A) If it happens that you are sick one day, you can still (with pain) carry out an acceptable amount of work for that day.
B) You can work in a decent way, in the long run, while being sick most of the time.
Are you saying that (B) is true, or just (A)? I fully concede (A) - I also did it. But (A) does not imply (B). I work as a PhD student (which in Europe is a job: you do not have to attend lessons, but you have to do research), and I am sure that (B) is false for me.
Maybe there are jobs for which (A) implies (B), but my intuition is that they are not the majority.
Business (and life) favours completion over perfection. You might have a feel for whether you are underperforming at work but the question is whether others can see that (and especially whether they can quantify it).
So you are saying that you can still pretend to do a good work if many people do a work just a bat as yours. This is different from saying that your work is decent.
In the town I grew up in, it is common for people to do not work at all (not because they are sick, but because they do not care). They “can” do it in the sense that they do it and they face no consequences—but we all pay the price, for our public services are terrible to nonexistent.
People are sick all the time. A third of the population is on antidepressants or other psych meds, and script drug addiction is massive. Work still gets done.
Do you think that the performance of a workforce on antidepressants would be the same as the performance of a drunk workforce?
In regards to you and B: If you haven’t worked at breaking point then you don’t know what you’re capable of.
I do not know, but neither do you. I mantain that my output would be terrible (I would not be fired, because of my contract, but it still would be terrible).
I’m willing to bet your town’s average wages are terrible in comparison to what you get doing nothing.
No, it is not that the wages are low, it is that they can not be fired (both for legal and for cultural reasons). So they do not risk to lose their wage by not working.
To clarify your position, are you saying that if more people were sick/intoxicated then the quality of their work would deteriorate, but this does not really matter because there is sufficient slack in the system and nothing really bad would happen?
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Maybe I am making confusion between two claims:
A) If it happens that you are sick one day, you can still (with pain) carry out an acceptable amount of work for that day.
B) You can work in a decent way, in the long run, while being sick most of the time.
Are you saying that (B) is true, or just (A)? I fully concede (A) - I also did it. But (A) does not imply (B). I work as a PhD student (which in Europe is a job: you do not have to attend lessons, but you have to do research), and I am sure that (B) is false for me.
Maybe there are jobs for which (A) implies (B), but my intuition is that they are not the majority.
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So you are saying that you can still pretend to do a good work if many people do a work just a bat as yours. This is different from saying that your work is decent.
In the town I grew up in, it is common for people to do not work at all (not because they are sick, but because they do not care). They “can” do it in the sense that they do it and they face no consequences—but we all pay the price, for our public services are terrible to nonexistent.
Do you think that the performance of a workforce on antidepressants would be the same as the performance of a drunk workforce?
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No, it is not that the wages are low, it is that they can not be fired (both for legal and for cultural reasons). So they do not risk to lose their wage by not working.
To clarify your position, are you saying that if more people were sick/intoxicated then the quality of their work would deteriorate, but this does not really matter because there is sufficient slack in the system and nothing really bad would happen?
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I do not think this is true. I think that it is important that we clarify this point before continuing.
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