Fighting Boss Favoritism
By Matt Breunig, Demos
The Obama Administration passed new overtime rules that make 4.6 million more people eligible for overtime protections. In the resulting commentary, I’ve noticed some claiming it has certain downsides that I think are actually hugely important upsides. Here is Slate’s Jordan Weissman for instance:
That said, there will be trade-offs. There is probably at least one aspiring restaurant manager at your local Chipotle who would be happy to pull a slightly longer shift without extra pay for the sake of a promotion. The Department of Labor’s proposal will make that a lot harder to do.
To say that this is a tradeoff or downside is to suggest that this isn’t an intended consequence of these kinds of work hour rules. But it is actually one of the main purposes of capping work hours.
Work hour caps are designed to prevent workers from competing with one another for the boss’ favor by running up work time. Without such caps, someone who works a normal work week so that they have time for leisure and family is disadvantaged relative to someone who is willing to put in a bunch more hours to score the promotion. The effect of this power dynamic is that everyone who wants a chance at promotion is forced to also increase their work hours, and a race to the exhaustion bottom is set off.
With such caps, it becomes impossible for bosses to penalize those who do not work beyond a normal work week. This effectively stops the race to the bottom by removing the pressure to curry favor with the boss by working more hours. The same dynamic can be found in mandatory vacations—it makes it impossible to curry favor with the boss by not taking your vacation—and other kinds of leave as well.
For people who have never worked a normal job or been around those who worked normal jobs (see most journalists), this might seem to be a very alien concept. But there is a reason why labor movements across the world have pushed for these kinds of things, both in regulation and in collective bargaining agreements. Boss favoritism is a serious problem, and the potential of it divides workers and forces them into a kind of degrading rat race. Workers end up working longer, foregoing vacations, accepting mistreatment, and sucking up to the boss, all so that they can angle for the precious gifts of promotions and raises that the boss has power over.
Outside of the realm of leave, this is also why you see seniority playing such a big part in the workplace decision mechanisms favored by labor: seniority operates as an objective way to determine which workers will be favored over others where such favoring (e.g. in the case of work assignments) is necessary. This undercuts the power of the boss to dangle favors over people’s heads in order to, again, make them fight against each other and race to the bottom.
If you are having a hard time understanding this argument or think it is half-baked, just remember that this is identical to certain arguments about gender dynamics in workplaces. That is, it is very common for people to note that not capping hours and not requiring leave advantages men over women in the workplace because they are typically more able to work over and avoid leave. When couched in gender terms, it lights up the liberal imagination, but the argument applies more broadly as well.