{"id":5582,"date":"2013-12-15T12:20:48","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T18:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5582"},"modified":"2013-12-15T12:20:48","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T18:20:48","slug":"why-the-cult-of-hard-work-is-counter-productive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5582","title":{"rendered":"Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/2013\/12\/right-be-lazy\">Steven Poole<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Loafing around can be an act of dissent against the ceaseless demands of capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, \u201cI\u2019m doing work\u201d. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a species of work illustrates the colonisation of everyday life by the devotion to toil: an ideology that argues cunningly in favour of itself in the phrase \u201cwork ethic\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer \u2013 not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: \u201cproductivity\u201d. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player\u2019s \u201cwork rate\u201d, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to \u201cde-fry your burnt brain\u201d, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.<\/p>\n<p>A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a \u201cmaster of extreme productivity\u201d. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: \u201cProductivity will set you free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Strategies to enhance the \u201cproductivity\u201d of workers have been formalised since at least Frederick Winslow Taylor\u2019s early-20th-century dream of \u201cscientific management\u201d through methods such as \u201ctime studies\u201d. The latest wheeze is the Big Data field of \u201cworkforce science\u201d, in which everything \u2013 patterns of emails, the length of telephone calls \u2013 may be measured and consigned to a comparative database to create a perfect management panopticon. It is tempting to suspect that the ambition thus to increase \u201cworker productivity\u201d is aimed at getting more work out of each employee for the same (or less) money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Poole Loafing around can be an act of dissent against the ceaseless demands of capitalism. Recently, I saw a man on the Tube wearing a Nike T-shirt with a slogan that read, in its entirety, \u201cI\u2019m doing work\u201d. The idea that playing sport or doing exercise needs to be justified by calling it a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5582"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5583,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5582\/revisions\/5583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}