By Lauren Weber

Are you trawling Amazon between meetings, lingering awhile at the office coffee machine or writing a novel during work hours? Congratulations, you’re doing your share of “empty labor.”

That’s the term for the non-work activities we do on the job, and the name of a new book by Roland Paulsen, a sociologist at Lund University in Sweden and one of the world’s foremost experts on how people shirk on the job.

Employees typically spend about two hours per day slacking off on the company dime, and this “organizational misbehavior,” as Paulsen also calls it, is probably more widespread than most managers realize (unless they engage in a fair amount of empty labor, too).

In his book Paulsen examines some extreme cases of empty labor, interviewing employees who lollygag for half their days or more. Many of our jobs have become more demanding than ever, but “not all parts of the labor market are driven by fierce competition intensifying people’s work days,” he writes.

Though employers use technology to ensure people are doing their jobs—from software that monitors computer activity to GPS systems that track the whereabouts of delivery drivers—workers often figure out how to sidestep them.

“What do we do with our wish to work less and live more?” he asks. The question has some personal relevance for Paulsen, it seems. “If truth be told,” he writes early in the book from a room in Bali, “right now I would rather try windsurfing than writing this preface.”

Why do people engage in empty labor?

The job or tasks feel meaningless. The [tasks] didn’t serve any human needs, perhaps not even the needs of the company. Some interviewees expressed frustration with their company or a certain manager.

There were political narratives as well, though not as much as I thought. In those cases, workers had the sense that it’s okay to take back some of the time that wage labor consistently takes from us.

Everyone I know complains about working more, not less.

We are seeing an intensification of work in general. But wage labor is an unequal institution in terms of job security and in terms of stress and strain, [so some workers have more freedom to loaf]. Often those paid the least have to do more and more with no possibility of even taking a five-minute break, while others can be quite idle while at work.

Are employers aware of how little people actually work?

Some of them probably are. And I think that most companies want to reduce this as much as possible. Then there are companies like Google or Facebook  where they even boast about the melting together of leisure and work. But that’s only among the privileged few.

I think time-regulated labor is very obsolete today, especially for knowledge work. But there are other ways of controlling output and measuring performance.

You write that not everyone who engages in empty labor is doing so because they want to slack off.

Some people are forced into empty labor against their will and do not enjoy it. This surprised me the most. The most extreme example was a bank clerk who in one project worked only 15 minutes a day. He reached a point where it just wasn’t funny anymore, so he informed his boss quite bluntly about his situation, and they rewarded his open communication by cutting his job in half.

He actually wanted to do something more productive, but the manager was too occupied to invent new tasks. In that situation, he simply had to simulate work because there’s also a pressure from your colleagues; you don’t want to appear idle in front of them, either. There was no shirking on his part.

What about people at lower-wage jobs?

Those workers tend to be the most likely to be monitored technologically by their employers, and so are not the ones who spend half their working hours slacking. But even if you are heavily monitored there might also be some openings there for slacking off.

Where did you find the most empty labor?

You can’t generalize from the sample. Most of them were office workers with academic degrees and a fair amount of autonomy in their work. If you want to engage in extreme forms of empty labor – some people spent half their working hours on private activity – then you must be able to claim some expertise, and that’s not possible for everyone. A copywriter at an ad agency spent most of her hours writing on her blog. I interviewed several web developers who had figured out how to come in late and leave early, and an archivist who wrote his master’s thesis while at work.

How do they manage this?

Sometimes it can be very hard for a manager to know what tasks a certain job entails, and to know how much time and effort a job requires. That’s especially true when there’s some technical knowledge involved. The bigger the company or the bigger the department, the harder it is to know what’s actually going on there.

If there is no opacity, you can create it by mystifying what you’re actually doing and how long it takes, like telling your boss this project will take 10 hours–even though you know it’ll only take six. An important part is to keep managers at a distance. If they’re too involved in the labor process, they’ll know how much time it takes.

Source: The Wall Street Journal