Ubuntucat

Okay. I confess. I work an exempt job that makes sense to have hours for, since I am also the receptionist for my office, so I have to be ready in case the phone rings, or at least be able to get back to the phone message quickly if I miss the call.

Some other people have exempt jobs that require them to work very hard all the time. And then there are the non-exempt folks who get paid by the hour.

But I know a lot of people who work salaried, exempt jobs and who have to be at work from a fixed hour to another fixed hour, regardless of how much work they have to do. That I find silly. If your job doesn’t require meeting people who randomly walk in or answering random phone calls, you should be paid to do your job, and not to be in an office for a specified number of hours.

But the culture of the American office workforce is “Work these hours,” not “get this job done.” Because of that culture, millions of employees spend hours of their time “on the job” talking with each other at the water cooler about what happened on some TV show the night before or surfing the internet and doing some online shopping. The best is the employee who spends all her time complaining to her co-workers about how busy she is (uh… the time you’re spending complaining about how busy you are? You could use that time to actually get your work done and then be a little less busy).

Imagine if you were a manager and had a project you wanted to be done well, do you think you’d get a better result saying, “Do as good a job on this project as you can. I’m going to be judging the project by how well it’s done. I don’t care if it takes you two hours or two weeks to do. Whenever you’re done with the project, go home” or saying “Do this project. No matter how good a job you do on this project, you have to be here from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM”?

I had a job once that was a lot like the latter. People would always marvel at how quickly I got things done, but I think that’s just because they had no incentive to get things done quickly… or even well. All they knew is they had to be in by a certain hour in the morning and leave by a certain hour in the evening. That’s it. What gets done or doesn’t get done in the meantime, for a lot of office workers, is just enough not to get fired.

Am I alone in thinking this way? Can my readers from other countries shed some light on whether this is a uniquely American phenomenon or not?

Two books that changed my life were recommended to me by a good friend during senior year of high school. One was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the other was The Feminine Mystique. Recently, I picked up Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake from the library, and I think it’s a life-changing book that everyone—both male and female—should read. It’s kind of an unofficial sequel to Friedan’s groundbreaking book of a similar name.

Yes, Bennetts is a self-proclaimed feminist. But she doesn’t spend most of her energy on ideological battles (she does shove a few into the last chapter of the book, which may anger some conservatives). She looks at working while having children from a pragmatic point of view. Her main point is that women who decide to quit their jobs for full-time motherhood are putting themselves (and their children) at economic risk, because they can’t anticipate the likelihood that their husbands will leave them, suddenly lose their jobs, or become extremely disabled or dead. Coupling those unfortunate possible future circumstances with the unlikelihood that someone 15 years out of the workforce will be able to find a job on par with the one she left makes it a no-brainer that simply for economic reasons, women should keep their jobs while having kids, or at least not leave the workforce for too long.

Added to that, Bennetts notes that the burden of being the sole breadwinner also adversely affects men and traps them in jobs they may not like or feel fulfilled in. More importantly, she debunks the idea that women have to “have it all” or “be perfect.” You don’t have to put 110% attention into your job and 110% attention into your children. Both men and women have various aspects of their life that need to have attention paid to—personal relationships, hobbies, achievement, community involvement, etc. And sharing work, children, and household chores ends up benefitting the whole family.

Even though Bennetts does repeat herself a lot, the book doesn’t feel as repetitive as some other one-idea books, mainly because Bennetts (who is a journalist by trade) goes so in-depth into her topic (using the full breadth of sociological studies, books, magazine articles, interviews, and personal anecdotes to flesh out her point).