>In addition to cultural attitudes about the value of hard work, she said, some employers reduce costs by relying on overtime, and employees work the longer hours for the extra pay and to please the boss — promotions often depend more on time spent at a desk than actual productivity.
Agggh hits to home. Arrogant American me rolled into a Taiwanese job expecting to skyrocket up the ladder on results alone. Nope, because I left at 5 sharp to enjoy the beautiful mountains, I was a lazy shit. Never mind my 10x increase in sales. Well, also I was an arrogant prick.
I chew on this issue a lot - it's bad to work so much. But, it's culturally ingrained. Some people are trying to change it... but it's happening so slowly. We have our own culturally ingrained things in America that I'd like to change as well, and that are changing, but so slowly. How do you implement change?
I guess that's the plot of any good fantasy or political drama, how do leaders convince people that change can be good?
The same way that all social norms get changed applies here; publicly challenge them and then withstand the viciousness of the backlash without losing your conviction. Then other people will get the courage to agree and it will spread. Not being cowed by the initial furious attacks on you but also not getting dragged into a vengeful battle are the means of social transformation.
This show is not seeking to do this. Note this part of the article which barely gets a mention:
"In the novel, the decision to work overtime leads to her downfall: She becomes addicted to work, ends up in the hospital and loses a new beau, who has a decidedly more relaxed attitude toward his own job. But on the TV show, which began airing in April, Ms. Higashiyama is destined for a happier fate, said the producers"
They're subverting the novel and using it as a tool to support the obsession with putting in more hours, not avoid it, apparently.
It is too early to say that, no? Perhaps the happier fate is the result of recognizing the mistake of caving into overtime and correcting it before things get as bad as they did in the book.
I am not sure about that one. Maybe it was the movie Deep Impact?
But I will tell you an actual and more direct example. The recently elected president of Ukraine LITERALLY is a comedian who was the star of a show where he plays the President of Ukraine! He had very little in the way of policies, but a lot of sharp humor, criticism of Poroshenko and the fact that many people routinely could see him on TV being the “President”!
Nichelle Nichols was actually disappointed in the way her character was portrayed (she did nothing but sit at her station and answer hailing frequencies) and was going to quit the role, but she was convinced to stay by none other than Martin Luther King Jr[0].
It was one of the first, if not the first, portrayal of a black woman on television in a non-stereotypical, non-subservient role, even if it was just secretarial duty on a spaceship.
Someone big and local has to step in, let the the workers leave on time yet kick everyone’s butt on the market. Then everyone will start copying the practices.
No, we just need to stop letting the ultra rich demonize unions. Unions fixed this problem the first the and are the obvious solution again. There's a reason our quasi sweat shops in America fight them so hard.
You have to both work long, and be an amazing worker. Then you'll have a better chance. It's useless to do only one, but if you do anything, just stay late. At least you'll be seen as dedicated to the company.
Is there any way you could just make it physiologically untenable for anyone to stay in your office past 5PM?
Right around 6PM at my apartment, the downstairs tenants light up with the most awful, stanky skunk-weed. You literally cannot keep the windows open; and yet, in the middle of summer and no central AC, you can't afford to be there with them closed, either. So, in effect, my neighbour forces me to ensure I'm not home at that hour.
Anyone you could bribe to do the same near your office? :P
That is like spraying perfume in a stinky room, it might work short term though. Good solution is to clean the stinky room :P
Jokes aside, I don't believe any amount of laws/hacks can completely fix the issue, they sure can help. The attitude has to change. There is more to life than work, money, titles, corner office etc.
The saddest part in all of this is a large part of the workforce has nothing to show for all those long hours they put into work. It might be a tiny bit comforting, if they at least got something in return for their hard work. They've been brainwashed into thinking "at least I have a job" :(
? They do that in my Japanese town of Kumagaya but that is for the kids to go home because it is getting dark. It changes to 4 or 5pm depending on the time of year. Are you sure that music is to remind adults that it is time to go home?
I dunno, they did it in hachioji when I lived there several years back. I remember it being at 6 and I remember my coworkers telling me that was the reason for it but I could be mistaken.
One of the customers I've worked for in Japan has alerts over the loudspeakers when it's time to go home. The company I work for had people working insane hours (14+ daily) and acted like it was normal. The people were obviously not doing much work staying later, but they wanted to appear to be dedicated. I'd much rather my people work hard when we need it and have time to unwind when we don't. I see it as a failing of management of every day requires an emergency level of effort.
I don't imagine we will actually see this change in the way expected. Rather than companies making it so employees can leave on time and still feel secure in their job, I imagine companies will eventually find themselves destroyed by competition that are smart enough to forego having an office at all. Offices are a massive expense, and while they were crucial and profitable in the era of difficult communications, they're now nothing but a source for value destruction, amplified even greater by the tremendously negative impact on cognitive productivity interruptions have. The exact things that made offices valuable in the past, physical proximity of coworkers, are their greatest weakness now.
I have worked in Liberia (in fact, I just returned from a four month stay today) and since the public power company is so untrustworthy, NGOs and offices usually run their own power off diesel generators. It's common the generators are shut down at 5:30 or 6. Works out pretty well.
Because often it's not that hard for the employee to take credit for someone else's results or just fake them. It also creates a poor set of incentives. It causes problems like when programmers are given a bonus for fixing bugs, resulting in them adding bugs to their code and then fixing them.
