01 May 2005 Employment

By way of the Daou Report, which I read nearly every day on Salon for a summary of interesting posts on various blogs, I learned of this post on Ankle Biting Pundits:

You aren’t going to believe this (OK, maybe you will). French union workers are demanding to be paid for the extra 1 minute 52 seconds per day that management has asked them to work…

Commenters to the post seemed mostly hostile, and supportive of the French union workers.

There’s more to the story than this brief treatment suggests (see the International Herald Tribune for how the controversy came about), but my own take on it is that anytime a person finds himself worrying that he might give away two minutes of labor without getting something for himself in return, that person may have a character problem.

To my way of thinking, doing one’s best for one’s employer, within reasonable bounds and taking universal human frailties into account, is a moral duty. Likewise, with the same caveats, employers should try to do the best they reasonably can for their employees. It ought to be a matter of pride on both sides.