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Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

theguardian.com

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Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#71

Post by pc86 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #55
pc86 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my area McDonald's is a pretty large employer of physically disabled people. Not a single one of them has the dexterity or strength to load a plane. Coincidentally I know some people who work at my local airport and they don't have any idea what they're loading or unloading or where it's going to unless they happen to speak to the pilot. Employment does not exist to fulfill your personal sense of self worth. You'r…

Get money out of the equation and everything changes dramatically!

If only everything was free and nobody had to work for anything.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#72

Post by gdulli »

lj3 wrote: post #42
bmmayer1 wrote: post #2

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, wor…

> Really, barbaric? Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is. Or, as Mr. Bukowski likes to say, > It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at…

> > Really, barbaric?

> Yes. Think of it in terms of a larger picture. Most men are spending the better part of their lives making the top 1% rich. That's what a 9-5 day job is.

It sounds spiteful to object (in principle) to your labor making someone else richer. If an employer is doing something specifically oppressive, then sure, that's a problem.

But you need money to live. Either work for some company or assume the risk and stress and uncertainty of starting your own. Or find some other way of scrounging up resources and be solely responsible for it. Working for a company has tradeoffs but it provides stability. I find the tradeoffs reasonable. The smarter you are or the harder you work, the fewer compromises you'll have to make.

> awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic

Very dramatic, but these are all either orthogonal to work, can be controlled, or are biological imperatives.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#73

Post by gdulli »

jgrahamc wrote: post #4
bmmayer1 wrote: post #2

Hyperbole like this makes it difficult to take his arguments seriously, even if he makes some good points about the changing nature of work. Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? It's such a dramatic leap forward from the way most humans in history--and many still today--have had to scrimp for survival, wor…

Really, barbaric? Having set work hours in a steady job with regular pay in a safe workplace with benefits usually included, including paid vacation? I don't think it's hard to see that as barbaric. Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods".

Before we had modern labor and lived indoors we may not have had employers, but we still had to leave our family to go hunt. No vacations from that. And sometimes the animals would win and we'd die.

And then modern labor started to take form and employees had many fewer protections than they have today.

So let's call the history of labor "barbaric" and recognize the situation today is still not ideal, but improved enough that we need a less dramatic word to describe it.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#74

Post by fsloth »

krapp wrote: post #59
fsloth wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..." I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale. There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lo…

>Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't. Who are "we", though? Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo.…

"A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo."

Generally, providing better wellbeing for employees is profitable. Or, that's at least what trendy management books tell us. I don't have a clue, I'm just a frontline coder. See for example Hamish "Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't"

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#75

Post by majewsky »

> Always have an actual skill as a back-up, that’s very good advice.

This advice from Coupland is the best part of the article, because it uncovers the intended audience: telephone sanitizers. [1]

> Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.

This statement actually works for about every profession.

[1] If you don't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#76

Post by majewsky »

unprepare wrote: post #70
jackhack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a load of shit, indeed! This degree of hipster self-pity is intolerable. I couldn't make it more than half-way through the stupid article. "Barbaric." I wonder if he realizes how insulting and patronizing that is. I wish he could have met my grandfather, who worked his life in a coal mine literally scratching out a living six long days a week before dying of lung cancer in the 1950s. A man who lived in a company hous…

Ahh yes, the always tired retort of "people in the past/in a different place have it worse, so you have no right to complain" totally legitimate argument, im sure your grandfather fought hard for there to never be better working conditions for his grandchildren, and would hate that working conditions have gotten better and continue to improve. have you ever complained that something tastes bad? dont forget theres sta…

Not every opposing argument is a fallacy. I observe the grandparents [1] as trying to put things in perspective, which is a very reasonable followup on a decidedly opinionated original article.

[1] Grandparents as in comment hierarchy, not as in coal miners.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#77

Post by majewsky »

jhoechtl wrote: post #54
test1235 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another complaint I have about 9-5 is I can't find time to do certain things because everyone all works the same hours. Certain services such as doctors appointments are only available while I'm working, or if I need contractor services at home, again, only available while I'm working. Luckily I work in a city centre so I can do some things in my lunch hour, but if you happened to work out of town (e.g. business park…

In former times it was perceived to be ok to see your doctor during the 'regular' office hours. Go figure

It isn't? I do that regularly here in Germany (although of course I coordinate my appointments to not conflict with important meetings etc.).

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#78

Post by majewsky »

Bartweiss wrote: post #53
pc86 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lunch is included in my day but I know that's an extremely rare situation. The 4-mile, 10-minute drive is pretty nice too. But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?

> But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute? In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.

When I talked to my brother (a civil engineer who's doing his fair share of driving to remote working locations all across Germany and beyond) about the prospect of autonomous cars, he said that he wouldn't want to have one of these as a company car, for the same reason he wouldn't want to go by train: Under German law, when you're driving the car yourself, it counts as work time. When you're being driven by the car (or when you're going by train), it counts as free time. So if the location was 5 hours away, he would lose 10 paid work hours if the car was driving him instead of the other way around.

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#79

Post by jerf »

scarmig wrote: post #44
jerf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Think of it as "I am forced to be away from my loved ones for most of the daylight hours and most days of the year excluding these permitted 'holiday' periods"." As opposed to what, though? Hunter-gatherers may or may not have had a lot more leisure time, depending on who you ask, but they didn't hunt and gather together in family groups all the time, and while many people use their words to sing the praises of this…

1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies. 2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it. Even when hunter gatherer soci…

"Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist."

Yes, they do, even now. Of course, they're so inconsequential on the world stage that you don't hear about them much, but yes, they exist.

Now, you have the problem that they probably won't accept you, and will probably eventually try to kill you if you seriously set up next to them and start truly doing the hunt-gather routine.

But then, that's the authentic hunter-gatherer experience too.

(I don't believe the garbage about how peaceful they supposedly were. It is logistically ludicrous.)

Re: Douglas Coupland: The nine to five is barbaric

#80

Post by unprepare »

majewsky wrote: post #76
unprepare wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes, the always tired retort of "people in the past/in a different place have it worse, so you have no right to complain" totally legitimate argument, im sure your grandfather fought hard for there to never be better working conditions for his grandchildren, and would hate that working conditions have gotten better and continue to improve. have you ever complained that something tastes bad? dont forget theres sta…

Not every opposing argument is a fallacy. I observe the grandparents [1] as trying to put things in perspective, which is a very reasonable followup on a decidedly opinionated original article. [1] Grandparents as in comment hierarchy, not as in coal miners.

i never said every opposing argument is a fallacy, but this one definitely is.

what our grandparents experienced is irrelevant to discussions on how working conditions should continue to improve.

Would you have told the men starting the UAW that they should stop because their grandparents had to work longer hours and that they have no right to complain? Thats idiotic, its fallacious, and its not even an opposing argument, its an attempt to stop a conversation.

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