Yes. It's hard to measure results, because you usually want to know the counterfactuals, like: "what would the result have been if someone else had been given the assignment".
If sales grow 10x under your watch, was that because of your hard work and talent, or because the economy went through an upswing and a few lucrative customers stumbled in the door on their own accord?
If your colleagues responsible for the neighbouring regions aren't doing as well, would you have done any better in their place?
Very hard to know. But they can easily see if you're working overtime.
Alright - the term "overtime" here was confusing me. In America, overtime means getting paid 1.5x your normal hourly rate. I have a lineman friend who eventually gets paid 2x his normal rate over some number of hours.
I don't know of a better term to use, but "overtime" is certainly a tricky one to use here.
In a place I worked, if someone left at 5:30 pm, the CTO used to joke "half day today?", even though the person came in at 9 am.
In many places I worked in the US, it is somewhat of a badge of honor to spend long hours at work (how many of those are actually productive, is a different story). And these aren't even startups.
This can't continue - an entire generation of people have been brainwashed that hard work = good, costs be damned. It has to change.
IMHO, the only reasons to work long hours are - real emergencies (like the kind doctors and cops deal with, not the kind when some photo sharing app goes down for 15 mins), or you're working on your own business. It is ridiculous to work 70 hours a week bringing someone else's dreams to life, especially while getting paid for only 40 out of that 70. This is even more annoying when the said job adds no value or negative value to society.
I read the book “Why we sleep” and they present some statistics from studies.
One being that lack of quality sleep from working such long hours which can negatively impact sleep and has massive economic costs due to workspace accidents, errors and poor judgement.
From memory, one statistic showed Japan was losing the most money by far.
I highly recommend the book for those interested in improving your life.
I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean when you clarify emergencies. I'd like to add that it's pretty silly how many hours doctors work regularly. In a triage situation, it's understandable for someone with that job to work 100 hours, but if that is a regular week they will make unnecessary mistakes.
Ditto. Happened to me in Tokyo - I was told work times were flexible and so in order to avoid peak Yamanote traffic I started doing 7-4 only to receive an passive-aggressive e-mail from the HR person that such behaviour can't be tolerated.
Hours in front of screen are perhaps the easiest metric to check up on workers. Unfortunately, it's also not well correlated to productivity! Lazy managing, for sure.
Personally, I'm pessimistic that any metric about productivity can be useful in the long term, but I recognize that in this reality, there WILL be metrics used to judge you. So, what's the best way to handle this? Is there anything an individual contributor can do to guide towards better metrics, or even just the perception of such?
> IMHO, the only reasons to work long hours are - real emergencies (like the kind doctors and cops deal with, not the kind when some photo sharing app goes down for 15 mins)
Even that doesn't make tech look great. Hours are bad for most doctors, but it seems like emergency medicine handles it a lot better. Doing some brief reading it looks like doctors can work 40 hours a week or under in the ER if they want to, and this is shift work.
The problem with the way doc hours are handled is: there's zero back-up. Whether private practice or group or hospital, everyone is utilized at maximum. I had a colleague once get terrible food poisoning - and had to come in anyway. They crawled in. We saw them, stole a bed from the trauma surgeons' on-call room, stuck an IV in him, and told him to sleep.
When he emerged two hours later, clinging to his IV pole, we were grateful for the manpower.
That's not counting all of our "unofficial hours". You officially work, whatever, 9-6. You're packed with patients for those hours, though, with almost no time to chart, so you go home and chart ... and on a daily basis at home, you're catching texts from colleagues for informal consults and requests to see patients the next day. Your "off" hours aren't off - and if you have to take call, and end up driving back to the hospital...
EM "handles it better" (a phrase I'm loathe to use) because they have legit shift work, with no continuity. No one calls them for a consult; they're not responsible for anyone after they leave because all their patients are short-stay, they don't have to see "every patient on X roster," they just have to manage their ER while they're in it. They manage shifts because of features more-or-less specific to their specialty. A handful of other specialties share those features, and manage to do the same. But not most.
Hell, I chose to pursue my specialty specifically because it lacks emergencies. I never wanted to wake up in the middle of the night post-residency; no one pays you enough for those hours (you're generally not paid for those hours.)
Yeah, on the whole I'd say doctor's WLB is a lot worse, especially considering what I've heard about residencies. And I think a developer can find a job with better WLB much easier than a doctor.
I just think that tech, especially startups, don't handle overtime well. A service might not need to have high availability, and if it does there a ways to manage operations well. Leadership focusing on quality, so that production issues are minimized is good. Explicit on-call schedules can provide benefits if it's not a ton of work, being on-call is definitely a negative. But knowing that you don't need to be available at all is better than not having an on-call schedule. Shift work, with the focus on explicitly dividing up the schedule between employees can provide that benefit.
I haven't worked at Google, but the Google SRE book mentions a lot of things I like. Like giving the option for cash compensation for overtime, requiring postmortems for on-call incidents, capping the percentage of ops work, and having multi-site teams to minimize night shifts all sound like great ideas.
