[lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

moominek at aol.com moominek at aol.com
Tue Jun 10 00:57:51 PDT 2008


Actually sleeping less and working longer hours does not make you more but less roductive.

Even the Pentagon shall take this seriously:

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/jason_warns.html

-- "Wir wollen etwas verfeinerten Radikalismus. Nicht bloß dieses grobkörnige Entweder-Oder" Rosa Luxemburg -- Sebastian Gerhardt Am Treptower Park 24 Berlin, 12435 Tel. 030/530 27 695 mob. 0176/24 04 28 95 www.hausderdemokratie.de www.lunapark21.net www.jungewelt.de

-----Ursprüngliche Mitteilung----- Von: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> An: lbo-talk lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Verschickt: Di., 10. Jun. 2008, 7:28 Thema: Re: [lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

Actually sleeping less and working longer hours does not make you more but less roductive. This is a result of industrial psychology that is so robust it could e the foundation of the field. I know of no, zero, zip work even disputing it, nd every one of the dozens of studies that look into this variable suggest that ore sleep and shorter hours make you more productive. I mean every single tudy, without exception. If you make people work 14 hour days over six or seven ay weeks, you will get no more work, in fact less, than you would if you had hem work about five hours (the limit of productive work) about four days a eek. You just get the same amount of work done spread over more time. This raises the question of why there has been what the old man called the truggle over the length of the working day. It is actually against capitalist aterial interest for the bosses to keep you chained longer to your machines. In ome contexts, rare, such as hourly billing for associates in law firms, where umber of hours put in rather than actual productivity is the basis of profits, here is a rationality to it. But for most workers, where profits depend irectly on increasing unit production per hour, it's irrational in the ndividual capitalist case. As a first approximation, I hypothesize that the struggle over the length of the orking day, the absolute intensification of exploitation, is an exercise of apitalist class power to keep workers in their place. In the early days of Sir ndrew Ure, as documented by, e.g., E.P. Thompson in The Making Of The English orking Class, it was necessary to "break" newly proletarianized former farm aborers to factory discipline. Now of course we are all thoroughly broken, so the question is, why does this fficiency-wrecking (as well as soul-destroying) practice continue? It's not as f the psychological results are not known. Maybe they are not believed, robably managers don't believe them, but you'd think that just a few companies hat were sensible about this would have a serious competitive advantage. And his isn't rocket science; you'd think it was totally obvious that rested, happy orkers would do more and better than tired, bitter workers who need constant onitoring. Nonetheless, the prevailing managerial philosophy throughout the apitalist world is "the whippings will continue until morale improves." How this can persist, in capitalist terms, seems to me to be a very important uestion.

-- On Mon, 6/9/08, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: B. <docile_body at yahoo.com>

Subject: [lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

To: "LBO Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>

Date: Monday, June 9, 2008, 2:04 PM

[Not only does that (what's in my subject line) seem

to be a common theme of conservative groaning, it's

something I've encountered not infrequently among

crusty, cracker-barrel wisdom types.

Yet, not only have measures of US worker productivity

shown this to be untrue (right?), but, check this

out:--

B.]

--------------

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20080608/hl_hsn/sleepanecessitynotaluxury

Sleep: A Necessity, Not a Luxury

By Dennis Thompson

HealthDay Reporter Sun Jun 8, 7:01 PM ET

[...]

Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1880,

people slept an average of 10 hours a night. These

days, Americans average 6.9 hours of sleep on

weeknights and 7.5 hours a night on weekends,

according to the National Sleep Foundation.

[...]

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