White Collar Slavery
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The overvaluing of overwork
By Edward Hadas Moritz Erhardt has become a tragic symbol. The 21-year-old summer intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch was found dead on Aug. 15 at his rented London apartment. There is no official report of what happened, but coworkers blogged that Erhardt died after working three consecutive 20-hour days. Whether or not that is true, the tragedy has prompted a worthwhile debate about the work culture in banking and other high-pressure professions. Erhardt’s schedule was not extraordinary for the ambitious young people who are trying to advance on the fast track at investment banks, law firms, consultancies and other practitioners of long working hours. The normal career starts with a period of white-collar slavery: 80 or more hours a week of drudgery in air-conditioned offices, with occasional breaks for take-away meals. The tasks eventually become more interesting, but the years of mega-hours drag on. Later, workers often have lives of privileged desperation: lots of money, luxuriant houses and holidays, and a trail of damage. Deaths from overwork are rare. But exhaustion, family breakdowns and substance abuse are common in high-stress jobs with ultra-long days. The extent of the gradual degradation of character – intelligent and interesting people reduced to narrow-minded careerists – is a matter of ongoing debate. Long hours were once traditional in factories. That changed. So too it could change in the office, and more easily, since shorter workdays have less effect on output there. These professions don’t need or even obviously benefit from this cult. So who is responsible for its perpetuation? Employers deserve some blame. Human Resources departments could brief managers on the extensive psychological research about the damage of overwork. The excuse that mega-hours are somehow good for shareholders is both mistaken and feeble: workers should not suffer unduly just to keep profit up, and profit would not suffer if workers had a chance for a good night’s sleep. One reason these practices continue is that there are so many would-be workers willing to endure them. Each intern position at top firms attracts hundreds of applicants. The few who are chosen, and then the even more select group who get professional positions, vie to put the most hours on the job. The post-midnight days are often described with a sort of grim satisfaction and pride – a mark of membership of a privileged group. Fear of being fired or of losing out also keeps people working hard. However, anyone who is skilled enough to find a job at a leading bank or law firm could easily get a less all-consuming job at some other respectable employer. And while the lure of ultra-high pay is significant, young professionals could demand, and be given, more reasonable working conditions without sacrificing much income. I think the culture of long hours can be traced back to something else – the status that now comes with overwork. This is a historical novelty. In almost all pre-industrial societies, the aristocratic life had ample leisure time, while very long working hours were a sign of poverty and a low social position – think Downton Abbey. That hierarchy – leisure above labour – made sense when hard work was necessary for survival. Today, we have a new social hierarchy. A life of leisure is more often associated with shameful unemployment than with wealth and privilege, while the irreplaceable expert enjoys the highest social status. That status is demonstrated by the need, and the desire, to work long hours. The time on the job shows dedication, skills and the importance of the job. If my theory is right, there’s an economic irony. The skills of most of the professionals who enjoy an elevated social status are real enough, but the social benefits of many of the long-hour roles are questionable. The hard grind of many bankers and lawyers does not translate into much gain for the productive economy. There is also a social tragedy. One of the great gains of the modern economy – the reduction of toil – is being squandered. The labour-market elite, who help set the social standard of the good life, too often choose to put exhausting work, however pointless, before family, community and what used to be called the higher things in life. As a result, the work multiplies, and with it the sense that it should bring extravagant rewards. The widespread, horrified response to Erhardt’s death shows that many people are concerned by the hours-culture. BofA Merrill is investigating working conditions for its young workers, with a view to encouraging cultural change. That’s a good first step. The overvaluing of overwork has gone too far.
