Time theft

 

Coffee Time

An article on the escalating concern of some employers with time theft caught my attention today. The COVID pandemic and the resulting “work from home” option has underlined the possibility that the office worker you’re paying a full wage is not spending the agreed amount of time working for you. Since a wage is paid on the basis of time on task, your work-at-home employees may be stealing hours from you. Time theft.

Unions worked hard to limit the number of hours a worker could be compelled to work in a week; forty seems to be the current standard. But hours worked is not a reliable measure by which an employee’s worth to an employer is determined. It might be if we were all equally skilled, equally motivated, equally self-directed and if we all had the same commitment to honesty and fairness.

Working on a commission basis, i.e. piece work, measures worth by productivity, i.e. you’re paid X dollars for each widget you assemble, each vacuum cleaner you sell. But how do you pay a teacher, a pastor or a politician by the piece?

Merit pay has been suggested, whereby a teacher, for instance would be paid a bonus or no-bonus based on students’ standardized test scores. That has too many pitfalls to be seriously or broadly applied.

Typically, individuals and families exchange a portion of their strength, skill, experience and time for housing, groceries, a car and fuel, clothing and leisure-time options. We call it work or a job. The description of paid employment has and is evolving through automation, robotics, changing needs and wants, and more and more people will find themselves unemployed in the traditional sense and more and more of the capable will join those unable to work or hold a job: the elderly, the children, the handicapped. How will we distribute food, shelter and myriad necessities in the years to come? Who’s working on a paradigm for the future if and when “get a job” ceases to make sense?

What if I should become a church pastor whose job description and pay scale are negotiated with the council of a local church? Is that “a job?” Is it clear as I begin my tenure how many hours of work I owe in order to match the salary I draw? Am I “on the clock” from 9:00 to 5:00 Wednesday through Sunday and “off the clock” at all other times? Will I be remunerated for my productivity, $150 per sermon, $50 per home visit? I’ve seen enough pastors over time to know how quickly this would turn out to be an absurd way of exchanging work for means.

There must be a sweet spot where distributing living sustenance to people is neither the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” of a Marxist ideology nor the conservative strident resistance to change, as in defending the age-old simplification inherent in, “work … or starve!” It’s safe to say that as long as we have jobs, that stealing time by employees and stealing labour by employers will remain crimes … and will remain endemic.

Every community needs its members’ contributions of time, skills and energies in order to prosper; this is probably true. Every individual has more or less of time, skills and energies to contribute. But every individual needs good food and a warm, comfortable, safe place to sleep.

A measure of how much dollar value any individual’s work is worth is, by its nature, arbitrary and inexact. In the end, without general good will, a cooperative (as opposed to a competitive) ethic, genuine empathy and compassion, some will be rewarded with way more abundance than their work deserves …

… and others will sleep on a park bench, hungry.