Corey Robin notes a disturbing trend in the workplace: the notion that workers should be grateful for the most basic of freedoms, such as lunch breaks:
In one television advertisement, a woman gets up from her desk and announces, “I’m going to lunch.” Her co-workers try to dissuade her, telling her that the days of taking lunch are long gone.
In a scene reminiscent of “Jerry Maguire,” an inspired colleague stands up and says, “I’m going with her.” The music swells, he tears off the lanyard around his neck and adds, “I don’t want to be chicken, I want to eat it.”
Geoff McCartney, vice president and creative director at DDB Chicago, the agency that worked on the campaign, said the ads were based on a simple precept: “that busy people should take some time for a decent lunch.”
“Work-life balance is really at a tipping point,” he said. “People don’t have a break for lunch, and they feel like they can’t take one for whatever reason.”
Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse coined a phrase in One-Dimensional Man for capitalism’s ability to use (and tame) an emancipated sexuality for the sake of advancing capitalism itself: repressive desublimation. The basic argument was that the fantasy and idea of liberation could be mobilized to reproduce the very system that produced a need for liberation.
But what are we to make of a society in which liberation is defined as scarfing down a ham sandwich?
Sometimes I think that modern corporatist propaganda has become so potent that it will turn us into a population of willing serfs.
PeakVT
Let me be the first to contest the use of “will” in the last sentence.
S. cerevisiae
Time to EAT??? For the serfs??? Inconceivable!
The Republic of Stupdity
@PeakVT:
And since you’ve already gotten there, I shall be second…
AA+ Bonds
If it gets anyone here to read One-Dimensional Man then I’m all for it
If you work (and everyone works) then you should read that book
reflectionephemeral
Have you ever read Neil Postman? Here’s a cartoon based on the foreword to “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.”
Like the post title. On the other hand, though, “I believe in this– and it’s been tested by research…”
Bruuuuce
Interestingly, this exhibit just opened here in NY:
Lunch Hour NYC
Blame NY, once more, I guess.
pseudonymous in nc
Or in the case of that ad, a chicken sandwich from Maccy-Ds. Robin’s right: corporate fast food is the acceptable face of workplace “transgression”: asserting autonomy in an itty-bitty box.
debit
It’s an employee started thing, I’m pretty sure. “Look at me, skipping lunch, or eating it at my desk while those other losers with no self control go waste time when they could be productive. Man, I’m totally getting that bonus/award/pat on the back I’ve been craving.”
ETA: Not to say that employers wouldn’t encourage that sort of thing. They love it. But you can’t forbid a meal break in an eight hour workday. Well, not yet anyway. Give the GOP some time.
arguingwithsignposts
There’s been a whole series of posts at Crooked Timber in the past month about work in the context of libertarianism that sort of hits this. People should not have to wear adult diapers on a factory line. Seems pretty basic to me.
red dog
But on the other hand, personal business was not allowed in the past. For some reason employees seem to think it is their right to get and make calls and texts, shop on line etc while being paid to work. Blame the cell phone for changing working conditions.
Harlan T. Fescue
Bravo, Mr. J, for an excellent post. I confess that it generally nauseates me to read the Communism that pours forth from this cesspool, but today we seem to find ourselves in agreement. I, too, have seen these deplorable ads, encouraging The Peasant to, let’s be frank, engage in petty theft by taking its owners’ valuable time and wasting it on something as trivial as basic nourishment, and I find such a sentiment to be tantamount to inciting mass violence against this once-great nation’s continually abused Creators. It is my hope, as I assume it is yours, that the purveyors of such sedition, who alarmingly appear to be Creators who have been brainwashed into working against Our interests by the beguilements of The Peasant, will be investigated for High Treason under the administration of Master Romney.
l.p. garnell
“white youth, black youth” you go dougj go!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@PeakVT: Doug’s an optimist.
mellowjohn
and – having been there myself – i can guaran-damn-tee that most of the DDB people who worked on that ad wolfed down a lot of lunches (and dinners) at their desks while doing so.
Carnacki
I’ve long held that a segment of the population (maybe the 27 percent?) actually long to be serfs. Less messy and people will know their role. As long as there is someone worse off than them they’re happy with being kept in their place because then they don’t have to feel bad about not achieving more with their lives.