Amazon’s White-Collar Salary Slaves
By Annie Lowrey This weekend, the New York Times published an excellent, in-depth look at what it is like to work for Amazon. We’ve heard a lot about the working conditions in which the retail behemoth’s blue-collar wage slaves toil. This time, we got a look inside the white-collar salary monkeys’ Seattle salt mine. There’s seemingly a lot to dislike. Take this jarring anecdote: Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon. “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said. Or this one: A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover. It is hard to tell whether the problem is with a few apples or the whole barrel, to be fair. Jeff Bezos, the company’s executive, sent a letter to all employees describing those incidents as “shockingly callous” and inexcusable. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero. A number of other Amazonians have stepped forward to argue that the story depicted the company culture cartoonishly: people who describe it as an intense but wonderful place, people who work fairly standard eight-to-six-type schedules, people who have taken time off when they needed to do so. Bezos himself pointed to this response to the Times piece from one Amazonian: During my 18 months at Amazon, I’ve never worked a single weekend when I didn’t want to. No one tells me to work nights. No one makes me answer emails at night. No one texts me to ask me why emails aren’t answered. I don’t have these expectations of the managers that work for me, and if they were to do this to their Engineers, I would rectify that myself, immediately. And if these expectations were in place, and enforced upon me, I would leave. If Amazon used to be this way (and it most likely was, as you’ll see in the quote below), from my 18 month experience working in two of its biggest product groups, that Amazon no longer exists. But I think it is fair to say that Amazon is perks-light and rough-handed in a way that a lot of other technology companies are not. In Bezos’s first letter to investors, after all, he wrote: “It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, ‘You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three’), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy.” (Hat tip to Mashable for digging that up.) Why does anyone at Amazon Corporate put up with these Wall Street–type conditions when they could be playing in ball pits and getting their feet massaged at their desks down in Silicon Valley, or working at one of the many other technology or retail firms with offices in Seattle? Well, to quote Don Draper: The piece scarcely mentions the kinds of salaries that these employees are pulling in. Indeed, the only dollar figure quoted in the piece is Amazon’s market value. But Payscale data on Amazon’s compensation for a wide range of positions shows a whole lot of six-figure numbers. Moreover, the company grants employees hefty stock options. So don’t worry too much about the demands placed on white-collar workers in a growing, competitive, venerated, respected, remunerative industry. Worry about those wage slaves instead.
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从"房奴"到"白奴墓奴" 新式"奴隶"是无奈还是幸福
“奴”字在字典的解释为:(1)受人役使,没有人身自由。(2)心甘情愿供人驱使。这是“奴”最初最原本的含义。现如今,奴隶社会早已离我们远去,奴隶制度也早就废弃消失,但是“奴”字却未因此消声隐匿,反倒愈加的“大放异彩”起来。在教育部颁布的171个新词中,“房奴”、“车奴”、“卡奴”、“白奴”等一大批缀以“奴”字的词汇赫然位列其中。这个时代的人们似乎正在被一种有形或无形的力量折磨着肉体和精神,成了不同角色的“奴隶”。 这绝不是危言耸听。2009年,一部《蜗居》让无数买不起房的年轻人找到了“房奴”的共鸣;网上一则《80后孩奴妈妈晒百万账单,你还敢要孩子吗?》的网帖,又让一群人化身“孩奴”;2010年春节刚过,晒“春劫”就成为一种新时尚,于是又产生了“节奴”的概念;到近日,天价墓地的新闻一再发热,北师大金融研究中心一教授又发出“墓奴”的警告…… 人们不免发出抱怨,为什么我们会沦为各种各样的“奴隶”?一个小小的“奴”包含着太多难以言说的酸、甜、苦、辣、咸,五味杂陈……难道中国的年轻人真已大步走入“奴时代”? 从“房奴”到“墓奴” 刚过而立的苏先生在抚顺一家韩资企业工作了三年,年收入8万元左右。他说:“小时候我们是‘学奴’,不拿小鞭子抽就不好好学。上大学了我们成了‘证奴’:英语4、6级证,计算机证,报关报检证,考研,公务员没有没参加过的,我甚至还考了一个导游证。当时就是‘考证无意识’的状态,没办法,手里多个证,心里才有底啊!现在成家立业了,我又加入了新的‘奴’队伍! ”除了当上“房奴”、“车奴”、“孩奴”,苏先生还是一位名副其实的“卡奴”。三张信用卡,经常刷卡消费,常常分期付款,难怪苏先生说自己:“发工资的日子就是去银行还各种钱的日子,感觉努力工作,都是在给别人赚钱。 ” 现在,像苏先生这样生活的人不在少数,甚至有人提出了这样一个等式——白领现状:卡奴+证奴+房奴+车奴+X奴……=白奴。大家被房子、车子甚至墓地等一系列东西“绑架”,众“奴”加身,却又不可自拔。据某地产网的一项最新调查,我国32.18%的人月供占到了收入的50%以上,他们在享受有房一族的心理安慰的同时,也承受着不敢轻易换工作,不敢娱乐、旅游,害怕银行涨息,担心生病、失业等等精神重压。
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 "White Collar Slavery" cannot really enjoy their lives.
2 "White Collar Slavery" refers to a social phenomenon caused by higher stress from various aspects.
3 "White Collar Slavery" is a result of modern economy.