Original Reddit discussion: View on Reddit
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
966 points (97.6% liked)
Work Reform
16328 readers
42 users here now
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it. Its closer to 50/50 iirc though. So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
But that also includes stuff like meetings and water cooler talk. Socializing has its benefits, but hard to quantify.
I mean, more that it's a joke that we have to sit in an office for 8+ hours to do 3 hours of work.
I think it's unreasonable to call it "wasted". Like telling a pro-athlete "if you're not running the ball continuously for every minute of the game you're wasting your potential".
Some of it is socializing (which has knock on benefits). Some of it is simply resting/recovery (because intellectual labor takes real energy and people get exhausted). Some of it is bureaucracy.
The real gains of IT are in the speed of data transfer and processing. That saves human labor to a degree, but it also proliferates the labor. Excel allows every Mom & Pop accounting firm to do what required an army of NASA "computers" 60 years ago. But because everyone is doing this level of rigorous, high speed accounting, it actually requires more overall work, not less.
The individuals in question are no more or less efficient today. They were taking coffee breaks, long lunches, and clocking out early to play golf at NASA, too.
Marathon runners take no breaks. If you’re requireing constant breaks due to mental fatigue, like any other muscle training and work it.
How do you think tradesman handle working 8 hour shifts with only a 30 minute break? They’re constantly on their feet, being physical, they are also doing calculations, looking around at their surroundings in case something is wrong or going to happen.
So yes, it is in fact wasted.
Marathon runners take breaks between every marathon. Runners can require nearly a month of downtime between races in order to perform optimally.
Resting isn't wasted time any more than sleeping is.
Just because people are standing around, does not mean that they are all "lazy" construction workers fyi. Any number of them could be engineers or municipal employees.
Right, but they handle the full shift of their duties in that time, and get their REST after. They get no breaks.
Thank you, that’s a union job, makes my point quite well, other tradesman would be canned for doing that. They can go a full shift without breaks.
Resting and breaks are wholefully different things. Everyone needs rest between shifts, but if you can’t perform your shift without breaks, why are you there?
That's just a job. If you think people are working harder without a union, you'd be surprised. More often they're being paid less to do less work, because the workers aren't trained by their veteran peers to manage themselves.
The suffocating bureaucratization of the corporate world tends to make work sites more difficult and dangerous to navigate, tires people out more quickly, and ends up with exactly this kind of "six guys staring at a hole in the ground while one guy works" dynamic - because corporate only delegated one shovel for six people, to save money.
Nope.
Each one has their role, and can’t start till the one before is done. But it’s too difficult to coordinate and people don’t like sitting around at home not being paid. So they just pay everyone to stand around.
It’s why union jobs cost 10x as much as private, and do the exact same job.
On a normal jobsite, the plumber could dig his own hole, and sweep up after, but now that’s 3 different jobs done by 3 different people and different rates as well.
But they can't perform their work efficiently, because of the artificial constraints imposed by the business. I've worked these jobs and I've seen the tight-fisted nature of corporate drag a job out needlessly for months on a number of occasions.
They don't cost 10x as much. They cost maybe 10-20% more, but with much thinner margins, because the workers get a bigger cut of the gross revenues. So you tend to see unions employed in bigger and more professional tier projects, where failure costs far more than some angry retail sucker giving you a bad Yelp review.
There's no such thing as a single "normal jobsite". You have different levels of job and different requirements for the job. On a new build, you can have multiple professionals working simultaneously if they're well-managed. Or you can have a bunch of apprentice-tier dorks waiting in line to do the next task, because the project manager is a paint-by-numbers guy taking instructions from some master planner that isn't on site.