@infinity I mean, this is basically what I do

I'm the second-most senior in my lab (despite being the youngest by some years) and I always scold the grad students for cancelling social engagements for work or working while sick/on their personal time

not in a judgemental way but in a "you're not helping yourself in any way that will pay off for you" way.

@amalie @infinity Hmm, I don't think there's a one size fits all model though - some people do work better by spreading some work into weekends and doing shorter days or more dispersed time in the week, so I don't think a hard "preserve the weekend" rule is necessarily healthy either? People should know not to burden colleagues/supervisors outside working time of course though.

@JubalBarca i was just thinkin about that a while ago

Maybe a better model is stop treating labor like a market (because competitive labor equals normalizing overachievement) and just standardize workplace expectations according to the fact that we are overpopulated and underemployed (figure that one out; its like people starving in the streets when you have a surplus of food)

@JubalBarca or in other words, solution: if you have an overworked employee and somebody who is unemployed

Create two happy employees

@infinity I can only speak for academia here, but modelling some research like a normal job doesn't necessarily work in that way. I agree that we'd be better to distribute work more evenly in society overall, but if I was banned from doing research on weekends, half my project was hived off, and I couldn't pick what stuff to give up it would make life more stressful and lose me flexibility in choosing when I do my research (& thus harder to balance my research w/health issues etc).

@infinity Now my individual mental health stuff might be a worthwhile sacrifice if it meant better distribution of work across society of course, but I think it's worth remembering that inflexible rules usually have some drawbacks for some folk. Also, and a separate issue, in many areas simply splitting a job in half creates two salaries that aren't liveable, and not all employers (esp public/smaller/social ones) can afford to to up to two decent salaries.

@infinity Finally (sorry for rambling) I think work-as-market only normalises over achievement in circumstances where people compete for jobs heavily, which tends to happen when they don't have options to refuse them, especially at lower pay scales - I tend to think unconditional income security of some sort is an alternative key to that puzzle, in that it allows workers to refuse bad employers & pushes employers to compete for employees more.

@JubalBarca i feel that the institution of labor subordinance is fundamentally exploitative, voluntary or desperate, because the value of the labor is based on what employers can get away with and not the value of the employee's product

If my company exists exclusively because my coworkers and i have done our job, we are the most valuable employees, not some suit and tie pencil pusher exec

We should be receiving the full value of our labor, purchasing management services from them

@JubalBarca my clients would still have care if my conpany ceased to exist

If my coworkerd and i ceased to exist my company would be out of business

@JubalBarca i make the company two hundred dollars an hour

I see 14 of it

@infinity Sure, I don't disagree with any of that, and I think most companies should run as coops/mutuals as a normal expectation for that reason. I'm nervous of trying to abolish labour subordinance by giving the state more control of the distribution of jobs or heavy standardisation of what jobs look like, though, because I don't think one rule will usually work everywhere for this stuff; I'd rather work on the basis of changing the nature of the institutions/structures people work within.

@lilletale @gannet they're also the working habits students expect from profs

students get very distressed if you can't answer questions as they're working on things, even if that's in the middle of the night

also, student workload CAN be a problem, but also students are not taught healthy work and study habits.