Talk is cheap, my darling

You go into your job, you piddle around getting coffee and getting “set up” every morning when you’re on the clock, you spend an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon on Facebook, you mess around on the internet in between that, and you have a custodial staff cleaning up after you.

You don’t have to do the cleaning yourself. You don’t have bosses telling you “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” You have time to lean. You lean on your desk during the mid-afternoon slump and no one says anything except to remark on how many hours you have to go. You lean on your friend’s cubicle wall while you talk about the big game or your guild raid or who said what about whom on TV last night. Sure, if you do that too often or too obviously, someone will say something, but the mere fact that conversation happens isn’t automatically taken as a red flag that someone is stealing time from The Company.

You might have to kiss up to the boss or a touring client from time to time, but mostly, you don’t have to provide service with a smile or anything like that. You don’t have to smile and speak cheerfully and politely to customers who are making your job difficult by their apathy, entitlement, and disrespect. You can sit there and grimace and sneer and roll your eyes at the computer monitor, muttering under your breath (or speaking out loud to your neighbors) about what a live one you’re dealing with as you type out your considered and professional reply. Whatever your job is, you’re just expected to do it, not do it and perform the emotional labor of a continuous mask of unflappable perkiness.

Your schedule is not a weekly guessing game. It’s not set by someone playing chicken with the part-time/full-time boundary. You aren’t expected to come in before your shift to get everything set up or stay after you’ve clocked out in order to clean everything up for tomorrow. You don’t live in a state of constant tension between the fact that you don’t make enough money even with the hours they deign to give you and the fact that they give you hours designed to ensure you can’t have any life or commitments outside the job.

White collar workers are paid with the expectation that they will have done their jobs within the time that they spend in the office, not that they will have worked a solid 8 or 10 hours the entire time they were on the clock.

Minimum wage workers are treated like if they aren’t performing two or three jobs the entire time they’re on the clocks, they’re stealing their wages.