Busy Work

Have you ever witnessed an otherwise unoccupied clerk in a grocery store cleaning an already clean belt or seen a waitress almost compusively wiping a spotless table, over and over?

These are examples of what is commonly known as "busy work". Most employers expect employees to engage in some form of this pointless activity any time there is no real productive work to be done. Such "work" accomplishes nothing of any actual use to the employer; its only purpose is to keep the employee busy.

I've always resented the hell out of busy work. I fully accept that one should attend to one's work when there are actual productive tasks to be done; after all, that is the point of one's employment. But if there is no real work to be done, I don't want to be doing useless busy work.

All types of businesses have periodic downtime, when all work is caught up and there is no new work to take its place. Depending on how long the downtime lasts, an employer could either allow for some idleness, knowing that employees are standing by and ready to resume working once new work is available.

If there is going to be an extended period of downtime, instead of making employees waste both their time and the employers', employees could be allowed to leave work and return once new work is expected. Indeed, at my last job, I didn't think I was being paid 12 dollars an hour to spend all day sweeping already clean floors. They had janitorial staff paid much less to do it only when actually needed.

After all, the first thing an employer is paying employees for is their time, first and foremost, before the actual work one dones. Workers give up a large part of their waking hours to be available for an employer's purposes; time that could be spent doing other, more enjoyable things.

To spend that time doing busy work that accomplishes no goal for the employer, but only serves to keep workers from idleness, isn't the point of having a job and, as I said before, wastes the time of all involved. As the saying goes, time is money. Busy work that adds nothing to their profit wastes the employer's money and your time. It is in no way an improvement over idleness.

I remember one time working in a plant when we ran out of work. As we were expected to do, we kept busy with inane tasks: sweeping an alredy tidy work area, cleaning the tables and machines. The downtime extended to the point where we'd emptied every trash can in the entire plant and taken the trash to the compactor. After we'd all taken extended bathroom breaks, there still wasn't any real work to be done, and we'd exhausted all possible forms of busywork, so we sat down to wait for work. A supervisor from another department walked by and gave us all hell. I looked at him, telling him we'd emptied every trash can in the place and asked what he would have us do -- throw the trash back on the floor and pick it up again?

Thoughts?