The Art of Not Working at Work

9/10/2016
TheArtofNotWorkingatWorkTheAtlantic
The Art of Not Working at Work

At rst, the ability to check email, read ESPN, or browse Zappos while on the job may feel like a luxury.
But in time, many crave more meaningfuland more demandingresponsibilities.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/theartofnotworkingatwork/382121/
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Lauren Giordano
ROLAND PAULSEN
NOV 3, 2014
BUSINESS
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Two years ago a civil servant in the German town of Menden wrote a farewell message to his colleagues on the day
of his retirement stating that he had not done anything for 14 years. Since 1998, he wrote, I was present but
not really there. So Im going to be well prepared for retirementAdieu. The e-mail was leaked to Germany's
Westfalen-Post and quickly became world news. The public work ethic had been wounded and in the days that
followed the mayor of Menden lamented the incident, saying he felt a good dose of rage.
The municipality of Menden sent out a press release regretting that the employee never informed his superiors of
his inactivity. In a lesser-known interview with the German newspaper Bild a month later, the former employee
responded that his e-mail had been misconstrued. He had not been avoiding work for 14 years; as his department
grew, his assignments were simply handed over to others. There never was any frustration on my part, and I
would have written the e-mail even today. I have always oered my services, but its not my problem if they dont
want them, he said.
The story of this German bureaucrat raised some questions about modern-day slacking. Does having a job
necessarily entail work? If not, how and why does a job lose its substance? And what can be done to make
employees less lazyor is that even the right question to ask in a system thats set up in the way that ours is? After
talking to 40 dedicated loafers, I think I can take a stab at some answers.
There are thousands of articles and books about the

stressed-out fraction of humanity, but why has so
little been written about the opposite extreme?
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Most work sociologists tend toward the view that non-work at work is a marginal, if not negligible, phenomenon.
What all statistics point towards is a general intensication of work with more and more burnouts and other stress
syndromes troubling us. Yet there are more-detailed surveys reporting that the average time spent on private
activities at work is between 1.5 and three hours a day. By measuring the ows of audiences for certain websites, it
has also been observed that, by the turn of the century, 70 percent of the U.S. internet trac passing through
pornographic sites did so during working hours, and that 60 percent of all online purchases were made between 9
a.m. and 5 p.m. What is sometimes called cyberloang has, furthermore, not only been observed in the U.S. (in
which most work-time surveys are conducted), but also in nations such as Singapore, Germany, and Finland.
Even if the percentage of workers who claim they are working at the pinnacle of their capacity all the time is slowly
increasing, the majority still remains unaected. In fact, the proportion of people who say they never work hard
has long been far greater than those who say they always do. The articles and books about the stressed-out fraction
of humanity can be counted in the thousands, but why has so little been written about this opposite extreme?
The few books that have been written on this topic were written by slackers themselves. In Bonjour Paresse, French
author Corinne Maier oers her own explanation for professional detachment. Maier opens the book (which
eventually cost her a job) by declaring that social science has miserably failed to understand the mechanisms of
oce work: Millions of people work in business, but its world is opaque. This is because the people who talk about
it the mostand I mean the university professorshave never worked there; they arent in the know. Having
spent years as a bureaucrat at the utility lectricit de France, Maier contends that work is increasingly reduced to
make-believe, that at the oce, image counts more than product, seduction more than production.
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One Swedish bank clerk said he was only doing 15

minutes' worth of work a day.
Under these circumstances, feigned obedience and fake commitment become so central to working that a
deviation from those acts can result in embarrassment for everyone. As she recalls: One day, in the middle of a
meeting on motivation, I dared to say that the only reason I came to work was to put food on the table. There were
15 seconds of absolute silence, and everyone seemed uncomfortable. Even though the French word for work,
travail, etymologically derives from an instrument of torture, its imperative to let it be known, no matter the
circumstance, that you are working because you are interested in your work.
The gap between image and substance is also a recurring theme in the comic Dilbert, whose creator, Scott Adams,
was inspired by his uninspiring stints in the working world. Again and again, Adams questions not only the link
between work and rationality, but also the relation between work and productivity: Work can be dened as
anything youd rather not be doing, he says. Productivity is a dierent matter.
In the preface to the Dilbert collection This Is the Part Where You Pretend to Add Value, Adams openly gives his
impressions of 16 years of employment at Crocker National Bank and Pacic Bell:
If I had to describe my 16 years of corporate work with one phrase, it would be pretending to add
value. The key to career advancement is appearing valuable despite all hard evidence to the contrary.
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If you add any actual value to your company today, your career is probably not moving in the right
direction. Real work is for people at the bottom who plan to stay there.
Other oce workers have presented similar accounts. In The Living Dead, David Bolchover rues the dominance of
image over reality, of obfuscation over clarity, of politics over performance, and in City Slackers, Steve McKevitt,
a disillusioned business and communications expert, gloomily declares: In a society where presentation is
everything, its no longer about what you do, its about how you look like youre doing it.
The simulation, the glossing over, the loss of meaning, the jargon, the games, the oce politics, the crises, the
boredom, the despair, and the sense of unrealitythese are ingredients that often reappear in popular accounts of
working life. The risk when they only appear in popular culture is that we begin regarding them as metaphors or
exaggerations that may well apply to our own jobs but not to work in general. But what would happen if we started
taking these unserious accounts of working life more seriously?
Consider the last novel by David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, in which an IRS worker dies by his desk and
remains there for days without anyone noticing that he is dead. This might be read as a brilliant satire of how work
drains liveliness such that no one notices whether you are dead or alive. However, in the strict sense of the word,
this was not ction. In 2004, a tax-oce ocial in Finland died in exactly the same way while checking tax
returns. Although there were about 100 other workers on the same oor and some 30 employees in the auditing
department where he worked, it took them two days to notice that he was dead. None of them seemed to feel the
loss of his labors; he was only found when a friend stopped by to have lunch with him.
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For most people, work simply sucks.

