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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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It feels like the big elephant in the room about shorter work weeks and more remote work is that lower level employee productivity is not the issue with them (likely at all).
And it isn't even that managers and higher-ups have some biases against such schemes (which they certainly do).
It's that such schemes put a clearer focus on the actual role managers and higher-ups are supposed to be performing, namely organising employees and their tasks and priorities into coherent and well-planned projects. Managers are, on average, not actually good at this. And the problem is systemic ... the average work culture doesn't have a good sense of what this looks like. Instead, there are "glue people" all over the place, working beyond their roles to fill in the gaps and keep things together.
But, with a less "monolithic", co-located and co-active workforce, the need for actual coordination beyond "do the things! LFG!!" becomes very real, and very anxious for people who either don't know how to do that or don't want the world to find out that things were actually working fine in spite of their inability to do it. A remote and discretely scheduled workforce necessarily asks accountability questions like "who is responsible for planning this?" and "this isn't my responsibility, you need to get someone else to do it" etc.
Managers and higher-ups aren't comfortable with their actual value being scrutinised more closely. And in many ways, it's actually understandable ... as they likely don't know the answer themselves.
I wish it were that simple. There's also personality and behaviour differences in people. Some people simply suck at working alone or remotely and it fucking sucks to be their manager because guess who has to work onsite now?
Even if my current team was like my previous ones where everyone could 100% remote—hell, I saw one guy every six months or so and let another travel Europe remote working—theres's personalities that loooooooove seeing everyone at work and 0.6 of their FTE is socialising. Work is getting out of the house and away from the family. They complain that no one's at the office to get paid to talk to.
And what about the people that suck at working at the office? And those that don’t get any or are not interested in a work based social life?
Reality is that there’s diversity and lots of in betweens. Thus diversity and flexibility and the value of managers in bringing it all together (like maybe they were always supposed to?)