Nicole
@debit:
Actually, federal law doesn’t require meal breaks, or any breaks at all, in fact. If the employer does offer breaks and the break is 20 minutes or less, federal law mandates the employee be paid during that time, but if the break is an actual meal break (30 minutes or more, usually), the employer need not pay the employee for that time. Break time is mandated via state law, and it varies wildly, from no required breaks to (at the more generous end) mandated unpaid 30 minute break for 5 continuous hours of work.
So, the fact that many workplaces offer breaks in excess of what state and/or federal law require is most likely something else that can be chalked up to the influence of… oh, what’s it called… I can’t remember, since it’s getting pretty rare, but I think it rhymes with “noonyan”
Soonergrunt
@red dog: I don’t know what world you grew up in, but in the past, as in that time before cell phones, etc, only real dick head employers didn’t allow their employees to conduct limited personal business at work. It was expected that people would occasionally need to use the company phone to call the bank or the electric company or what-have-you.
It was also a time, back in the 80s, when people had a paid hour on the clock for lunch. There’s a reason that Dolly Parton’s title song for the movie was ‘9 to 5’, not ‘8 to 5’ or ‘9 to 5:30’.
The american worker has given way, way, too much to his corporate masters.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@red dog: Before there was the cell phone and the internet, there were still land lines where the wife would call the husband and they would talk, and the husband would call restaurants or florists or whatever, and some women would do Avon on the side and bring their order books to other women.
It hasn’t changed as much as you think.
Loviatar
McDonald’s had a similar concept a few months ago with one of their promotions. It essentially said win a million and quit your second job, not your first job, but your second job. I got so disgusted I walked out of the restaurant.
Win a Million and quit your second job.
I agree with DougJ’s statement we are becoming a country of willing serfs, with a sizable percentage of serfs willing to attack their fellow serfs if they dare complain about their masters.
pseudonymous in nc
@debit:
It’s a chicken-and-egg mcmuffin. Employers can encourage appropriate break time, or create environments where desk lunches and working when sick and not taking vacations are symbolic of being “good team players”. I once worked for a company in Amsterdam where they started encouraging people to leave at 6pm and turned off the lights at 7pm — partly to save energy, partly because they didn’t want to encourage the “last one to leave wins” phenomenon.
@red dog:
Protests too much. For some reason, employers seem to think it’s their right to stretch work hours so that the things that could previously get done before or after work are now a lot harder to accomplish. It’s fairly well-established that productivity in standard cubicle/office-type jobs wouldn’t suffer if you compressed working hours, and in some situations, might even improve.
Violet
Years ago I did temp work for a short while to support myself while in school. I ended up getting a short gig as an assistant for a bigwig guy at a well known company. They were almost like their own little world, with an in-house cafeteria and gym and all that. Because they had the cafeteria, employees were only allowed 30 minutes for lunch.
While looking through some files the bigwig guy wanted, I stumbled across a memo he’d written to the woman I was replacing for the few days I was there. He actually took the time to send her a memo reprimanding her for being five minutes late back from lunch. He said there was no excuse because they had a cafeteria on the campus. I remember thinking, “What if she needed to run an errand?” There was no flexibility for anything from him. Nothing. Typical corporate managerial asshat. Trying to control the peons as much as possible.
elmo
@Nicole:
And most states don’t require breaks; only a few do.
jurassicpork
Dear Imaginary Senator Shannon.
redshirt
Nobody’s coming home for lunch these days.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Nah, the propaganda’s just the icing on the cake. We’re willing serfs because of fear of losing our livelihoods. All of our protection from that is long gone. No unions, no contracts, no loyalty. No predictable ownership, no long-term lines of business.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@mellowjohn: So. No more three-martini lunches in the ad business? What a world we/ve come to.
different-church-lady
Lunch? Lunch is for wimps.
@debit:
That’s one vector. Read the end of George Saunder’s “Pastoralia” for the ultimate satire of the phenomenon.
different-church-lady
Wait.. have we all forgotten the feeding machine scene from Modern Times? When what that made… 1936?