How could no one notice? I talked with over 40 people who spent half of their working hours on private activities
a phenomenon I call empty labor. I wanted to know how they did it, and I wanted to know why. "Why" turned
out to be the easy part: For most people, work simply sucks. We hate Mondays and we long for Fridaysit's not a
coincidence that evidence points towards a peak in cardiac mortality on Monday mornings.
There are, of course, exceptional cases. According to a Gallup report from last year, 13 percent of employees from
142 countries are engaged in their jobs. However, twice as many are actively disengagedtheyre negative
and potentially hostile to their organizations. The majority of workers, though, are simply checked out, the
report says.
Foot-dragging, shirking, loang, and slacking are ways of avoiding work within the frames of wage labor. In 1911,
Frederick W. Taylor, the notorious founder of scientic management, called work avoidance the greatest evil
with which the working-people of both England and America are now aicted. His attempts to eradicate slacking
set the course of a perpetual cat-and-mouse game, between the time-study men and the worker collective, that
would live much longer than the industrial piece-work system.
For Taylor, the project of making the labor process transparent was an important step towards eciencynot only
because it made the optimization of each operation possible, but also because it siphoned power from the worker
collective, with its natural inclination towards loang, and giving it to management, or as Taylor would have
it, to Science. Today, now that the labor process has become opaque in new ways, the evil of which Taylor once
spoke may have returned for good.
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Something that would have surprised Taylor is that slacking is not always the product of discontent, but also of
having too few tasks to ll the hours. According to repeated surveys by Salary.com, not having enough work to
do is the most common reason for slacking o at work. The service sector oers new types of work in which
periods of downtime are long and tougher to eliminate than on the assembly line: A orist watching over an empty
ower shop, a logistics manager who did all his work between 2 and 3 p.m., and a bank clerk responsible for a notso-popular insurance program are some examples of employees I talked with who never actively strived to work
less. Like the civil servant of Menden, they oered their services, but when the ow of assignments petered out,
they did not shout it from the rooftops.
Involuntary slacking may seem blissful, but

eventually, most of us will crave some type of
meaningful activity.
Many would say that the underworked should talk to their bosses, but that doesn't always help. I spoke with a
Swedish bank clerk who said he was only doing 15 minutes' worth of work a day. He asked his manager for more
responsibilities, to no avail, then told his boss of his idleness. Did he get more to do? Barely. When I spoke with
him, he was working three-hour daysthere were laws that barred any workday shorter than thatand his
intervention only added another 15 minutes to his workload.
There's a widely held belief that more work always exists for those who want it. But is that true? Everywhere we
look, technology is replacing human labor. In OECD countries, productivity has more than doubled since the '70s.
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Yet there has been no perceptible movement to reduce workers' hours in relation to this increased productivity;
instead, the virtues of "creating jobs" are trumpeted by both Democrats and Republicans. The project of job
creation hasn't been a complete failure, but the fact of unemployment still looms.
What's more, the jobs that are created often come up short on providing fulllment. Involuntary slacking may rst
be conceived of as real bliss: Hey, I dont have to work! one of my interviewees recalls. But as the years pass by,
most of us will crave some type of meaningful activity. I interviewed an archivist who wrote his masters thesis
while at work and a subway-ticket collector who composed music in his little booth. If you're lucky, these activities
may be pursued within the frame of wage laborbut that's very hard to come by. Our economy produces
inequalities in income and job security, but also, we should acknowledge, in stimulation and substance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROLAND PAULSEN is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University. He is the author of
Empty Labor.
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Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to the Daily, our

There are thousands of articles and books about the

One Swedish bank clerk said he was only doing 15

For most people, work simply sucks.

Involuntary slacking may seem blissful, but

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