An increasing trend I have seen is employers exerting control
over their employees outside the workplace.
For example, on another blog I write for I noted the blogger who was told to quit blogging on hispersonal blog on his off time since he linked to his boss’s competitors. His boss told him he could keep the blog if the boss got to approve the content and links…
The consumerist reported today that Sprint employees could be fired for using blogs or forums…
Witness mandatory drug testing for working at the convenience store…
While I decry it as wrong and would do all in my power to rebel against such rules, I really can not blame the employers.
The employees have sold themselves into indentured servanthood. They eat the Master’s porridge and then cry foul when he demands they do what he says.
Read your Emerson; all the world is in balance. In this world there are two pans on the
scale, one labeled [tag]SECURITY[/tag], and one labeled [tag]FREEDOM[/tag]. This is a zero sum game, so if you want more security, it comes at the cost of freedom. If you want that porridge, you had better jump when he calls.
[tags]Emerson[/tags]
[...] As I have asked before… Just who owns your time? [...]
It’s a two-way street. An employer who plays the domineering father with his employees will be lucky to get nothing worse than passivity and a ‘work to rule’ attitude. Heaven help him if they get annoyed enough that they decide to use their creativity to figure out ways to spite him.
On the other hand, getting employees on your side isn’t rocket science. I once asked the wife of a hotel owner how he got such happy, enthusiastic workers in the lackluster, post-communist work force he had to draw on in his country. She said there were two ‘secrets’. One was that he always worked along side his employees, did everything they did– only he worked longer and harder than anyone else. The second was a generous profit-sharing program. He’d worked a long time as an employee in the hotel business himself and he just didn’t think it was fair that people should get none of the reward for a business they helped to create.
Sometimes freedom and security really are at odds. But sometimes adding a third thing that many of us value equally– fairness– will service to ‘magically’ reconcile the two.
Sarah-
I never said you should be unfair to your employees. What I am saying is that by deciding to become an employee, you have given up a great deal of freedom. Everything has a cost, including security.