This law firm employee secretly automated their job and now works 10 minutes a day from home

[smulder]

@frauenfelder

they don’t have to work more than 10 minutes a day to earn their “just-shy-of-90k” salary

SACRILEGE

OWNERS are supposed to benefit from automation, not WORKERS

[kmoser]

@timquinn

Yay for getting away with something against “the man.” Except our society is on the edge of collapse because of this kind of thinking. So, there is that.

If anything about this is causing our society to be edge of collapse, it’s the fact that way too much money is spent on frivolous lawsuits and covering our asses because our laws favor litigation over common sense.

[stinkinbadgers]

@Chuckles

By your thinking, anyone who finishes their work early and coasts for the last hour of the day is similarly “dangerous.”

I am a huge fan of the job, not time, being the unit of work.

[DukeTrout]

@timquinn

Why does he keep it a secret then.

Ah, the ol’ “when did you stop beating your wife?” school of management, eh?

Because he works for a law firm. I’d keep everything secret if I worked for a law firm.

[hecep]

Yes. And a reminder that suspiciously expansive quotable remarks by famously successful people should always come with qualifiers and clarifications and be torn to shreds before acceptance. Gates reasoning was rather lazy.

[LurksNoMore]

Solution: make the workers the owners!

(Seriously, there should be way more co-operatives and companies w. the workers owning a significant stake in the business.)

@kmoser

If anything about this is causing our society to be edge of collapse, it’s the fact that way too much money is spent on frivolous lawsuits and covering our asses because our laws favor litigation over common sense.

Also, make-work is a blight. The problem there tends to be that the reward of doing your job quicker and better is being saddled with more work, which disincentivizes people to do so – or admit to it, as in this case!

[smulder]

The problem is, as long as “the system” is capitalism, workers who are owners have a financial interest in

• hiring more workers (who will not be owners)

and/or

• selling the business (to new owners who are not workers), keeping the money, and getting another job somewhere else

As long as it’s legal to “sell out” and go back to exploiting people, there is a Prisoner’s Dilemma where whoever sells out first, wins

[KathyPartdeux]

[gero]

I’ve recently encountered a solution to this problem in the context of housing projects in Germany. It’s called Mietshäuser Syndikat (tenement syndicate). With housing prices rising and rising, that “sell out” problem is very much real for housing projects. Solution: the house is not in the possession of the local cooperative, but belongs to a limited company (the irony!) specifically founded for each house. This company has two stakeholders, (1) the local cooperative, and (2) the syndicate, which is the collective of all housing projects that are part of the initiative. The house can only be sold when both stakeholders agree, which the syndicate will never do. Voilà, the real estate of all housing projects in the syndicate can never be sold and so is taken off the market, there is no way to “sell out”.