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Soonergrunt:
Well in the engineering biz, as both gov’t employee and consultant, going back to the 70s, I never had a paid hour on the clock. It was 8:00 to 5:00 for 8 hours pay.
Chris
No “sometimes” or “will” about it!
cat
What a bunch of historical revisionism. The serfs were always willing and even in these modern times they are us.
The only time there was any trouble was one some “noble” white dude got pissed at another “noble” white dude for some imagined slight and they mobilzed the serfs and went to war. Serf/Slave rebellions are historical anomolies.
Butch
Maybe a related concern but something that’s been bothering me – I don’t think there’s been a Friday in the last several years where someone at work didn’t contact me to “see if you might be willing to put in a few minutes this weekend,” always on some routine project that shouldn’t demand extra time at all. Saying “no” and pointing out that it’s the damn weekend have gotten easier with practice.
J.W. Hamner
I eat at my desk, but it’s because I’m anti-social not because I’m looking to earn brownie points or because I’m so busy I don’t have time or whatever.
l.p. garnell
@l.p. garnell: i’m just a white man in the palais!
Betty Cracker
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: This! I’m self-employed, but very often I work 16 hour days, scarf down a bowl of cereal while typing with my free hand and generally drive myself to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Why? Because I’m rather fond of eating and having a roof over my head…
Grumpy Code Monkey
It’s amazing how far we’ve backslid on stuff.
Back when I started my first job in January of 1990, I had three weeks of vacation (granted, not accrued) which could be rolled over in full for two years, an all-company-paid health plan, and a decent pension plan. This company was one of the last to offer benefits that generous. Unfortunately, some MotU decided to take the company private in a textbook example of how not to do a leveraged buyout, saddling us with debt, and doubled down on the stupidity by liquidating the profitable divisions for quick cash (for pennies on the dollar IIRC). Once we made it back out of bankruptcy, benefits were brought in line with what the rest of the industry was offering.
Several jobs later, I now get two weeks of vacation (accrued) until 5 years of service (which hasn’t happened since that first job), a HDHP+HSA (which basically translates into “no coverage” since we never meet the deductible), and a middling 401(k) plan.
And I have no right to complain compared to what most people have. I’m at least in a segment of the software industry that pays extremely well and values experience over youth (even for hacks like me). I don’t work insane hours, it’s a fun place to work in, there is a blessed dearth of PHBs, and everybody is generally happy.
I just look at the standard of living that my father was able to maintain as a civil servant and sole earner, compared to what I can do now. I’m making at least twice as much as he did (adjusted for inflation), yet I feel like I have a harder time just keeping up.
We are barreling headlong into a neofeudalist system.
Cassidy
Nothing some torches, guillotines and pitchforks can’t handle.
redshirt
@cat: SPARTACUS!!!!
Somewhat relatedly, preview for new season here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qXoC-DykyM
cat
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
More revisionism, those benifits you had were the peak not the average. We are reverting to the mean.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
It happens. Two of my co-workers were fired for not coming to a manager’s office during their (off the clock) meal break, and for ignoring phone calls summoning them. I was there. It was bullshit. The farther down the ladder of success you are the tighter the employer’s stranglehold on you.
ruemara
@Grumpy Code Monkey: already there and wondering why, in general, people are unwilling to take down those MotU with us.
The Moar You Know
Too late, we already are. People can’t wait to hand over more of their rights to their employers. Probably because they’re too scared of the alternative. But still, when did we turn into such a nation of cowards?
AA+ Bonds
@debit:
Read One-Dimensional Man, you will learn about this
AA+ Bonds
Whenever you are at work you are being exploited, and guess what? Now, you’re always at work
AA+ Bonds
Just read One-Dimensional Man or you’ve failed as an American, all right
Cassidy
That’ a harsh and unfair characterization. This isn’t about cowardice. I would imagine that the large majority of us peons are willing to accept garbage, not because of cowardice, but because we have obligations such as children and SO’s who need what little benfits you can get more than most people need to make a point.
I would go even further to say, why the fuck did the older generations sell out my generation’s future? These things didn’t happen overnight. We have been left with crap.