I think there are a lot of situations where service reliability could be improved while making things easier on sysadmins and developers.
there's a real open question regarding app downtime. I know being 'on call' is a common occurrence in a number of tech positions, but if the thing really 'needs' to be responsive and up 24 hours VA day 7 days a week and something can explode and take it down, then one should probably look at what other sectors with that kind of need do and have rotating shift/ rosters...
course, that would probably result in lower wages for those shift
(that being said, in my country, doctors working hours in the likes of hospitals are notoriously unsafe/long/unreasonable/unethical as well, so your mileage may vary)
> In a place I worked, if someone left at 5:30 pm, the CTO used to joke "half day today?", even though the person came in at 9 am.
In both the places I've worked, it's a common joke anyone says when somebody leaves. everybody laughs and nobody gets offended. It doesn't mean anything.
As far as I can tell, jokes are an important method of communication. There are times where they are light-hearted, or just part of the culture, but there are other times (where there is, say, one person in a position of authority, making the same joke repeatedly) where it is meant to call out a behaviour and implicitly shame it.
It's like if you're on the bus and someone's sitting really close. Some people would say "Excuse me, you're too close", but others would jokingly say "Little close, aren't you?", but the meaning is the same - Move.
Joking that a reasonable leaving hour == too early isn't a good joke. It plants the idea that the reasonable hour maybe isn't reasonable in other peoples' minds.
That kind of thing only works as a joke when it's about an obviously late hour (i.e. well past the norms of the company). If someone stays until 9pm to put out some fire and then people joke about working a half day, its obvious that there's no underlying meaning to that, since the leaving hour is well past the established norms
That’s a very toxic attitude to have, especially as a manager. You don’t know that “nobody gets offended”. All you know is that “no one chose to express their discomfort”, a very different thing.
It's pretty easy to make sure nobody gets offended - you communicate (in a serious setting) that you value results over hours worked and you demonstrate this in practice. At that point irony and sarcasm is safe territory (appropriate or tasteful is another matter). Being afraid to joke about this because it could be missunderstood tells me you are failing at that which is far more important than worrying about what are potential interpretations of your jokes.
It’s not being afraid to joke, it’s making sure that employees do not feel like they are receiving mixed signals (“he says results are what matters but he’s always joking about me leaving early when I’m leaving at a reasonable hour and getting my work done?”). This is particularly important when considering employees who might not have English as their first language, or come from a culture where joking is perceived differently.
interesting, in that from my perspective it's a joke that only works if you're reinforcing a cultural attitude that they're breaking a norm. I.e. it wouldn't exist or even thought to be said unless there was an inherent expectation/value in working long hours.
Also, I'd probably worry that such frequent jokes walk a very fine line towards passive aggressive behavior (again, such jokes just won't exist where there is no expectation).
obviously I don't know your workplace, so there's a good possibility no one gets offended, but just pointing out there's different interpretations of such actions, and just because no one's saying anything doesn't mean it's not happening...
I once heard it said that employee overtime was like morphine for employers, because it masks the pain of organizational dysfunction. It's important to let your employer feel that pain so that they can become aware of what is wrong and fix it.
"I once heard it said that employee overtime was like morphine for employers, because it masks the pain of organizational dysfunction. It's important to let your employer feel that pain so that they can become aware of what is wrong and fix it.
"
One of my jobs in Germany had a strict 35 hour week. No overtime allowed unless paid 2x and even that was very difficult to do. Management was definitely much more decisive and we worked most of the 35 hours. With my current employer I am pretty sure I am working less productive hours but I am in the office more. Meetings, meetings, conference calls, more meetings and no clear decisions.
Give it enough time and your hourly wages will amortize to cover this - what should now be a 75/hr tier will have remained at 60/hr because everyone gets paid that, working overtime, to get some job done that probably doesn't need overtime to get done.
Saw this in Oil and Gas industry among Engineers and Designers (the pipeline/wiring kind, not the UX kind), not sure if it's true for other industries though. Haven't worked contract in software yet to see for myself.
More hourly people need to realize this, that what seems as a marginal benefit of time and a half pay from constant overtime hours eventually just gets priced in as lower base wages. I think a source is thinking too much about gross pay vs effective hourly compensation. It doesn't "feel right" to switch jobs and take an effective pay cut, even if your effective hourly compensation in terms of benefits and wages is higher.
Oh very traditional in heavy engineering, I know one industrial relations expert who told me, when a big turbine was due for delivery suddenly the tools and screwdrivers would get suddenly heavy and every one got very tired.
Until of course the brown envelopes came out then as he said even the tea boy got a grand - this is mid 70's btw.
And you move into higher tax brackets so take home a smaller fraction.
I'm starting to see it as a loss, the additional time I may put in as overtime is subtracted from time I have for side projects and learning that is far more important to my career (as well as metal / physical health).
When overtime starts getting budgeted the employer doesn't care so much. Usually they've done the math on if hiring people (with benefits, etc) is better than spreading the hours out as overtime.
An interesting take on this in Spain recently was that unpaid overtime was effectively "robbing from state taxes", because those extra hours should have been paid and so contribute to the government coffers. This resulted in a law (mostly defanged, self reports and no real punishment) that companies must track the time employees spend at work.
The government may not have standing to sue on the worker's behalf.
The agency that prosecutes tax fraud may be larger and better funded than the agency that protects workers.
One tax evasion charge may combine the cases of thousands of affected workers into one case, where the individual cases are too small and time consuming to pursue.
