A challenge

Members of a Taylor County committee this week were grappling with what can be expected of workers outside of normal working hours.

Most of us are pretty clear on the idea of being “at work” and being “at home.”

The distinction is pretty obvious for many jobs. You come into work at the start of your shift and punch in, do your job and punch out at the end of the shift. Then you go home to your families and whatever hobbies or activities you enjoy doing.

Others, like farmers, doctors, lawyers, plumbers and newspaper editors, tend to be a bit more blurry in when work ends and the rest of their life begins.

You take your downtime when you can, knowing that often something out of your control will happen and you may need to throw the plans you made out the window.

The trap that many of us in that second group fall into is always being at work, if not physically then mentally. While this may be a necessity in short-term situations such as being up against a tight deadline and having things proverbially - or in some cases literally - blow up all around us.

This blurriness between being home and being at work has gotten even worse as technology has gotten increasingly intrusive in our lives.

According to the global data and business intelligence firm, Statista, 97% of Americans age 18 to 49 own a smartphone — by comparison only 76% of Americans over 65 years old own a smartphone. What this means is that not only can people from work call us whenever they want, but they can text, email, video chat or use any of the dozens of other methods of online communication to bring our work lives into our home lives.

Some employers and managers take this to the extreme, with the idea that just because they can get ahold of you 24 hours a day, that you should always be available for instantaneous response regardless of what is going on in your life.

This also bleeds over into part-time jobs. While completing his degree, a friend of mine worked at a big box store. He liked the work and for the most part liked the people he worked with. The challenge came with the schedule, his manager told him he expected him to be available for shifts anytime from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. but wouldn’t let him know more than a week in advance of when those shifts would be and would hold it against him if he wasn’t able to pick up a last minute shift. My friend eventually told his manager where he could shove his minimum wage part-time job and considering he had gotten an A in his anatomy class, was very specific about where it could go.

Fortunately, most of us aren’t in that extreme a situation. But still, it raises the question of what sort of barrier should be between work and home.

There is the Gen Z stereotyped extreme that says your employer being short-staffed isn’t your problem and wanting to be paid extra for anything not in their job description, and the workaholic Gen Xers who take literally the “and any other duties that may be assigned” portion of the job description. And we won’t get started with the retirees who complain about no one wanting to work anymore when it takes extra time for their coffee refill at the diner.

Local government isn’t immune from these influences. At this week’s buildings and grounds meeting the question was raised about on-call pay for maintenance technicians. The department made the argument that if people have their home lives restricted by being scheduled to be on-call the workers should get compensated for that time.

Others pointed out, correctly, that being on-call was part of the job and that it could open the door to just about every department asking for on-call pay. Visions of exploding payrolls and busted budgets may be a bit overdone, but it is hard to argue with the fact that resources are finite.

But then again, so is the free time of workers. While it is clear there needs to be a line between work and the rest of your life, it is sometimes less clear where that line should be placed.