Work isn't worth extreme sacrifice
Work isn't worth extreme sacrifice
The promise of reward comes at a cost.
At the end of August, several news outlets reported that a Wells Fargo employee was found dead in her office. She'd last clocked in on a Friday morning, and died sometime during the weekend, according to authorities.
She was found on Tuesday, August 20th. Which means that at least all of Monday passed with no one noticing that she hadn't interacted with a single person in her department. And hadn't called in sick to work, because she never clocked out on Friday.
The news has undertones of "Your employer doesn't care about you" and "No one will even notice if you're gone." But what struck me in the news report was that she had died over the weekend.
I don't know the specifics of this employee's job or the number of hours she typically worked. But it made me think of a pervasive culture of overwork at many companies and the expectation that you'll do whatever it takes to get the job done.
It all starts with company culture
A few weeks ago, I read an article about how a 35-year-old Bank of America employee had died earlier this year from a blood clot. He was working more than 100 hours per week. This prompted a follow-up report from the Wall Street Journal a few months later, entitled "How Bank of America Ignores Its Own Rules Meant to Prevent Dangerous Workloads." The WSJ cites employees who said they're instructed by managers to lie about their hours.
In a 2022 article, "Companies Can't Stop Overworking" from the New York Times, John Pencavel, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, says, "There is now a mountain of careful research showing that people who experience long hours of work have serious health consequences." This may prompt some companies — like Bank of America — to put policies into place on paper. But in practice, they continue to revert to practices that expect, and even demand, extreme overwork.
Employees feel pressure because work is tied to performance. Companies like Goldman Sachs are known for their compensation structures, which include low salaries but high bonuses. And those bonuses aren't based solely on the employee's performance, but on how well they stack up against their peers. It's like Survivor, Corporate Edition. Outwit, outplay, outlast.
Early in my career, I worked long, long hours. Nothing like the extreme 100-hour workweeks, but somewhere between 50 and 60 hours was normal. I'd work a typical 8-hour day and then work into the evenings to wrap up. It was a combination of the company being understaffed and my own desire to get ahead. I wanted to stand out based on my ability to get work done. It worked: I got two promotions within the first two years.
The 100-hour workweek examples all came from the banking world: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc. But the startup world often faces the same type of frenetic pace. In particular, startups have financial constraints: they simply can't afford more employees, so they have high expectations of those they hire. They are also fighting a metaphorical clock. If they don't get their products to market — fast — another company will beat them to the punch. Facebook famously had the motto "Move fast and break things," coined by Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk required an “extremely hardcore” culture when he took over Twitter.
Startups similarly use compensation to drive employees to work more, usually in the form of stock options. While banks are stacking employees against each other, with stock options, the company has to collectively succeed in order for the options to be worth anything. Other industries, like law firms, offer salaries to associates, but compensation is also tied to billable hours. If you're not billing enough, you're underperforming.
It's an endless cycle of overwork in order to receive compensation for said work. And that compensation isn't even guaranteed, since you're fighting external factors, such as how well you perform against your peers and how well your company performs within the market.
The problems are structural
Companies have no incentive to find different ways of working or different compensation models. The current culture of overwork suits them just fine. Banks have all the financial resources to hire more people, but they don't. Startups could focus on building a sustainable business instead of one that operates at breakneck speed, but they don't. They could look into different compensation models that measure individual performance, rather than performance against peers or the number of billable hours, but they don't.
points out in her Substack Culture Study that this is a "marked switch" from the 19th century, when "the rich worked as little as possible, and the poor worked as much as possible." This shift has occurred, in part, because of the rise in the billable hour. But she also points out that salaried office workers have typically resisted unionizing, as they move up the corporate ladder or want to differentiate themselves from "blue-collar" work. Unions offer workers protections, such as the number of hours worked and a contract that lays out the expectations of the job.Perhaps these salaried, non-union workers felt like they had job security, especially once they reached the management level. They were (in theory) rewarded for their long hours and hard work. Over the decades though, this has bloated into something unhealthy, and a system where there the employer benefits far more than the employee. Think of the millions of dollars an analyst at an investment bank earns for the company. Think of the potential value of a startup someday when it is acquired or goes public. All of that comes from employees killing themselves (in some cases, literally causing death), to earn a minuscule fraction of that value.
These days, it's not even a guarantee of job security. Layoffs have been rampant in the tech industry. Goldman Sachs laid off employees, claiming that the cuts were aimed at "low performers." This, at one of those 100-hour workweek companies. Imagine being told that the hours you put in are "not enough."
I wish more workers would say, "It's not worth it." Because only through a collective rejection of such extreme working conditions will anything change. Recognition that companies cannot exist without the work of their employees, and those employees deserve to be treated fairly.
Perhaps that's not merely a pipe dream. But the Economic Policy Institute found that there's an increase in the number of people who are "union curious." Will this curiosity trickle into large corporations and a larger percentage of office workers? It certainly feels like a movement, even if that movement will take decades to come to full fruition.
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