The penalties for tax evasion may be more severe than the penalties for wage theft.
That's sad that a government wouldn't see its citizens being robbed as a problem that affects them, as governments are directly responsible for the regulatory environment in which we all do business.
If people allow themselves to be robbed, and millions do everyday, there is nothing the government can do about it, just as if they are robbed by a mugger. If people aren't reporting it, then nothing will change.
Sounds a bit like an old ‘legal fiction’ in England - person A claimed that they were unable to pay their taxes because person B owed them money so sued them in the Court of Exchequer (which was not supposed to hear disputes between two subjects but could hear disputes between people who owed the Crown money and the Crown). As the court was a bit more efficient at the time than some of the alternatives and everyone wanted a speedy resolution to the dispute, no one challenged the (non-existent) debt to the Crown.
1) Wages are taxed, not work. If there is no money paid there is no tax evasion.
2) Unpaid overtime is not really unpaid unless your employment agreement explicitly states that you are not supposed to work more than 40 hours. If you get paid $100k to work 50 hours, then you are getting paid $100k to work 50 hours, not $100k to work the first 40 and $0 to work the next 10. Your comp is payment all the hours you work, not just the first 40.
At least in the US, not sure about the EU, but unless your profession is explicitly exempt salaried employees are still owed overtime. Unless a job explicitly states the number of hours an employee is to work it's assumed it's 40 hours.
Of course there are exceptions, such as programmers.
There were J-Drama actually, ハケンの品格 ("The Pride of the Temp") about the contractor who is so brilliant that she gives conditions to the staffing company.
> The conditions are that her contract term is for 3 months only, working time is from 9am to 6pm on weekdays only and no extra work or work expected on holidays.
Anyone with expertise care to chime in regarding possible causes? I recently finished a WWII documentary and the first few installments of Hardcore History's look into Imperial Japan. The Japanese seem like an "intense" (for lack of a better word) culture, which seems like it can be a pro or a con depending on what that "intensity" is targeted towards.
I always like to say that Japan is basically a feudal militaristic society that just shifted their focus of effort from warfare to business. Japanese introductions and pleasantries are in some ways eerily similar with Marine Corps "customs & courtesies". There was a Youtube documentary I watched where they pointed out that most of the central bankers and other high-ranking economic staff, post-war, were still hardcore fascists. So Japan keeping the structure that had been imposed by centuries of rule under a warrior caste should be less surprising.
The documentary you're referring to is 'The Princes of Yen'.
Contrary to all the Western BS about "samurai caste" etc. (it's always some dim-witted "academically proven" stereotype with you folk), the Samurai completely lost their power during the Tokugawa period due to inflation.
Meiji broke this completely, and gave power to an oligarchy consisting of rich merchants/farmers (and some their samurai co-conspirators who helped with the restoring Meiji to power.). In fact, this transition was helped by the British, which might explain why Meiji was so anti-Asia to begin with - there was an incomplete purge of Buddhism and conscious playdown of Chinese culture.
B. Sure, the samurai lost their political power by the Meji period. That doesn't mean their social and cultural influence disappeared overnight, especially since the country spent decades more or less under the thumb of the Imperial Japanese Army....who saw themselves as carrying on the samurai legacy, well within living memory for some Japanese. In the 30's and 40's it permeated the school system, so generations of Japanese grew up with that same military discipline, inherited from the IJA, who inherited it from the samurai.
They sure as hell didn't get rigid selflessness and tolerance for suffering from rich merchants. Plus they still form up for morning PT sessions at corporate jobs! They just have the intensity dialed down to.....1/10. Do you ever see this in any culture that hasn't had a strong military tradition?
Couldn't find a decent video of Marines doing company-level PT for comparison, but here's Army Basic Training at "Relaxin' Jackson" (everyone pokes fun at graduates of this base for producing the softest Soldiers): https://youtu.be/cIVWU8hyuI0
Post WWII, Japan was in the position of "work like crazy so that we don't all starve". So their culture became "work like crazy". That position ended perhaps by 1970, but the culture survived.
There may also be other factors, but I think this is one.
I listened to this podcast series too! So, so interesting, especially as an Asian American and understanding how that period of Japanese colonialism affected the rest of the region.
Not a historian, but working together as a group and not letting the people around you down are values that are emphasized from childhood. Leaving work before the people around you makes it feel like you are the weakest link.
Also there is a lot of weight placed on seniority, so younger people have pressure to work harder to make up for what they lack in experience. While a little less common now, it used to be understood that you shouldn't leave work before your boss.
It’s like anywhere else. There are plenty of slackers and dumbasses. They just aren’t remarkable, so they’re not in our zeitgeist. But believe me, if you teach in Japan, you meet lots of people who are lazy.
When I was in Japan a few months ago, the TV channels were hyping up the show. One of the segments had the very well-respected lead actress (Yuriko Yoshitaka) going to OL (office lady) bars after work hour and had her talk to the OLs there.
All the OLs there immediately recognized her and showed her more respect than a what a typical Japanese celebrity would receive in similar situation. My guess was that the actress was older, and was known for her strong personality and work ethic, and the OLs respected her for it.
Anyway they started sharing their war stories and asked the actress for suggestions. It's quite an enlightening experience for me as I wasn't very familiar with Japanese OL culture. Some of the stories were startling.
