together into a lifestyle.

When the industrial revolution came about that changed. People now had specific jobs, where they got up at a certain time, travelled to a factory, worked a specific amount of time, doing specific things, in return for money, and they clocked out when the whistle blew. This non-working time was then their leisure time, where they were free to do what the wanted. Some employers like Rowntree and Cadbury felt it was their duty to provide for their worker's leisure (along with mixing in a bit of social engineering about what was a good way to live.) The industrial revolution basically brought in the idea of a specific work, at dedicated times, that you probably hated, but needed to do to survive, or in some cases better yourself and your family. Sure the earlier farmers or fishers were not having constant fun, but they didn't see it in the way we now see "work." (This is all separate to professions like Law, Clergy, Educator, etc. These weren't work, you practised them as an advocate of their beneficial and enlightening ways. Barristers are "called to the bar," they do not work. With the trades they were seen as a vocation, a calling and destiny in life where the execution of the craft, such as building a ship, or masonry was something you worked to master, hence, "master tradesman," and tradesman guilds, which continues to this day.)

If you bring that up to the modern day work or employment has become a defining factor of life. If you want to be a respected member of society, you have to have a job, and you have to work, and you have to be at least a bit dedicated to it, even if you whinge about it a lot. Work has become caught up with identity and ideas of self-esteem. You're at a party, or in the pub,or a sports club and someone asks the dreaded question, "What do you do?" You are, in many ways defined by your employment.

Lack of employment, especially long-term unemployment of a year or more is considered to be harmful, both physically and mentally. Long term unemployed people have lower life expectancy, greater physical health risks, and suffer more from depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.

But this wasn't always the way with unemployment. If you go back in time the aristocracy were positively in love with the idea they didn't work. They had fun with their unemployed freedom. Their ideas of fun were enabling charity, reading, writing and the arts, learning about different societies and culture, travelling and exploring, meeting people with similar noble standing but with different ideas about themselves, and education and scholarly activity. The only thing some of them viewed as "work" was sorting out problems in their estates, and lands, and later with their industries.

So if an aristocracy, who never worked and never had to work didn't have difficulties, and thoroughly enjoyed their life, then there's no reason to think modern day unemployed people have to suffer purely because they're unemployed. The problem is that modern day values are so tied to the idea that you must work, and you must contribute (in the form of earning money for your employer/capitalism, or becoming an entrepreneur.) This means that it can be hard for someone to get away from those societal value judgements.

The technology issue supposes that there will be many more people becoming employed in the future. Unfortunately he Bull**** Jobs article explains how society is creating new, meaningless jobs to occupy people, despite the fact that the job produces nothing, and demoralises the worker who is tied into a culture where valuable contribution is essential to self esteem, and they feel they contribute nothing.

So what if these bull**** jobs didn't exist, what if there were far more unemployed people free to live their life (presuming a Universal Living Income,) what would be the result? The current situation is that people would become disillusioned and self-destructive as can be seen by generations of families tied down by chronic unemployment, but there is no real reason why that should be the case. If we start turning people's self esteem and value away from producing through a job and creating wealth, and instead turn it towards personal achievement and contributing through personal action, whether it's self-enlightenment or self-directed education (look at all the information available on the internet for anyone to use,) or contribution to society through myriad ways such as the arts, writing, poetry, painting, fashion, photography, charitable work, activism, politics, science, improving the local community, educating others, etc. then the results could be amazing. Especially when the basis for these activities is not generating wealth, but a personal and societal enrichment. This is important in allowing people begin at these activities without fearing they may never be good enough to commercialise their efforts. Their value is not tied to earning, and producing, but contribution and personal achievement.

This might seem like a flight of fancy but the reality is technology is replacing the need for workers in many ways. There are many jobs where nothing of value is created by the worker and may actually hinder the effectiveness of an organisation (look at the middle-management of the HSE.) Even more notable is the amount of work people who are producing do while they're "on the clock."

There's plenty of research that says most workers (although not across all industries) waste huge amounts of the day. On average in an eight hour day a worker will be actually producing from their work for about for four hours. Workers are shocked by this when the research compares the observed activity, to the worker's log of their own activity. Managers are not at all shocked by this. This is well known amongst most managers who have been to a business school, well known by academics and researchers in management theory of worker efficiency and productivity, and not at all controversial. People spend a lot of their time checking personal email, facebook and their phone, looking at boards, talking to co-workers about Game of Throne after asking them what is probably a necessary, but easy to answer question about a particular part of their work, going for a company paid crap, looking at holiday destinations, daydreaming about winning the Euromillions despite never playing it, etc. And then they spend even more time not producing in transitioning back to the work activity and preparing themselves for the work after checking twitter. In a lot of cases if workers focused, dedicated themselves to completing the work as a priority, then all the work for those allocated forty hours could be achieved in twenty hours. The problem then comes of should a worker do that?

