Legal, maybe. Ethical? Not to me. Think of it this way: would you tell your employer you were planning to work two jobs, and put in the minimum effort into them? Would you be above-board and transparent about your conflicting responsibilities and schedules? If not, you're committing fraud: "intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value." (The value, in this case, is the fruits of your labor.) And fraud is most certainly unethical, even if not illegal in this case.
Employees trade their hours for the company's money. If you want to trade deliverables for money, you have to be a contractor on a deliverable-based contract. It's a lot riskier, which is why it pays more... sometimes. If you are in a full-time job, and not putting in full-time hours, you're defrauding your employer.
I'm not particularly making an assertion about whether working two jobs is ethical, just that doing the minimum is. Again, if the minimum isn't the least it is acceptable to do, then what is, then what does that word even mean?
What exactly an employer is paying for with a salaried employee is fairly nuanced and specific to the work. "They're paying for your time" isn't wrong but it's insufficient to explain a lot of the real dynamics there.
Specifically that would make every time you look away from the computer a privilege purely at the discretion of your employer. Not a condition many of us would accept given other options. So it seems to me either this isn't the pure moral reality of the transaction, or we're all transgressors here.
> I'm not particularly making an assertion about whether working two jobs is ethical, just that doing the minimum is.
Sure, I'll agree with that, up to a point. And I think, for me, that point is "would you behave differently if your employer had full knowledge of your actions."
Ultimately, people who work two simultaneous jobs are abusing the trust of their employers, and if it becomes commonplace, it's just going to hurt the rest of us. Instead of trusting employees to do the right thing, employers will put draconian employee tracking measures in place.
They're going to do that anyway whether we preemptively placate them or not. The solution is solidarity and organizing, not trying to infer their invisible demands on how we allocate our time around the workload.
And why would my employer ever have full knowledge of my actions during the workday? Even in the hypothetical it's extremely invasive. If I need to pray five times a day several of those are landing during the workday. Fuck a boss who thinks they need to know about that.
It sounds like you haven't been part of a healthy workplace environment, and have so much anger about employer/employee relationships that you're straw-manning my hypothetical. That's too bad. But healthy workplaces do exist, and they involve mutual trust. (Up to a point. I'm not advocating blind trust and obedience.) Workplaces where everyone thinks everyone else is out to get them are hell. Don't contribute to it... just get out and find an employer you can trust, if you can.
This entire industry is in a hiring frenzy, and even before it, job-hopping for wealth and experience was very common in places like Silicon Valley. In such an environment where employees and employers both treat each other as fungible, it's easy for everything to be highly transactional, low-trust.