Chris
@The Moar You Know:
I would argue the seeds were laid in the early 1950s, when the Red Scare was used as a reason to purge “the far left” from organizations like unions, party machines and political life in general (something Republicans and Democrats both participated in copiously). The “liberal consensus” remained for twenty years or so after that, but the people who’d fought to bring it about for the previous half-century either settled down and became “respectable” or were purged, and economic populism never returned as a political force.
(Needless to say, the far right did not experience a similar purge, even in the years when their party was run by Eisenhower/Rockefeller type moderates).
Spatula
That lunch break ad creeped me out from the first viewing.
Ick.
Maude
@J.W. Hamner:
You don’t want your co workers to see your Snoopy lunchbox.
AA+ Bonds
@Cassidy:
This is a good time to mention Eros and Civilization, another Marcuse work that addresses this issue under the topic of surplus repression.
Really, if anyone here has read Corey Robin (or Thomas Frank while we’re at it) but hasn’t read Herbert Marcuse, you may not be getting nearly as much out of the former as you could be.
Mnemosyne
I’m lucky to live in the People’s Republic of California, where there was a huge outcry after the Republicans changed labor laws so that you would only get overtime pay when you worked more than 40 hours in a week instead of more than 8 hours in a day. That would of course have meant that minimum wage employers would have been able to schedule people to work 10 or 12 hours at a stretch with no fear of having to pay extra for overtime as long as they cut their days back to 3 or 4 a week.
That lasted for about a year before it was reversed. Some jobs offer a 4/40 schedule as an option, but it has to be spelled out and agreed voluntarily by the employee.
Nemo_N
Also too, art creators (film makers, graphic artists, song writers,etc.) should be eternally grateful companies are magnanimous enough to share some of the profits with them.
Bondo
It should be noted that in the countries with real corporatist interest group systems (i.e. Scandinavia), lunch breaks are (probably) well protected. Stop misusing the term corporatist. It doesn’t mean a society where business entities are powerful.
Steeplejack
@Maude:
My Malcolm X “By any means necessary” lunchbox was quite the conversation piece.
Davis X. Machina
In this country, you are what you do. Ask people what they are, and they give you an occupation back, not a region or a religion or a tribe or such… So if you are unemployed, you’re nothing. You cease to be. If you’re not working, you’re invisible.
different-church-lady
@Cassidy:
Locusts don’t have a sense of the future. Locusts don’t give a shit, locusts just takes what it wants.
redshirt
@Steeplejack: For reals? Such a product exists? WANT!
Another Halocene Human
@debit: ETA: Not to say that employers wouldn’t encourage that sort of thing. They love it. But you can’t forbid a meal break in an eight hour workday. Well, not yet anyway. Give the GOP some time.
HahhahahahahHAHAHAHAHA! Your naivete is refreshing, grasshopper. *wipes eyes*
Another Halocene Human
@red dog: But on the other hand, personal business was not allowed in the past. For some reason employees seem to think it is their right to get and make calls and texts, shop on line etc while being paid to work. Blame the cell phone for changing working conditions.
You’re right. Bored secretaries never made personal calls in slow offices. Managers never deputized underlings to carry out all of their personal business, even getting their clothes cleaned, food provided, apologies sent for missing little Johnny’s recital. Laborers never loafed and shot the shit with the deliveryman.
Another Halocene Human
@cat: This is not reversion to mean, this is a swing of the pendulum. It will be back, no telling how much human suffering later.
Freedom exists in a state of astable equilibrium.
Rafer Janders
@red dog:
Ah, but in “the past” (we’re really talking about the 1950s-1980s postwar era) there was also a more rigid separation between work and leisure, and an expectation that once the work day was done (usually at 5 PM for office workers), that was it. You weren’t expected to take your work home wiht you, so you could do those tasks (shop, etc.) in your ample free time.
Now, with the expectation that you should be available to your employer at all times, it’s only natural that people will do more and more personal work on company time, because they’re also expected to do company work on personal time. If you can’t shop on Saturday afternoon because you have to spend two hours on a conference call, then you’re going to shop Monday morning online work.
Also, too, let’s not forget that pre-cellphone and computers, people also wasted vaste amounts of time at work, just in different ways. They didn’t spend two hours on Facebook, but they did go out for a two hour three martini lunch, and frankly, no one really got that much work done after those lunches.