If a worker achieves all their designated work in twenty hours, the employer will add more work to fill up the other twenty hours of the forty hour week. And this doesn't make sense. Some people bill by the hour, sure, but if your assigned tasks are allocated forty hours, those are the tasks you are expected to achieve, and that is what you're paid for. If you can do what you're expected to do in less time, then you have achieved your goal. You have produced for your employer what they want, and what they are paying you for. If you can do this in twenty hours rather than forty, hours, then why not work the twenty hour week? Employers aren't buying your presence in an office. They are paying you to achieve a goal. If you achieve that goal, that should be the end of the matter. And even further, those twenty hours of dedicated, focused work might be as tiring as the forty hours of work with informal breaks, chats, and browsing. Surely workers should be given a choice in how they conduct their work?

If you are the type of person who needs frequent breaks, and downtime between smaller activities then maybe doing twenty hours of productive work over the allocated forty hours is for you. But what about the person who can focus? They should be allowed to dedicate themselves fully to their work, and if they achieve their tasks in 15, 20, or 25 hours rather than the allocated 40 hours then why should they be expected to simply sit in a chair in an office to get paid? And if more work is added when you've finished your allocated forty hour task in twenty hours, and you complete it in the next twenty hours, shouldn't your pay be doubled? You're doing twice as much work as other people. This is the premise of businesses looking for more productivity as a cost saving measure. But if you're more productive or more efficient it benefits the business' bottom line, so surely you should be paid more.

Businesses absolutely despise this idea, they want to extract more and more out of workers, pushing them harder, while not rewarding them for their extra effort despite it boosting their profits and competitiveness. These workers are benefiting business, but they're not being compensated for that benefit. This is the basis of a lot of Unions complaints about "Productivity Measures" and "Work Practices." If someone's work is changing from what they were supposed to be doing, and it's benefiting the business, the worker should be rewarded for that benefit. But the main principle of all this is why should a worker be expected to work 40 hours? What's the reasoning behind 40 hours? If someone is being paid to do something, and the task can be completed in a shorter time, then the work is done, they've done their job, they've completed their task. Why should they be expected to sit around purely to spend time. If they complete their task in 20 hours, then their work week should be 20 hours.

An extension of the increased productivity idea is if there's a neverending stream of work that will never be completed, and is constantly piling up and waiting. That's plain and simple bad management. The manager needs to hire more employees, or stop taking work on when they're pressuring their workers for more and more. This is especially evident in industries like games production where they have "crunch." Workers are expected to work 18 hour days, for months at a time, to fix and build on a product that has a release date, while never achieving the desired goal of the product, or constantly moving the goalposts further and further. Tech workers hate it, it's exploitative, a sign that you have no idea how to manage employees and their work, and your project planning skills are downright abysmal.

The future predicted at the start of the 20th Century said that industry would become more automated, and that would result in less need for workers. In some cases it would replace workers, in other cases it would reduce the hours of their working week. When computers came about, along with algorithmic analysis, robotics, self-service kiosks, etc. the need for a workforce was reduced again. However this hasn't resulted in a reduction in work for employees, or freedom from the pressures of work for people who don't fit into other work models. There is ample evidence that people should by rights, have more free time, but industry is coming up with more and more bull**** and bull**** jobs that produce nothing. There is also increasing evidence that more and more people are becoming "unemployable" due to changes in the economy that they cannot adapt to, there is also more and more working age people leaving the workforce, and declaring themselves "not looking for work."

There are many young people who simply cannot find work, in part due to the push for higher education requirements for jobs that do not need higher education, leaving those without higher education without work, and in part due to those in the workforce retiring later, resulting in less openings for positions. Unemployment may not be increasing, technically, especially as people get directed into more bull**** to take them off the unemployment register. However the amount of people of working age outside the workforce population is growing in many western countries.