Actually they do have websites in Japan. And they don't remove it after - this is "The Pride of the Temp" website, created in 2007 http://www.ntv.co.jp/haken/
One question i am asking repeatedly is what is exactly the work they do for 5 extended hours? i have seen people barely work 4 out of 8 hours and being super productive!
Either almost literally nothing, or the work that should have been covered by hiring more staff. It’s either of those extremes and as far as I’ve seen (working in various Japanese offices for almost a decade now) rarely anything between those.
Some were mentioning it is more about sticking around until the boss leaves. Apparently it isn't so important that work is getting done, just the perception that you are working hard (actually working long.)
Finished the show (last episode aired two days ago).
It was as good as it could get I think. No stone were left unturned, they didn’t shy out from most themes (sexual harassment, moral harassment, generation gap, sub contracting, bribes, actual death by overwork, heroism etc).
The take on the subjects is honest and decent, they manage to push well thought arguments without making too much ennemies or pushing the ball too far. The ending is a very soft landing without ruffling too many feathers.
I hope some other series will fill the gap left open and have a more aggressive take, but this series was good enough I think.
I do not understand why in this article it is permitted to only be mentioned in passing that the creators of the TV show are completely and fundamentally changing the core message of the novel it is based upon. In the novel, the characters decision to overwork ruins her life. In the TV show, they're going to have it do the opposite. So while they toy with the idea of leaving on time, they're just going to feed more into the social disease of overwork.
I realize that the change from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a knowledge-work-oriented economy is going to take decades, and there are going to be a lot of bumps along the way and likely a good bit of bloodshed, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch.
>In addition to cultural attitudes about the value of hard work, she said, some employers reduce costs by relying on overtime, and employees work the longer hours for the extra pay and to please the boss — promotions often depend more on time spent at a desk than actual productivity.
The US game industry - except you don't get overtime pay (maybe pizza).
> We have our own culturally ingrained things in America that I'd like to change as well, and that are changing, but so slowly. How do you implement change?
Out of curiosity, what would you like to change in the US?
Systemic racism and sexism (bigotry in general, and America to this day is overflowing with it - for Muslims, LGBT, Hispanics, Africans, Chinese, etc..), historical revisionism / fantasy, American exceptionalism, ideological imperialism, cults around jobs and work, corporate personification, the pervasive and toxic "I got mine, screw you" mindset, idolization of the rich, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and anti-expertise cultures.
Those aren’t culturally ingrained in the US on any wide scale. It’s not the expectation to be racist to move up in the corporate ladder in the US. We’re talking about common culture across the majority of the group.
Not even American exceptionalism is common in workplaces (e.g. see every big tech company). About the only thing that is common is that people think the country is fucked up because of “the other political party”.
You made connections between things and the workplace that the parent did not imply to my eye.
It was an array and you started making a dict, assuming whatever connections you wanted.
See Americans are trained to not be so gaudy but quietly believe in these things. I see it all the time when I actually push people to share their political views. Democrats and liberal minded folks totally ok with bombing the Middle East and making life cheaper and easier for America.
So I guess it’s something of a ymmv, depending on whether you actively dig or just idly observe.
I think what the internet has shown is we all have wildly varying ideas of what being free means at an individual scale but at a macro social like scale pretty much just follow the corporate drum beat.
Because it’s an unfounded list of complaints. Other than American exceptionalism you could easily argue that all countries have sub cultures with those exact same problems.
It makes it a likely human-cultural universal problem that can't be fixed at the level of national politics (but rather requires something like transhuman genetic engineering to change the way our minds work, or something.) Better to focus on the problems that we have at least one constructive proof of being something other than an irreducible part of the "human 1.0" experience.
Bullshit. A huge chunk of the world used to not let people vote on their governance, or basically gave no rights to women. Turns out that declaring war against England solved part of that, and other actions have made huge headway around the world. The civil rights act had huge effects, despite it being a big problem in many other places.
"A huge chunk of the world" and "literally every human being throughout history" are very different things. Like I said, a problem is potentially solvable politically if you have at least one constructive proof of people not doing that. If you don't, though, then it's likely one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal.
If, for some reason, you thought that—to use a random example from the list—people having names was a bad thing, would you try to use politics to get people to stop naming their children? No; that'd be insane. People aren't going to give up doing that as long as they're still human beings in any sense we recognize. Even if you outlaw it, they'll still do it; it'll just be a secret.
Same goes for many good things, but also for many bad things. You'll never be able to erase the human concept of e.g. people having things that are more "theirs" than someone else's (even in a communist totalitarian regime) or sexual jealousy (even if there's a central educational authority raising everyone polyamorous), or arbitrary etiquette fads (even in the context of a concrete replacement for them, like a military code of conduct) or people valuing kin over strangers (even if Effective Altruism propaganda were to be broadcast from loudspeakers on every corner.) You can't make a world without these things in them, without making a world without humans as we know them in them.
There are problems amenable to politics. Maybe most problems. But some problems just... aren't. (These problematic aspects of humanity may be amenable to other solutions—potentially many! It's just that a political solution requires the majority of people to want it; and, by the fact that these are universals, the majority of humans will never want them gone.)
Yes, cultural universals exist, but in the interest of staying on topic, you'll notice a distinct difference between e.g. people having names, and things on zanny's list or cultures that work overtime too much.