Another Halocene Human
@Mnemosyne:
What does that even mean? My coworkers get 4-10’s “voluntarily” if it means pulling a good route instead of a bad one, or avoiding a split shift–how voluntary is that anyway?
Another Halocene Human
@Bondo: Sorry, I don’t speak Scandahoovian.
Steeplejack
@redshirt:
Naw, but I always wanted one. I did a Photoshop prototype once, but I don’t think I still have the pics. Just thinking about it makes me chuckle, though.
Another Halocene Human
@Rafer Janders: Ha, my dad was a drone in the early 1980s for DOD. They gave him a terminal so he could work after hours from the house or on weekends.
But probably some jobs like engineering (and teaching!) didn’t quit at quittin’ time like the private sector union jobs did before Reagan (and Volcker) destroyed the unions.
The idjit “software engineers” at EA (and their families) are paying for that lack of class consciousness/false consciousness now.
My dad says for years CA (back when it had money) couldn’t get commuter and intercity trains because employers were afraid that their salaried workers would use the schedule as an excuse TO ACTUALLY FRIGGING GO HOME.
different-church-lady
@red dog: Aside from your misunderstanding about how slacking was invented along with the smart phone, you have a point: management demands every second of time and more from labor, so labor steals it back in little ways throughout the day.
As a freelancer, I have frequently experienced the friction between staff and contract labor. I have to go in and be a mercenary — I’ve got a fixed amount of time to do a specific task, and they’re paying me a fair amount of money to do it. I cannot spend my time looking at viral video on YouTube, picking up my dry cleaning at lunchtime, or checking my stocks. I see staffers of all parts of the diligence spectrum doing at least some of these kinds of things. It must be the only thing that keeps them sane, and in most of the offices I visit it seems to be tolerated without a lot of strum un drang — a tacit admission that without these moments of distraction the human batteries will simply burn out.
Rafer Janders
@Another Halocene Human:
Highly unusual in the early 1980s. Computers didn’t really take over most workplaces until the 1990s. A lot of jobs before then really couldn’t be done at home or on weekends the way they can now.
satby
Not only should you be grateful for a little crumb like time to eat lunch, but you should be grateful and cheerfully help the company write the instructions of how to do your jobs so that those jobs can be sent to India, as many in my company just were asked to do. And they did it, because not to would just get them riffed earlier.
There is no path to get to where I am today in IT, all the entry level jobs were off-shored long ago. Thus ensuring that the middle and upper manager jobs will surely (and have started to) follow because the experience to move into those positions can only be acquired offshore as well. I moved up through the ranks, now there’s no ranks (in the States at least) to move up through. I look at my kids and wonder what in hell we’ve set up for the future, but none of these were choices I made; I’ve just been outvoted over and over.
Ruviana
@cat:
mclaren
Too late. That happened years ago.
Commenters on this blog (yes, this blog) have explained to me in public that increasing taxes on the rich “is probably unconstitutional” and that a national VAT tax “would cause a revolution.” And a guaranteed national income? Commenters have stated “that’s crazy, it’s communism.” FDR toyed with the idea of a guaranteed national income in his fourth term.
Heliopause
I live in western Washington state and get a couple of Canadian channels. I sometimes watch the CTV news out of Vancouver and have noticed that their newsreaders will do something that their Seattle counterparts don’t; they talk openly about days off and vacations and how much they enjoy them. Seattle’s happy-talk newsreaders always give you the impression that there is nowhere they’d rather be than in that studio reading from that teleprompter. I’m starting to think that maybe this is more than just variation between TV stations, maybe it’s indicative of a cultural difference between the two countries.
paintedjaguar
FDR? Hell, Richard friggin’ Nixon supported a guaranteed annual income! That would be the same Nixon who made a whole political career on being “anti-pinko”.
M. Bouffant
Did you miss the “We’ll actually use all our vacation days” advert?
Quaker in a Basement
One step at a time, comrade. Sandwiches today, tumbrels tomorrow!
YellowJournalism
Went for my break really late in the day. Had a coworker ask me where I was going in that “how dare you leave” voice. Of course, she had her full break earlier in the day.