In 2017 and 2018, 57 percent of American wage and salary workers had a flexible work schedule. Only 16 percent had a formal arrangement with their employer that permitted this flexibility. These figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the private sector, schedule flexibility without a formal arrangement was more common than in government jobs: 44 percent compared with 24 percent.
In August 2015 The New York Times published a long report on working life at Amazon. The Times reported that “emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered.”
Jeff Bezos responded in a memo to staff: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”
A Harris Poll published in 2024 surveyed 1,170 employed Americans about time off. Thirty-seven percent of millennial workers had taken time off without telling their manager. Almost 40 percent of millennials had moved their mouse to look active online, and as many had sent emails outside working hours to look as if they were working late.
Among the biggest reasons people gave for feeling nervous about asking for time off was pressure to always respond to work inquiries.
In May 2024 Wells Fargo dismissed more than a dozen employees in its wealth and investment management unit. Its filings with the financial regulator FINRA gave the reason: “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.”
Devices that move a computer mouse by themselves are sold online for about twenty dollars. They are called mouse jigglers.
In 2012 Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School published Sleeping with Your Smartphone. In her survey of about 1,600 managers and professionals, 70 percent checked their smartphone within an hour of getting up. “26 percent confessed to sleeping with their smartphones.”
“Our respondents were caught in what we have come to call the cycle of responsiveness.” Those who do not keep up “risk being branded as less committed to their work.”
At the Boston Consulting Group, Perlow tested planned, predictable time off for consultants. After four years more than nine hundred teams in thirty countries had taken part.
In the metal and electrical industry of Baden-Württemberg, the collective agreement adds performance pay to base pay. Across a plant, the performance pay is to come to 15 percent of total base pay.
In 2014 the Federal Labor Court ruled on who must prove what. An employer who rates an employee below the 15 percent must prove that the rating is justified. An employee who wants a rating above it must prove that he earned it.
On November 26, 2018, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” Asked how many hours he meant, he said about 80 a week was sustainable, with peaks above 100. “Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
In 2016 the U.S. Travel Association’s Project: Time Off published a report on what it called work martyrs. These are employees who skip vacation to show complete dedication, worry they will be seen as replaceable, feel guilty for using time off, and believe no one else can do their job.
Thirty-nine percent of employees said they wanted their boss to see them as a work martyr. Among millennials it was 48 percent: “Nearly half (48%) of Millennials think it is a good thing to be seen as a work martyr by the boss.”
The last of the habits in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is Habit 7, “Sharpen the Saw.” FranklinCovey, the company that teaches the habits, explains that “dull or rusty tools are much less effective than clean and sharp tools.”
Renewing body, heart, mind and spirit preserves “the greatest asset we have to deal with life and contribute—ourselves.” Through renewal, “We increase our capacity to produce results and handle the challenges around us.”
In 2010 the Higher Labor Court of Munich ruled on two warnings. The employer had told some employees of the internal audit department about them. The court found nothing wrong with that. A law firm’s summary of the ruling puts it this way: such information was regelmäßig zu erwarten, zum Teil sogar geboten, to be expected as a rule and in part even required, because the employees shared their work in divided processes.
The court drew the line at the pillory. The employee had not been put an den Pranger. Only a particularly grave pillorying that harmed his honor would have required a public retraction.