If we achieve a state where people stop working bull**** jobs, and reduced hours of works becomes reality, what happens to those unemployed and the population with more free time than any other period since the beginning of the industrial revolution? (Similarly with increasing longevity and vitality, what about the unoccupied elderly?) The deleterious effects of not being employed are well documented, but this is purely an effect of culture and society. People need to begin defining themselves outside of their occupation. They need to realise that they are not a person whose existence is predicated on work. The very notion of "a proper day's work" is becoming outdated, because so many people feel their efforts in work are in no way "proper." Similarly society needs to stop judging a persons value by their effect on economic activity, and puritanical ideas of the nobility and honour of labour. People are much more than what they do to earn a living, and more people need to embrace the idea that they can become effective and happy in many other roles in life than simply being someone who does, "a proper day's work."

Realt Dearg Sec

^tl;dr I was too busy writing this to do a proper day's work

Realt Dearg Sec

Del2005 wrote: »

I've spent time nearly washing pots with the sweet dripping off me.

I've spent time nearly working too, it's awful. Can you imagine if you had actually washed them?

Mena

After that wall of text affront I'll keep it simple: for me it's when I've added value. Be that to any of my employees or teams, our function, our internal or external clients.

Whats's value? Meaningful contribution to strategic or operational issues, top line growth or bottom line savings or efficiencies or simply helping or guiding people in personal development.

A day after sitting in 9 different meetings running around like a headless chicken doesn't always count (but sometimes qualifies).

Realt Dearg Sec

Mena wrote: »

After that wall of text affront I'll keep it simple: for me it's when I've added value. Be that to any of my employees or teams, our function, our internal or external clients.

Whats's value? Meaningful contribution to strategic or operational issues, top line growth or bottom line savings or efficiencies or simply helping or guiding people in personal development.

If you could explain that in plain English it would be useful. It sounds like circular jargon to me. The words you use to clarify what value is, actually make considerably less sense than the word value, which I thought I understood until you started clearing it up.

Shint0

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

If you could explain that in plain English it would be useful. It sounds like circular jargon to me. The words you use to clarify what value is, actually make considerably less sense than the word value, which I thought I understood until you started clearing it up.

^^^
1. Doing the actual job
2. Help make a profit and reduce costs
3. Help other staff in their work

Lyaiera

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

^tl;dr I was too busy writing this to do a proper day's work

It took me about two, two and half hours to write and edit that. I'm sure there's mistakes and ****e phrasing in it though.

My previous job was in commercial writing. Admittedly most of it was writing complete bollocks on topics that no sane person would ever want to write about. I did get some nice feedback from a couple of the businesses I enjoyed writing for. Mostly for the guides and advice pieces I wrote that were genuinely helpful to their customers, based on sound principles that allowed them make informed decisions on choosing the appropriate product.

Definitely not a "proper day's work," though.

flas

Its when your days works results in something tangible,something you can turn around and say that was my days works,that thing there,moving money from one place to another and back again is poppy-cock,it is not a days work,it's made up,it cant feed your family,it cant clothe you,put a roof over your head,provide citizens with anything worthwhile,it is a false sense of worth,when your days work means something real its a days work..

darkpagandeath

I would imagine working in the private sector for at least 10 years with real prospects of loosing the job due to poor performance and alike ? Having to turn up everyday and work set hours like the rest of us. Well unless you are a contractor.

Permabear

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Dr Strange

thegreatgonzo wrote: »

Well there was this one time myself and and the vet I work for had to try and get a cow's prolapsed uterus back inside her in the pouring rain. A cow's uterus is very heavy. And slippy. We finally put it back after nearly 40 minutes and it came out again.

Well hello breakfast. I didn't think I would see you again so soon.

thegreatgonzo

Lyaiera wrote: »

My previous job was in commercial writing..

Is that different to technical writing?

donegaLroad

He also said that ' most of you have never created employment' or words to that effect.

So Id imsgine that by a proper days work, he didnt mean that someone would be doing manual labour on thrir own.

If wasnt the smartest remark ever said in the european parliment.

Letree

A proper days work is what people working down't pit do oh and public service office workers too.

pragmatic1

Ten hours in the bog is a proper days work. That's the standard.

pragmatic1

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

What do you guys actually produce and contribute though, apart from moving other peoples money around.

Permabear

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andekwarhola

No matter how useful it is or isn't, work is just something you do in order to earn money to live your life. To that end, no form of work is more valid than any other.

You obviously do get some people that valorize physcial labour (or DIY) as some sort of litmus test of classical manliness but they can be safely categorized as cretins. That Nigel Farage is courting them is not exactly astonishing news.