Competent Slacking Requires Incompetent Work

One of my fondest memories of working at Kohl’s was when I purposefully went slow on a particular night. We were doing the usual drudgery of taking clothes off a container and putting them in them in the appropriate place. This was fairly mindless, uninteresting, repetitive and frankly, insulting work that I generally disliked. It…

Work and “Time Poverty”

Last August we discussed a Gallup Poll that determined the obvious: we work more than we’re technically “supposed” to work. The study found based on a summary of the 2013-2014 numbers that Americans are more likely to work an average of forty-seven hours a week instead of the forty hours that is more commonly associated…

The Decline of the “Company Man”

A few months back a Reddit Thread had this headline: Workplace Loyalty is Declining: 69% of Employees Say Looking for New Opportunities is Part of their ‘Regular Routine’ which in turns links to this which links you to a Forbes article about job hopping which takes it’s data from a FastCompany article on “the four-year…

“Jobs” as a Red Herring: The Dangers of Make-Work Bias”, by Nathan Goodman

In the ongoing debate over the crony capitalist “Export-Import” bank, job statistics get thrown around a lot. On its website, the bank boasts that “Ex-Im Bank’s mission is American jobs,” claiming to have “supported 1.2 million private-sector, American jobs since 2009, supporting 205,000 jobs in 2013 alone.” Economist Veronique de Rugy points out that these job numbers…