I don't know, both bigotry and "[culture] exceptionalism" map pretty well to the cultural universals of "Collective identities" + "Binary cognitive distinctions".
Which is, again, why I think zanny was being downvoted: wishing people could get over wanting to work overtime, and wishing human brains would stop categorizing things and then assigning the categories themselves moral worth, are very different kinds of wish, that don't really feel like they should be in the same kind of list. The latter kind of thing can't be described with "a problem with American culture", because that's not the level it exists at.
Sure "otherness" is universal, but in a world where e.g. people of Irish descent used to be considered "other" by "normal" white people, I think there's empirical evidence we can still make progress.
The attitude towards taking time off, frankly. I don’t mind busting my ass at work, it’s fun, but the looks you get when you take more than a week or two of vacation at a time :-/
Where I work (Denmark); it's more the looks you get if you only take one or two weeks off or if you constantly stay in the office past 7hrs.
Over working is not healthy and you are not productive anyway. Work (at most) the 37.5hrs/week (maybe 40 if there's a crunch) you are paid for and take your 6 weeks of yearly vacation that you are entitled to (plus holidays) - is what I'd recommend and what my manager pushes. I think that's a good thing.
It's pretty normal in Europe. Not necessarily by law, but most French, Germans, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish have 6 weeks. In most places the minimum is 4 or 5 weeks, but 6 weeks is the norm.
Plus holidays. If it's similar to Norway (we get "only" five weeks, and an extra week past... 60 years?) - there's about a week of holidays (Christmas day, Easter , New years day etc) that don't count towards the total (we have 10 of those in Norway - but as some move, and/or fall on days that are typically off for office workers, like Saturday, they don't amount to 10 work days off. Somewhat depending on contract and type of work).
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Someone perpetuating toxic masculinity has little to do with the persons gender. It has to do with the cultural norms that they're choosing to enforce that result in a net negative.
A woman calling a man 'gay' because they have long hair is just as guilty of perpetuating toxic masculinity, for example. This has nothing to do with blaming men, it has to do with harmful stereotypes that hurt everyone.
> Toxic femininity is a term used by Men's rights advocacy activists to construct a False equivalence between Toxic masculinity (a manifestation of Patriarchy that both harms men, and causes men to be violent and aggressive against women and occasionally other men) and patriarchal limitations on women's gender presentation and expression.
Connecting bad traits with the same term as unchangeable traits makes no sense to. I am male and therefore have masculinity. Why connect demanding overtime to masculinity? It's super unspecific and not helpful. And no way you could ever use the word "toxic femininity" or "toxic blackness". People would go crazy,.
I've had many conversations about toxic femininity. It's a different thing, and often refers to learned helplessness or a victim mentality. But that's not what's happening in this case. Toxic masculinity is a cultural norm that requires men to be tough, to be providers, to never admit weakness, to be capable of everything that a "normal" person is capable of, and push the limits as well. And although it's called "masculinity", both people in the scenario described above could easily be women.
I have had numerous conversations with all manner of avowedly feminist-leaning folk, where both "toxic masculinity" and "toxic femininity" were under discussion, including particularly the ways they exacerbate and reinforce one another. These include people with graduate degrees in icky, feely things like Gender Studies.
It turns out, when you use those terms to describe traits, rather than as accusations of assholery or inherent awfulness, you can actually have a conversation, rather than shouting defensively at each other. I think it might be because as used in academic discourse, that's what they are: descriptions of traits.
That sounds a bit like how African Americans can use the N-word. The word has different meaning depending on who is saying it, who is the recipient, and the relation the two individuals have.
All words do, to some extent. "The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has happened at all." — George Bernard Shaw
I'm not sure it's much like the n-word beyond the intent of the utterer, though. I've been called "My n-word" before, by people who "get" to use that word, yet I'm white. I still wouldn't presume to use it back (for myriad reasons, most of which would be tangential, at best, to this discussion — yet more reason I don't find it so relevant).
My point has more to do with whether the term is being used constructively (or at least critically, in the sense of analysis, not of berating), versus whether it's being used as some kind of accusation of inherent badness. Because, basically every time the concept comes up, people leap into the conversation taking it that way.
Anyone who feels moved to can talk about "toxic [whatever]ity". How that conversation goes probably depends at least as much on what they mean by it as it does their audience.
It not really about the intent, but rather how the intent is perceived.
The reason to not use the N-word is for me identical to toxic masculinity. Most recipients and people who happen to be near won't interpret it in any positive way. Both are unproductive for meaningful discourse and leads to a hostile environment. Since people who use those term is usually well aware of the reaction, it must be assumed that it is the speakers intention is to cause harm.
> Since people who use those term is usually well aware of the reaction, it must be assumed that it is the speakers intention is to cause harm.
People who talk about "toxic masculinity", in the academic sense, shouldn't use that term, because other people will have feelings about it? People should adjust their speech to the sensitivities of — not just their, but any — audience? Is that legit the position here?
That is how pejorative terms tend to work. Here in Sweden we had a national discussion about the n-word as recently as early 2000 because a popular traditional nordic pastry since before world war 2 had the word as part of its name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havregrynskugle). As it went "It is just a word for a color, and in context of a traditional pastry, why can't we continue to use its name?".
