All About Work
by Miki Saxon
Startup or not, people are working longer hours even if they aren’t in an office.
Millennials are burning out, because they feel guilty unless they are working.
People of all ages, even those well into their seventies are working longer and proud of it. Having spare time has become a symbol of low value, while being always busy equates to high status.
So it’s no surprise that companies and individual bosses are taking advantage and always pushing people to increase productivity.
When what they should be doing is sending them home, since working longer hours has been proved to lower productivity.
As countless studies have shown, this simply isn’t true. Productivity dramatically decreases with longer work hours, and completely drops off once people reach 55 hours of work a week, to the point that, on average, someone working 70 hours in a week achieves no more than a colleague working 15 fewer hours.
But that doesn’t stop various media from writing job shaming articles making fun of successful, well-known people working retail jobs.
Fans wondered why it was deemed newsworthy that a mother of two had taken a job in a different sector when her best-known role as an actor had wound down. (Soap stars, even on massive hits like EastEnders, do not earn early-retirement-level salaries.)
The fiasco echoed a similar attempt at job-shaming by another British tabloid last year, when the Daily Mail published photos of American actor Geoffrey Owens bagging groceries as a cashier at a Trader Joe’s, a retail chain known for its excellent job benefits. Fox News picked up the story in the US and both media outlets were ridiculed for it.
And, for a change, the trolls crawled quietly back under their rocks. Will wonders never cease.
Many of those working so-called low-level jobs are college graduates.
McKinsey findings show that 48% of employed U.S. college grads are in jobs that require less than a four-year degree.
Geoffrey Owens summed it up best.
“There is no job that’s better than another job. It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper. But actually, it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable,”
Image credit: Kat
