A day at the beach
This morning my friend D and his girlfriend R came to visit. I've know D since university. He's in many ways a stereotypical boff, rather geeky, but very smart, and currently working for IBM Research. We don't really have that much to talk about, so it was actually good that I was with Edie, following her around on the beach. She found this amazing (but dead) swimming crab. Its back legs were formed into kinda flippers, and from its, er, butt came a segmented tail, almost like a crayfish's.
After playing with the crab for a while, we wandering along the rocks, looking at the anemones and other stuff. And talking a bit about our jobs - both D and myself had been approached by a friend of a friend recently about the business he is currently running. Now this friend, let's call him S, is an ex-leftie-ish person who is now running a successful business in the field of mining, applying IT to studying and optimising workflows. The same kind of thing Frederick Taylor was involved in in the field of manufacturing in the early 20th century. The social advantages for mining are that danger can be avoided (by studying work patterns and spotting dangerous work trends) and jobs can be saved (the South African mining industry is in serious shit at the moment due to declining profits). Of course, as an anti-capitalism, I view these 'social advantages' rather suspiciously, since the job of workflow optimisation at the end of the day is to facilitate the intergration of workers into capital, i.e. to make more money for the capitalists. Any social advantages are side products that will soon be dropped if they get in the way of profit. With this in mind, D and I got talking about business.
See, I reckon that I've got a pretty good understanding of business principles - maybe in a kind of 'know your enemy' way, but also in the form of having been part of startups and seeing the business process close-up. And yet, I'm loathe to apply my knowledge because I know that running a business efficiently goes counter to my other goal in life, which is getting by with the least amount of work (i.e. imposed labour) possible. Turns out D is not so far removed from me on this, as he said the reason the stayed at IBM was that the goals of his job are kinda ill-defined, leaving him with quite a bit of freedom. That's the thing - job efficiency and surveillance go hand in hand. In order to optimize 'employee productivity', the workers in question need to be studied and watched closely as they do their jobs. No slacking off with MSN for these ones... ;) This is obviously stressful - in one of the car factories where the ethic of performance maximisation has been instilled deep within the workplace (workers compete not just with other car manufacturers, but also with other factories within this one multinational), the company apparently has an in-house psychologist to help workers deal with the stress of the job.
I think most people understand the contradiction between the job and your life. Which is why, I think, most people slack off, using more or less sophisticated schemes (anything from working slowly to choosing a job (or choosing to not have a job) based on the ability to evade the boss). And, yeah, I don't think that the amount of work imposed under capitalism is ration or necessary, so I feel no shame avoiding it - but in that respect, I think I'm in a minority. Most people on the surface buy into the work-ethic.
And thus things like wandering around the beach looking at swimmer crabs are squeezed into the weekend. Bah. :D
After playing with the crab for a while, we wandering along the rocks, looking at the anemones and other stuff. And talking a bit about our jobs - both D and myself had been approached by a friend of a friend recently about the business he is currently running. Now this friend, let's call him S, is an ex-leftie-ish person who is now running a successful business in the field of mining, applying IT to studying and optimising workflows. The same kind of thing Frederick Taylor was involved in in the field of manufacturing in the early 20th century. The social advantages for mining are that danger can be avoided (by studying work patterns and spotting dangerous work trends) and jobs can be saved (the South African mining industry is in serious shit at the moment due to declining profits). Of course, as an anti-capitalism, I view these 'social advantages' rather suspiciously, since the job of workflow optimisation at the end of the day is to facilitate the intergration of workers into capital, i.e. to make more money for the capitalists. Any social advantages are side products that will soon be dropped if they get in the way of profit. With this in mind, D and I got talking about business.
See, I reckon that I've got a pretty good understanding of business principles - maybe in a kind of 'know your enemy' way, but also in the form of having been part of startups and seeing the business process close-up. And yet, I'm loathe to apply my knowledge because I know that running a business efficiently goes counter to my other goal in life, which is getting by with the least amount of work (i.e. imposed labour) possible. Turns out D is not so far removed from me on this, as he said the reason the stayed at IBM was that the goals of his job are kinda ill-defined, leaving him with quite a bit of freedom. That's the thing - job efficiency and surveillance go hand in hand. In order to optimize 'employee productivity', the workers in question need to be studied and watched closely as they do their jobs. No slacking off with MSN for these ones... ;) This is obviously stressful - in one of the car factories where the ethic of performance maximisation has been instilled deep within the workplace (workers compete not just with other car manufacturers, but also with other factories within this one multinational), the company apparently has an in-house psychologist to help workers deal with the stress of the job.
I think most people understand the contradiction between the job and your life. Which is why, I think, most people slack off, using more or less sophisticated schemes (anything from working slowly to choosing a job (or choosing to not have a job) based on the ability to evade the boss). And, yeah, I don't think that the amount of work imposed under capitalism is ration or necessary, so I feel no shame avoiding it - but in that respect, I think I'm in a minority. Most people on the surface buy into the work-ethic.
And thus things like wandering around the beach looking at swimmer crabs are squeezed into the weekend. Bah. :D