The answer was obvious and thus the pastry has a new name. Benign usage may take time to go away but if there is no negative intention then it is just easier to switch to other words. Even with traditional pastry people adjusted their speech because other people have feelings about it. Still people wrote quite a lot of political debate articles trying to argue that the whole thing were totally silly, irrational and people should just not get upset over the name of a pastry.
Back then I had similar line of thought as you and thought people should not have to adjust their speech because some unnamed and never defined person may get offended. It was after all just a pastry. It did not feel like something which anyone could legitimate be upset over. Now days I tend to see it more from a perspective of communication and if a word causes generally misunderstanding of the intentions of the speaker then it might just be best to use a other word.
Are we really equating the usage of the N-word, a term which has massive historical racist baggage behind it, to the term 'toxic masculinity' which is a well-known and defined term which does not have any sort of baggage like that behind it?
Masculinity isn't an unchangeable trait though. You can dress, shave, act etc in different ways which affect how you express yourself which all results in how 'masculine' or 'feminine' your expression is.
Toxic masculinity is an attempt to define how a man should look. If you get mocked for having long hair, shaving your face/body or wearing certain colors, that's toxic masculinity. Because you're not acting in a way how a man is supposed to act.
It's both a function of culture, and sex. Masculine behavior is pretty well the same across cultures. It's informed by biology. There isn't a culture on Earth where it's considered masculine to be passive and meek. Beards are just fashion.
Toxic masculinity is connected to the masculine roles society forces on men and women. I'm not sure what else you'd call it, because the entire point is that it has everything to do with masculinity. Hence, toxic masculinity.
I think the point is the definition of toxic masculinity that you are using differs from that of some of the other posters.
As I understand your definition toxic masculinity is the pressure society puts on people to conform to negative masculine roles.
My personal definition would be people expressing there masculinity in a way that is hurtful and belittling of others.
They both are part of the same problem where society creates and perpetuates and pushes people to toxic expressions of masculinity and that in turn hurts the public in general. Which looks something like:
Society -> Masculine Roles -> The Public
I'd call the negative expression of that chain Toxic Societal Norms and the second part would be Toxic Masculinity. In both cases it's the noun, societal norms or masculinity, that is the source of the toxicity.
> As I understand your definition toxic masculinity is the pressure society puts on people to conform to negative masculine roles.
> My personal definition would be people expressing there masculinity in a way that is hurtful and belittling of others.
It's both. The cultural norms, and people expressing them are both definitive of toxic masculinity.
The belittling is often a product of people internalizing those norms. They then ostracize or punish others who either fail to meet them in the eyes of the belittler, or are evocative to the belittler of the ways in which they, themselves, fail to meet them.
In fact, that kind of behavior is what the term "virtue signaling" is actually about: behavior that is performed to signal affiliation with and enforce the norms of some group. It doesn't actually mean the "you're all talk" kind of thing that it's broadly become.
Seems to me that if you're taking completely non-gender-specific toxic behavior like belittling employees for not staying late, and assigning it the label "masculinity", it is you who is engaging in the harmful stereotypes.
But this behavior stems from toxic masculinity. The culture of overwork in Japan has been predominantly a male phenomenon which is why Karoshi tends to occur among men.
However as women enter into the workforce they have to adapt these same norms in order to survive which is how toxic masculinity affects them as well.
The culture of overwork stems from the masculine stereotype of a man having to be the sole provider for the household which also means that they're expected to work extra hard and conform in ways that society demands. This is a textbook example of toxic masculinity. Another example is how some companies in Japan essentially demand you go out drinking with your superiors in order to keep up this facade. You can't talk about fixing issues stemming from male stereotypes without talking about masculinity. And as a man who has received insults and belittlement for having long hair, what else would you call that but a function of toxic masculinity?
"But this behavior stems from toxic masculinity. The culture of overwork in Japan has been predominantly a male phenomenon which is why Karoshi tends to occur among men."
It stems from overambitious people who don't care for others, not masculinity. Masculinity points towards males which doesn't help. Call it "overworking culture" to be inclusive. What do you do with a boss who has all attributes of "femininity" but works employees to the bone? Suddenly that's masculinity? Or is that not possible since feminine bosses don't do that?
It's a function of men being the main family provider for most of history, that's a fact not a toxic element of masculinity.
Saying that has negatively affected people and assigning it a label is fine, but how is this issue related to you being insulted for your appearance? How is men being the sole providers throughout history toxic? It in itself isn't and the concept of working hard is also not exclusively a masculine idea, just because in Japan male workers literally kill themselves doesn't mean that overworking yourself to death is a masculine idea does it?
And outside of Japan I don't see how it's a gender issue at all.
That's literally the definition of masculinity! The entire definition of masculinity is that it is the set of traits and attributes that a culture defines as being characteristically held by men.
So if one of the traits a culture holds is 'men must work themselves to death', then that's a toxic idea. It's an idea associated with what society expects of men, which makes it a masculine trait for that culture. Combined, these two form 'toxic masculinity'.
It's related what I mentioned because it all ties back to what a culture considers to be masculinity, which is the traits that a man has. Some of these traits can be positive, some can be negative. When we discuss 'toxic masculinity', that means things like men being called 'gay' because of their appearance, men having to be away from their family in order to appear like a hard worker for arbitrary reasons and so forth.
