The Work Math That People Fail to Do
And how you should really value the time of your life
By MARTIN REZNY
When reading the excellent article by Holly Wood (as always), I was reminded of a thing that I was forced to think about a lot recently. As someone who’s expected to do a lot of work for really not that much of anything, I cannot shake the feeling that I, and many others, are seriously being taken advantage of. Whether or to what extent it is a result of predatory malice, or simply cultural inertia of unexamined customary economic bullshit, is hard to say.
But I‘d be really surprised if none of the following ever happened to you:
- You’re not supposed to count commuting to and from work as work hours.
- You’re not supposed to count travelling abroad or far away to conferences and such as work hours.
- You’re not supposed to count preparation for or evaluation of your work at home as work hours (especially bad for teachers).
- You’re not supposed to think about expenses that only exist because of the work that you’re doing, like special clothing or equipment, extra fare, even increased costs for food or drink if you don’t have the time to eat at home.
- You’re not supposed to count the time for extra rest necessitated by the exhaustion from your work or jetlag as work hours.
- Extremely insultingly, whatever work you have fun doing or is meaningful to you does not count as work at all, and therefore it would be obscene to demand financial compensation for it.
- And finally (though I must have still missed some), as Holly elaborated on, you’re definitely supposed to ignore the artificially jacked up prices of things which often impact jobs extremely, such as insane paywalls in academic and other expert journals, or friggin MS Office subscription.
Just today I had a job offered to me that requires me to follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which is literally an entirely arbitrary set of rules for journalists and copywriters. Guess how much that costs. It’s $22.95.
And the new trend of all work software becoming continuous subscription based rather than single purchase based is outright thievery that needs to be stopped and companies that attempt it boycotted. Of all things on Earth, software is by far the least limited in terms of actual material resources, so why should it be not only not free, especially if it’s a basic utility kind of it, but paid for constantly until you die? It’s like leasing an imaginary hammer.
Soon, poor people will only be working to earn enough money to be able to afford to work in the first place. You know what that’s called? Wage slavery.
The thing is, in a society where time equals money, every additional expense that you’re expected to absorb costs you a calculable amount of the time of your life. Unless the work that you’re doing is legitimately fulfilling to you, either personally, or because of what it does for others, you must count it as a net loss. A loss of the time of your life. Think of it this way — a year lost at work or due to it is almost as if you died a year sooner. A hazard, a threat.
Not to sound too class-warfary, but any work required of a person under some version of “or else” conditions is an attack. It’s simply a complicated abstraction for a very basic and ancient thing — fight for survival. In prehistoric times, the cause for such “or else” work would be something like a tiger that will literally kill and eat you if you don’t do certain things to prevent that. Later on, it would be raiders or armies of other tribes, or your own king.
Guess what, barring very fortunate circumstances, you’re still a peasant under the yolk of some lord that doesn’t have to do any “or else” work, you’re still the prey of the beast. Because that’s what it is in a nutshell, you’re being preyed upon by someone higher up in the foodchain. I suppose the greatest travesty of our current version of it is the pretense that it’s not only ethical, but to everyone’s benefit, a gracious and charitable act. Of a tiger out to get you.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe until we switch to a less predation based economic system, something more symbiotic, then the prey animals among us, otherwise known as the poor, should start acting less like sheep, and more like antelopes, dart frogs, or shelled molluscs. You know, something with a defense mechanism that makes the predator work for a living as well.
The secret is that what we collectively stop accepting ceases to be the norm.
It’s really as simple as that. Even though I myself don’t have many options, my new year’s resolution was to at least make it clear to any of my employers whenever I disagree with their ideas of what’s normal to expect of a worker. Namely me. Respectfully, of course, but to push back every time they try to push me to do more for less. Unsurprisingly, it did help, not only because they realized I’m not handily expendable and that I know it, but also because they’re not actual comic book supervillains and don’t try hard to be inhuman.
And even if you can’t speak out, at least don’t internally accept what’s wrong.
Resistance may be painful, but it is the first step on the road to improvement.
Like what you read? Subscribe to my publication, heart, follow, or…
