Anyone who reads my articles may have noticed a common theme: I often talk about there being two good extremes, and one bad, cursed middle-ground, that combines the worst of both worlds.
No different is work. Anyone who has read my articles - the ones not about 3D graphics and software rendering - will know that I'm not too fond of the very concept of work to begin with, and that's quite the understatement. But, just to please those who have read my articles and are getting bored of every single one of them turning into pro-UBI propaganda by the end, I will resist the urge to further elaborate on that.
So, what are the two extremes of work, and why are we in a cursed middle-ground?
The employer's perspecetive
People often accuse me of not being able to put myself into the shoes of others, but that simply isn't true. I definitely can put myself into the shoes of others, and I'm going to put myself into the shoes of the employer now.
You see, from the employer's perspective, the idea of a monthly or hourly wage makes no sense. If I'm employing you, I'm not paying you - or rather, I don't want to be paying you - just for being physically present in the office, factory or field or whatever. I want to pay you for delivering results.
If I hire someone to pick strawberries, I'm not hiring them to do it for 8 hours a day - I'm hiring them for picking X-amount of strawberries. I want to pay you per kilogram of strawberries picked, not per hour you spent picking the strawberries. I don't care if you fulfill your daily quota under 8 hours, 4 hours or even 1 hour, as long as you do it. Once you picked it, you're free to go home, or work for extra.
Likewise, if I had my way, a programmer wouldn't be told "work on this piece of software for 8 hours every day" - a programmer would be told "deliver till the deadline, and if you are super-fast, the time between you finishing and the deadline is free time".
Again, if I was an employer, I would want to pay people for results, not for hours. Paying people for hours encourages workers to stretch the work out and be lazy. Paying people for results encourages workers to finish the job as fast as possible, then go home.
But you see, there is one fatal flaw within this kind of thinking...
The employee's perspective
One of the most childish delusions of corporate suits is the idea that us employees are loyal vassals. No, we're not. We're mercenaries. I'm yours for 8 hours, after that, kindly bugger off, buddy - unless you agree to pay me for overtime. I have zero loyalty to any company I work for - they might fire me if I said it to them out loud, but I'll write it here anyway: I'm only in it for the money.
You see, from our perspective, time is money. We're trading away our time - time we could be spending with our family, having fun, doing something we actually enjoy doing, etc. - for money. So, if commutes turn my de jure 8-hour workday into a de facto 12-hour workday (which they did before the pandemic convinced everyone to convert to home office - God bless Covid-19), that ought to be compensated somehow. Because that extra 4 hours isn't free time for me. I spend half of it traveling to work, and the other half of it going home from work. Work is the common denominator, and I consider it part of work.
In fact, if I fully had my way, I ought to be compensated for even thinking about work outside of official work hours, because that is a clear invasion of my free time and peace of mind by work.
There is just one major flaw within my more worker-friendly approach: if employers had to compensate their employees for the time spent traveling to work, they would never hire anyone who lives in a rural area (except for remote work, which only applies to a small fraction jobs as of 2021), anyone who lives 1-2 hours away from the inner city, etc. This would exacerbate the already prominent chicken-and-egg problem that plagues the European countryside: all the young people are moving to the cities because that's where all the jobs are (the ones that pay a livable wage, that is), and all the jobs are in the cities because all the young people are moving into the cities, thus villages get deserted.
The cursed middle-ground
What we have today, is the cursed middle-ground that pleases no one. Employees spend hours commuting to work, and are paid only for the time they physically spend in the office, which is bad for employees. But it's bad for the employers too, because the employees are paid for time spent at the workplace, rather than actual productive work and results, so employees are encouraged to stretch out the work and generally be lazy about it. It's literally the worst of both worlds.
Is there a solution?
This is the point where I'd normally derail the article into more pro-UBI propaganda, but since that's getting boring, I'll have to provide other alternatives, other potential solutions:
Remote work. If there is no real need for your to be physically present at the workplace to do your job, then why even force you to commute to work? For everyone whose job doesn't involve physically touching anything other than a computer, remote work should always be offered as an option.
Decentralization and deurbanization. Right now, much of the economical activity is centralized in the largest cities. But what if it wasn't?
The real culprit might be mega-corporations. Small, family-owned workshops simply can't compete.
Sadly, you require starting capital to even life off the land. If you don't own land and don't have money to buy land, tough luck trying to be a self-sustaining farmer. The government doesn't treat kindly those who illegally occupy even unused land. Sadly, homesteading is impossible in most developed countries as of 2021.
You can't really decentralize the economy without either a major catastrophe ruining all the major businesses, or some Communist wealth redistribution, which I oppose out of principle.
Business deregulation. Because regulating businesses is exactly what got us into this mess. If there was no regulation, and you were allowed to set up business wherever you please, it would be much easier to set up shop in your home town and create jobs for the locals.
This might backfire though, if we do it ceteris paribus and don't change other aspects of the system at the same time: under the current system, corporations have every incentive to concentrate their assets in urban areas, no matter the amount of regulation.
Alternative economics. Obviously, the elephant in the room that I'm resisting the urge to mention is one of them, but surely, there are other ways of achieving a more localized economy where people aren't forced to travel 50+ kilometres from their home every day just to put bread on the table.
There's Mutualism, Agorism, Distributism and some even want to revive guilds. Sadly, all of these ideas would require a massive sweeping change, either through the abolition of the state, or through a semi-apocalyptic cataclysm that does the dirty work for us.
Or just homesteading. But again, that would require us to cut the government down the size. Not that I'm complaining, since I'm very anti-statist to begin with.
The Amish might be onto something. They have a strong communal identity and emphasize self-sufficiency. It's a common misconception that the Amish hate technology. They don't. They just oppose anything that makes them dependent on outsiders. An Amish blacksmith can easily fix a broken horse cart or make a new one - an automobile, not so much.
So, why didn't I mention the government's intervention as a possible solution? Is it just because I'm such an anti-statist? Yes and no. I'm too jaded and cynical to put my faith in any government-sponsored "save our villages!" initiative. Whenever the government tries to desperately go against the wind and artificially redirect it, it always fails, or at the very least backfires. When the government sponsors movies and songs for a certain cause, youngsters always consider it "cringe" and favour the non-governmental alternatives. So the solution has to be organic change, rather than government intervention.
