Updated:2025-01-06 05:55 Views:77
lucky 777 casino real moneyThere is a growing trend among experienced remote workers in the tech industry to work two full-time jobs at once. Their justification for doing so is that they’re being paid for their services, and as long as they accomplish their tasks before their deadlines, it’s fair play. To me this seems wrong on multiple levels. They’re effectively being paid twice for the same hours of availability, regardless of when they complete their tasks. Surely they have reduced availability for meetings and invent excuses for that, slowing down the pace of work at both companies. And for those companies attempting to set fair and reasonable deadlines, this would cause them to unfairly operate more slowly than competitors whose employees weren’t double-dipping.
But my sympathies to employers only extend so far; I believe they would do (and sometimes already do) some equivalent of this in asking people to fulfill multiple roles to maximize their own profits. My real concern is that by occupying these additional jobs, the double-dippers use their experience to hoard these positions, taking them away from others who could really use them. Of course, as more peers mention doing this, it increases the temptation for others to do the same. Do you have advice for how I might encourage peers to refrain from going down this path without coming across as judgmental or seeming to accuse them of being unethical? — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
At a time when people worry that the tech industry is crafting systems that will eliminate jobs, how should we feel when its employees have found a way to eliminate jobs more directly? There are the efficiency issues that you raise — by pulling a fast one, these workers may also be pulling a slow one — and, of course, there’s the ongoing dishonesty that comes of juggling two employers who are also providing benefits like subsidized health care and life insurance. Your point about job hoarding is a sound one. There can be other ethical problems, too. Employees are privy to information that a company wouldn’t want known to competitors. Tech two-timers could use information provided by one to make them look good to the other, potentially to the former’s disadvantage. Because they are already being disloyal, the temptation may be particularly hard to resist.
You point out that employers can sometimes ask workers to do too many jobs — failing to hire the right number of people. Yet labor markets can, in theory, put a limit on such work hoarding. Many professionals, for example, expect their salaries to be adjusted upward when they do especially demanding work. They also expect to be paid roughly the same as people doing comparable work in the same industry, albeit with some adjustment for years of service. And of course, people who think their remuneration is unfair because they aren’t making as much as their peers are likely to go looking for jobs elsewhere, if they’re available. It’s true that for employees, the costs, including psychological ones, of moving to a new job can be high, but the costs to employers of finding and training new people can also be significant.
Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, declined to say exactly how many troops were deploying, citing operational security.
Employers, meanwhile, also make the opposite mistake: double-dipping is possible because many people are being paid a full salary for doing work that doesn’t take anything like the assumed number of hours. And though, as I say, the need for employee retention can deter companies from asking too much from a worker, there’s no immediate market discipline when it comes to how little they may ask. If successful double-dippers were spending 40 or more hours a week in an office, they’d be doing other things, whether surfing the internet, writing the Great American Novel or curating their Instagram accounts (another important genre of contemporary fiction). Some companies install software on work computers that allows them to monitor employees’ activities. Were double-dipping to become even more common, a growing number of employers may turn to this somewhat unsavory option.
Talking to tempted peers, you might note how the practice can affect the atmosphere of the workplace — it can make everything more transactional by fraying trust. (Yes, work is a transaction, but in a healthy place of employment, it isn’t only that.) You might also ask about the costs that would be imposed on them. The need to keep their lies straight can be corrosive, too, not to mention stressful, and they’ll know that they’re not really giving either employer their very best. And obviously, there are the practical consequences — termination, potential legal trouble, damage to their professional reputation, difficulty in finding future work — if the ruse is discovered.
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