Paid to be Lazy
January 9th 2008 12:18
I have long believed that all work should be paid on a job basis and definitely not on a per hour basis.
Paying someone to do something by the ticking of the clock, unless you can threaten him with a whip of a bamboo cane, which is unlikely, is inviting him to be lazy.
If not, watch this real life example: I work in a commercial kitchen, by nature I work very hard and I’m fast, as everybody acknowledges. I make some money. Another guy in a parallel position, always works slowly, always needs me to help him and always finds excuses to leave something undone. What’s more, he works much longer hours than me and makes a lot more money than me. Fair?
Were he given the job of doing his work for a limited amount of money and a certain level of quality, wouldn’t that act over him as a kick in the ass?
I believe in working for profit, and working for a job rather for an hourly pay rate approximates that.
I had one kitchenhand job once where the boss, with or without accordance with regulations, paid me and all the others in that kitchen for a set number of hours every night. The faster with finished, the sooner we could go home on the same nightly pay. Not surprisingly, the above problem never eventuated there.
We are in an era where much work can be done from home, and I do not mean just the white collar jobs. It is the more important now to tailor work in such a way that it can be given in lots and paid by the job. Otherwise, how is anyone going to pay a worker sitting in her kitchen in front of her PC, totally unsupervised?
We must supersede the industrial notion that you only do some work while your boss has his eyes on what you do. You are assumed to be dishonest, stupid and in need of that supervision. This must change to a situation where the employee – or should he be called the contractor? – works from internal motivation and has incentives to be efficient by being paid for a job.
Paying someone to do something by the ticking of the clock, unless you can threaten him with a whip of a bamboo cane, which is unlikely, is inviting him to be lazy.
If not, watch this real life example: I work in a commercial kitchen, by nature I work very hard and I’m fast, as everybody acknowledges. I make some money. Another guy in a parallel position, always works slowly, always needs me to help him and always finds excuses to leave something undone. What’s more, he works much longer hours than me and makes a lot more money than me. Fair?
Were he given the job of doing his work for a limited amount of money and a certain level of quality, wouldn’t that act over him as a kick in the ass?
I believe in working for profit, and working for a job rather for an hourly pay rate approximates that.
I had one kitchenhand job once where the boss, with or without accordance with regulations, paid me and all the others in that kitchen for a set number of hours every night. The faster with finished, the sooner we could go home on the same nightly pay. Not surprisingly, the above problem never eventuated there.
We are in an era where much work can be done from home, and I do not mean just the white collar jobs. It is the more important now to tailor work in such a way that it can be given in lots and paid by the job. Otherwise, how is anyone going to pay a worker sitting in her kitchen in front of her PC, totally unsupervised?
We must supersede the industrial notion that you only do some work while your boss has his eyes on what you do. You are assumed to be dishonest, stupid and in need of that supervision. This must change to a situation where the employee – or should he be called the contractor? – works from internal motivation and has incentives to be efficient by being paid for a job.
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