Casual reminder that working off the clock is illegal. Unless you’re salaried or authorized for overtime there is no reason for you to stay late. None. Your employers know this, too.
Coming over here from Europeland one of the things that’s most bizarre is this concept people seem to have that they need to be working all the damn time. For nothing. If I’m working I’m damn well being paid. I don’t mind the odd 10 minutes here or there, but if you want me to be doing work, you are damn well paying me.
I am super interested in my job, but [company] is being reimbursed for my effort by [customer], and I am having some of that money for myself, thanks*.
* When I want to feel like I’m purely giving back to society, that’s what volunteering is for.
The US attitude toward work and work ethic is honestly really weird, and pretty unhealthy and dysfunctional.
Yup. Thank you, puritans!
I’ll never forget the WSJ article I read on the plane back from Japan, talking about how France might “finally” raise the hours of it’s work week. The article just assumed that this was a good thing in every way, and that not doing so was holding the country ‘back.‘ It totally ignored why the 35 hour work week was initially instituted (to combat unemployment), but even more, it seems to ignore what seems to me to be the defining mark of the march of civilization: human beings having to spend less time working for subsistence. Seriously, all the ‘great leaps’, like agriculture and automation, have basically made huge societal change by reducing the working hours necessary to live. ‘Free time’ is when you get arts and innovation. We ALL want to work less, right? Or at least, to do less work that feels like, well, work?
AND YET.
My aim is to get to a point where I only have to work a little. Or ideally, I don’t *have* to work, it’s just something to keep me from getting too caught up in building some device to sink Australia and ending up some kind of supervillain…
Course the tricky thing is that I also want to get to that point without doing too much work, or anything hideously unethical. Which has spoilt the plan somewhat.
