Business - Those Thieving Workers

By my own estimates, the American workforce is gouging about $25 billion dollars a week out of its generous employers.

A recent survey concludes that fantasy football costs as much as $1.1 billion per week in lost productivity. The study, by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., culls this figure from Harris polls that estimate 36.8 million participants in the online sport, two-thirds of whom spend about 5 hours a week managing their teams.

“With people spending an average of 43 minutes per day on their teams, it is not out of the realm of possibility that they are spending at least 10 minutes of that time doing so at the office,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Even though this may be a gaping non sequitur, the methodology by which C, G & C draw their conclusions is intriguing and can be used to conclude that these same employers are actually victims of a much greater injustice.

The company compiled their statistics based on the average salary of these employees ($76,000) and breaking it down to $6 of wages every ten minutes. Multiplied by 5 work days, and again by the number of players, this figure of $1.1 billion dollars is only the tip of the iceberg.

If one should consider that the average employee takes a 5-minute bathroom break every hour, during the average work day that’s 40 minutes a day in the toilet. Four times the criminal cost of fantasy football.

Then there are personal phone calls and emails. Tack on the thrice daily phone conversations of the parents of newborns, the messages between new lovers and friends setting up a time to meet after work, bookings and attempts to correct the sly errata of modern life, and you could be looking at a whopping 60 minutes a day, costing employers $6.6 billion a week.

And we mustn’t forget gossip. If the numerous places I’ve worked at can be any kind of measure, a full 30 minutes a day can be allotted to the discussion of the drinking, work and sexual habits of other employees and their questionable hygiene. $3.3 billion.

Speaking of hygiene, if one figures that the average women spends 20 minutes a day grooming herself at work while a man spends perhaps 1 minute doing the same, that averages out to a little over the 10 minutes spent on fantasy football.

General distractions and lollygagging? Probably about 90 minutes a day, nearly $10 billion a week.

Given that these are all rough estimates, let’s tally the grand total to a conservative $25 billion a week that employers are losing to their lazy, uncooperative workforce. These selfsame workers are fucking around almost 6 hours a day and providing their generous oversears a mere 25% of the work that they are contracted to provide. That is simply egregious.

Given these startling figures, I would recommend that employers cut all bathroom and coffee breaks, eliminate any non-essential conversation in the office and monitor all communications going into and out of the office. If they were to invest only a small portion of that $25 billion that they are being robbed of, they could hire an internal police force to enforce this discipline, and then perhaps we could get about the business of making good business.