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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Industrial age relic: Do companies pay for your time or your brain?

By David McElroy · December 9, 2011

When I started work as a newspaper reporter many years ago, I had to clock in and out every day if I expected to be paid. Just like many millions of people, I was paid for my time, not my output. I never understood why.

When I was a teen-ager and first started cutting lawns to make money, I quickly discovered that people wanted to pay me an hourly rate. I used to gently push for a different arrangement. I wanted a flat fee for the service, because I felt that the hourly rate punished me for working harder and faster. Sometimes my clients agreed, but many held out for an hourly rate, so I was stuck having to make sure I didn’t work too fast and thus cheat myself. I hated it.

The obsession with paying people for their time is a relic of the industrial age, when human labor was considered just another interchangeable part of an industrial machine. (The idea that any hour of labor should have the same worth as another hour of labor was also an important cornerstone of Karl Marx’s thought.) The idea might have made sense in an age when people were treated like gears in machines. It has no place in a world where brains are more valuable than brawn.

I came across software today that is something like a modern version of the time clock for people who work for companies from home or other locations. The software is called Odesk. It’s installed on your computer and it takes screenshots of whatever you’re doing at six times each hour. It records the movement of your mouse. It can even record keystrokes to figure out what you’re doing. If your six screenshots show work apparently taking place, you get paid. If one of your screenshots shows something other than work, you give up one-sixth of your hour’s pay.

Unfortunately, governments have enshrined the idea of paying for hours into law. The mindset of labor law is stuck in something like a snapshot of the early 20th century — when efficiency experts such as Frederick Taylor helped industrialists such as Henry Ford make products cheaper and still pay men higher wages. There were good things and bad things about such systems. They worked, but they were stressful and difficult. Despite the drawbacks, they allowed poor men to make more money than they could have made otherwise and allowed low-income people all over the world to buy cars when they couldn’t have afforded them when they were made the old ways.

Whether you think that such industrial-age thinking was good or bad — or a mixed bag, as I do — it’s clear that it’s out of place today in many ways. If you’re doing something that involves output that’s identical to that of other people, it’s easy to measure output. And if you’re doing something that’s original or creative work — something that involves thinking instead of rote doing — all that really matters is whether what you produce has value. It doesn’t matter whether it took 10 hours or 40 hours.

If you’re an industrial designer who can finish a job in 20 hours, do you want to be paid the same as someone who takes 80 hours to do the same work? Or what if you’re writing software? Or designing web pages? Or writing? Paying people by the amount of time something takes is completely disconnected from the value of what’s produced.

Wage and hour thinking is completely out of date — if it ever made sense. I don’t want to be paid for my time. I want to be paid according to what I produce that has value to someone else. What’s more, I don’t want to work for a company that has so little respect for me that it’s taking snapshots of my screen at six random times per hour.

As long as a company is paying for your time, that sort of thinking is required. I think we need to ditch that idea and move to thinking about what a worker’s output is actually worth. To me, it’s ultimately a much more humane way to look at the value of labor.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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