(Written and posted 07 July 2009)

In 1989, I attended my first annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). For those unfamiliar with TRB, it is a huge weeklong meeting of engineers, planners, lawyers, and other transportation professionals from around the world where cutting edge research is presented and ideas are exchanged. At that time, I was a grad student at the University of Tennessee. I was also coming off of several months of recovery from a hernia surgery, during which time I just didn’t feel like shaving anymore so I had a bizarre, multi-colored beard. I looked like someone right out a hollow of the eastern Tennessee mountains. Well, at least a well-dressed one, since TRB has a rigid dress code.

One of the presentations I attended was about the efficiency of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes. For those of you unfamiliar with HOV lanes, they are special lanes that can only be used by vehicles with a designated number of occupants. The concept is to encourage carpooling and discourage single occupant vehicles by providing a special lane. Ideally, the vehicles in the HOV lanes are supposed to whiz by those poor saps parked in the other lanes, thereby encouraging others to carpool and, with the additional carpooling, reduce the total number of vehicles on the road and reduce congestion. The ideal is not the reality, and HOV lanes don’t always deliver the results promised.

Anyway, the presenter was a young engineer working for a big consulting firm in Los Angeles, who may have had a year or two more experience than I did. This engineer did the whole spiel, and then came the conclusion that blew me away – HOV are cost effective only if everybody goes to work and leaves from work at the exact same time. In other words, we have to intentionally congest the highways to justify their construction. Here I was in the back of this hot crowded room, a Tennessee backwoodsman in a suit, and I raised my hand to make a comment. I patiently waited my turn, and then I pounced – "That’s the most idiotic thing that I’ve ever heard!" It was the first of many moments at TRB that I successfully quieted a room.

It’s been twenty years, and we have HOV lanes everywhere and congestion is even worse. Oh, and we still all go to work at the exact same time and leave at the exact same time. I would say that it is to help make the HOV lanes cost effective, but I know that that isn’t the case. It’s about control. Control of bosses over their workers. Almost like slavery. It is counterproductive and harmful to America, just as slavery became counterproductive to the antebellum South. When you treat people like babies, they start to act like them, and how productive are babies?

Throughout most of my adult life, I have gotten crosswise with bosses over the work hours issue. I am a professional who works in an industry with basically zero contact with the outside world. I sit on a computer most of the day, and have for the better part of twenty-two years. What difference does it make if I sit on that computer from eight to five or nine to six or midnight to eight, as long as I get my eight hours in?

One place I worked, the hours were eight to four-thirty. After I would drop my daughters to daycare, I would consistently arrive at eight-fifteen, but I would work until five. So, instead of giving eight hours, I was giving eight hours and fifteen minutes, but being salaried, I only got paid for eight. So, in essence, my employer was getting fifteen minutes a day for free. That did not matter, though. I was reprimanded for not being to work at eight, and was sternly told that work hours were from eight to four-thirty, no exceptions. So, I started coming in at eight, and left exactly at four-thirty. I mean exactly. No matter what I was doing, I would stop and leave at four-thirty. The fact that I would abandon everything to leave at four-thirty raised some eyebrows, but why would I give an employer an extra minute who yelled at me when I gave him fifteen?

A boss I had at another job would schedule meetings for eight in the morning or one in the afternoon, and then harangue employees who were a few minutes late. Anyone who has ever eaten at a restaurant will tell you that sometimes, you aren’t finished in an hour if the service is bad. Recently, we had an office lunch that stretched almost two hours, as it took the better part of an hour just to get our food. Knowing this, it is extremely petty for a boss to schedule a meeting right at the end of lunch hour and then yell at those who were tardy. It’s also not a good way to build morale, either. What really bugged me about this particular boss was that he was the worst offender about showing up on time or taking long lunch hours. Irritated at his tactics, I decided that it was time to expose his hypocrisy. I waited at the door one morning for him to arrive. Coworkers inquired about what I was doing, and I told them that if he was going to hold us accountable, we should hold him accountable. He arrived ten minutes late, and did not appreciate being embarrassed. Of course, he stopped his nonsense after that, too.

It’s not just in the professional world where bosses are obsessed with the time clock. When I worked at the hotel, I was dressed down for calling in to say that I would be late due to the weather. A tornado was passing through, and I didn’t think it was quite prudent to risk my life in order to be there on time. Silly me.

When I worked at the ice cream shop, my hours were two-thirty to close. Close was supposed to be at eleven, but I was lucky to leave by twelve. Despite the fact that I was working well beyond close, which meant that I was working more than eight hours, if I showed up even five minutes late, I didn’t hear the end of it. If my presence had been crucial, that would have been one thing, but it wasn’t. The first thirty minutes were a shift overlap, so there were always extra people on the floor and little for the incoming shift to do.

So why, then, the obsessiveness about time, even when time doesn’t really matter? Simple. Ego. Vanity. Control. Power. Jumping someone about arbitrarily established work hours is a way to show who’s the boss, who is in control. It’s a way of telling your subordinates, "I own you." Of course, the bullying approach to management is stupid and counterproductive, and a big reason why American businesses are tanking. When you have bad managers, one of two things happen, either employees become apathetic or employees leave. Both are anathema to a successful organization.

If you look at the American Civil War, one of the reasons the North won was superior industrial output. The problem with a slave labor system like the antebellum South is that those who are doing the bulk of the labor have no incentive to produce beyond the quality and quantity necessary to prevent the sting of the whip on the flesh. The slaves did not care beyond what the masters cared, and why would they? Why help a bully? With a different labor system, the South could have been much more productive. It wasn’t, and the overall apathy of the workers contributed to its ultimate defeat.

After the Civil War, many of the former slaves, having grown weary and resentful over how they were treated, left the South, leaving if devoid of some of its best laborers. After all, if given a choice, why work for someone who mistreats you if you do not have to?

There are strong parallels between the Civil War South and today’s work organizations. When workers become apathetic because they feel like slaves or when they flee an organization like the freedmen left the South, what is left is an organization that never reaches its potential and is lacking some of its best and brightest talents. The organization can survive for a time, but ultimately it will collapse.

The solution, then, is to treat people like the talented and intelligent individuals that they are. In the short term, fear can be a powerful motivator, but in the long run, all dictatorships fail. Fear does not beget loyalty and trust, only resentment and betrayal.