OK I understand the definition, but the idea men should work themselves to death is not one actually held by society at large. Is it only Japanese Male toxicity? Why don't other places have this idea is it just because Japan is not enlightened?
I don't think so. In my opinion it's about the workforce being traditionally male, not that it's a masculine idea to overwork yourself. That's why the argument doesn't hold water to me across a global population. That's why it's not a masculine idea and not toxic masculinity, men don't believe it and it's not a generally held belief about men. In my experiences men and women go home at roughly the same time and there are not problems relating to gender there.
And you can't blanket your argument by saying 'when we discuss toxic masculinity this is what we mean' because that is exactly what is being debated. I was strictly talking about the article not your personal issues they are not the same thing.
It's specifically a cultural thing in Japan, yes. Some cultures have other levels of overwork at play but Japan has some unique issues in that regard.
And your second paragraph makes no sense to me. Masculinity isn't about what is 'globally believed to be true', it's about what each individual culture believe constitutes masculinity. If you were to ask people from each culture what does it mean to be masculine or to be a man, you'll likely get wildly different definitions. Because as I keep saying over and over again, masculinity and toxic masculinity is one we discuss as it relates to culture.
You keep defining masculinity as if there is a global constant to masculinity when it can vary immensely from culture to culture. If one culture believes beards are part of being a man and another culture does not, then which is masculine? How do you define that? Is there some global standard?
What does this attitude have to do with being male? They have children also. A woman could just as easily have this viewpoint and your anecdotal story doesn't provide any evidence to the contrary. Calling this toxic masculinity isn't just incorrect, it shows that you have a problem with masculinity and are trying to attribute all kinds of negative actions to it.
It doesn't have much to do with being male- that's the point! It has to do with the roles men are expected to play in society, and how "being a man" is culturally defined.
Of course men have children too! Again, that's the point- to a significant degree, the "normal" family- where culture defines what's "normal"- consists of a man who works and focuses on his career, and a woman who takes care of the kids.
So when they talk about toxic masculinity, they're talking about norms. In this case, it seems GP's point is that society considers it more acceptable to expect men to stay at work for long hours than it would for women.
This isn't anything intrinsically male - these are external, social pressures that might influence that CTO's view of a male employee who leaves "early" v.s. a female employee who did the same.
That's the thing so often misunderstood about the term "toxic masculinity" - it's not about what it means to be a man, it's about what society at large expects men to be. It's about stuff like men being expected to be more stoic, and the negative outcomes that can result- things like men not going to the doctor as much and suffering negative health outcomes from treatable conditions as a result.
That said, in this case I think GP is overreaching a bit. A male employee who replied to the CTO's remark with a laugh and a "Got to get back home to my kids!" would probably not raise any eyebrows.
Except this isn't an area where there is toxicity related to gender roles. Women work as much as men do, and this CTO has an attitude that treats everyone equally. Where does the toxic masculinity enter this scenario?
"a male employee who leaves "early" v.s. a female employee who did the same"
Is there a real problem for men leaving the same time as women? I've never encountered this at any job ever.
Right, this is why it seemed like an overreach to me. I guess you could say it's also related to men generally being encouraged to be more competitive- which might make them overwork to seem more committed- but that's an effect that's so indirect it's hard to pin down.
That's the thing so often misunderstood about the term "toxic masculinity" - it's not about what it means to be a man, it's about what society at large expects men to be.
Wouldn't it be more manly behaviour to stand up for yourself, and go home on time? It surely wouldn't be very masculine to sacrifice time with your family just because you get a bit of passive-aggressiveness from middle management.
I'd say the concept of what is and isn't masculinity is almost too nebulous to assign it good or bad qualities.
And the boss, who looks good because his team works so hard.
The real story here is the issue of incentive structure and coordination games. If one company sends their workers home early, they risk being outcompeted by another that keeps workers late. Companies could attempt to coordinate in order to mandate sending people home early, but then a defector stands to profit immensely.
Even if we were to pass laws mandating shorter work days, companies would find ways around it using contracts or temporary workers.
You might point out that some companies do offer a lot of flexibility and relaxed hours. These companies can do this because their productivity isn't strictly tied to hours worked. Other companies don't have that luxury, however, and the pressure to work overtime will always be there.
The comment above is a little bit of a stretch (I'm not sure I'd equate working more to toxic masculinity exactly), but this isn't about being a man: the CTO may have been female, that in itself wouldn't invalidate the comment.
Masculinity in this context is about gendered behaviours (behaviours traditionally expected of men). Toxic masculinity is any such behaviours that have a negative impact on the subject, those around them, or society. Women can also contribute to toxic masculinity.
In fact, within certain corporate cultures, where promotions have traditionally been awarded to men, it may benefit women's careers to adopt such toxic behaviours.
Agggh hits to home. Arrogant American me rolled into a Taiwanese job expecting to skyrocket up the ladder on results alone. Nope, because I left at 5 sharp to enjoy the beautiful mountains, I was a lazy shit. Never mind my 10x increase in sales. Well, also I was an arrogant prick.
I chew on this issue a lot - it's bad to work so much. But, it's culturally ingrained. Some people are trying to change it... but it's happening so slowly. We have our own culturally ingrained things in America that I'd like to change as well, and that are changing, but so slowly. How do you implement change?
I guess that's the plot of any good fantasy or political drama, how do leaders convince people that change can be good?