WORKERS: Compress 31 hrs work into 24 hrs and STILL NO WAGE GAINS. Hmmm

[elehhhhna]

Workers turning 24/7 into busy 31/7
Technology allows broader multitasking on every day from anywhere


By CHRIS COBBS
Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, FLA. - Work harder, play harder, and, with a boost from the latest technology, squeeze 31 hours of activity into a 24-hour day.

A study done for a cable-TV network concluded that people can actually add almost 50 percent more activity to a typical day of 16 waking hours. Spend a half-hour listening to podcasts while answering e-mail, and you've crammed 60 minutes of work into 30.

Multitasking is nothing new. But during the past decade technology has helped speed its spread throughout our lives.

The average yearly increase in U.S. workers' productivity, for example, has doubled from 1.5 percent during the period 1987-1996 to 3 percent from 1997 to 2006, according to U.S. Labor Department figures.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/3977986.html

[sui generis]

1. wow, work on your laptop while running a treadmill

and listening to a podcast and eating breakfast and getting a haircut. What will they think of next?

Too bad your pay doesn't increase in proportion to your productivity.

Just wait until they can can hook your toilet stall into a video teleconference.

[Igel]

2. Laptop, wifi, webcam.

Everything's in place.

What, toilet breaks are considered downtime?

[melnjones]

3. You just made me laugh really loud. nt

[aden_nak]

4. Yeah, pay doesn't scale with productivity (or effort, most of the time).

That's why I started multislacking. It's like multitasking, but instead I combine one mundane work chore with something I'd rather be doing. It looks just like work! And most middle managers can't tell the difference.

[Warpy]

5. Increased productivity = more work from fewer people for less cost

and that is why hard work simply doesn't pay.

Eventually we're going to see the same thing the Japanese are seeing, deaths due to simple overwork, sensory overload, multitasking beyond the human organism's ability to cope.

That won't change anything, though, because the corparate machine will just go find a new cog.

If we want things changed, we have to change them from the bottom up. That requires a great deal of risk, something most of us aren't desperate enough to take. Not yet.