The Firm Down the Road
I've been chewing on something. Not the big multinationals, not the corporates you read about overseas — the small outfits here. Doesn't much matter what trade. Could be a law practice, an accounting office, an engineering consultancy, a workshop, a small shop with a back office. Five people, ten, thirty. No HR department to complain to. No union. Just you, the boss's door, and whatever's due tomorrow.
The overseas numbers are ugly enough if you want them. Big companies over there, the average boss now takes home over 300 times what the typical worker earns. Meetings have roughly tripled since the pandemic. Office workers reportedly spend well over half their day just coordinating work rather than doing it. That's the big picture. It's not really what's bothering me.
What's bothering me is smaller and closer to home, and it's this: the boss doesn't have to guess anymore. Every late-night email has a timestamp on it. Every report generated at midnight, every reply sent over a Sunday lunch, every message fired off before six in the morning — it's all sitting right there, dated, in the system. With decent internet at home now, the office never really closes for anyone. The boss can see, in black and white, exactly how much of the worker's evenings, weekends, and family time got swallowed by the job. And still, nothing changes. No extra pay. No extra day off. Just quiet proof, ignored.
And here's the part that gets me. If a worker doesn't put in that extra time — doesn't answer the Sunday email, doesn't stay late — they feel guilty about it. Why? Because everyone else in the office is doing exactly the same thing. Everybody's handing over their evenings and weekends, and everybody's relying on everybody else doing it too, just to keep the whole thing running. It's not one person being asked to sacrifice. It's a room full of people quietly agreeing to rob each other's free time, because nobody wants to be the one who didn't pull their weight.
Then there's the client. No worker wants to let a client down — that relationship is theirs, built over months or years, not the boss's and not the owner's. The client just wants a good result delivered on time. Whether that meant somebody's Saturday got eaten, or their kid's soccer game got missed — the client doesn't know, and mostly wouldn't think to ask. That's the truth of it. The people footing the bill for good service have no idea what it actually cost the person doing it, and the people who do know — the owners — are the ones seeing the timestamps and saying nothing.
Under our own Labour Act, overtime is supposed to be paid at one and a half times the normal rate — double on a Sunday. That's not a favour, that's the law. Somewhere between "you're on salary" and "the client needs this by Monday," that seems to get forgotten.
I don't have a tidy fix. Maybe it starts with a boss actually looking at those timestamps and asking what they cost, instead of just being glad the work got done.
— Harry