Fag breaks cost £8.4bn a year says fake charity.
They really are scraping the barrel here. People need to take a break from work. We are not machines and cannot be expected to work continuously for the whole working day without taking a break. There are plenty of periods in the working day where things are slack and people take five. Usually they make a tea or coffee – they might just let up to chat to their colleagues. And, some, quelle horreur go outside and have a cigarette. This, then, according to the anti-smoking zealots is costing industry £8.4bn. And in so doing, cheerfully ignore the coffee and tea breaks taken by the non-smoking fraternity along with the unpaid overtime that many employees do. No, all that is factored in on their back-of-a-fag-packet calculations is the smoking break.
Y’know even the Guardianista can smell bullshit on this one and they aren’t slow in saying so below the line. This is classic junk science, although I hesitate to use the term science as there is none involved – merely prejudice and scaremongering.
Some people like to smoke. Get over it.
H/T Chris Snowdon.
Being a non-smoker and having worked with colleagues who smoked, I would suggest that smokers do indeed put in less work than non-smokers due to smoke breaks. This problem has, of course, been made worse by restrictions on when and where people can smoke. How anyone can claim to have calculated how much this minor act of skiving actually costs though, is beyond my meagre intelligence.
There are also people who sit at their desk all day, perhaps even putting in more supposed effort than the majority, but actually achieve less in overall productivity. Some of the worst “tut-tutter” types I have come across have done it out of insecurity as a consequence of their lack of skill. A person who puts in lots of hours, rushes jobs out one after another, takes few breaks and keeps a low profile is all well and good – but if all this “work” is badly done and riddled with errors, necessitating somebody else correcting or even re-doing it, their productivity may even be negative.
When both employers and employees start to realise that it’s not about time served but rather about getting the job done effectively and economically without the need for excessive control, the world will be a better place. Productivity is not measured in hours (and often can’t be numerically measured at all).
Surely the question is whether or not the smokers complete the work allocated to them? I find it difficult to imagine a situation where smokers just do the bits of work which they want to do and leave the rest to non smokers. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
In my thirty years working in a bank, breaks were organised – ten minutes half way through the morning, and hour at lunch and ten minutes in the afternoon. It was the same for everyone. Other departments and offices work in different ways, but, inevitably, a member of staff had X amount of work to complete and did so.
I dare say that there are jobs which lend themselves to skiving, in which case it is a problem for management to sort out.
Do people achieve their objectives? if so, then there is no lost productivity. If they do not, then that is a matter for managers to sort. Either way, this report is gold plated bollocks with a filigree finish.
Isn’t it a pretty well-known fact that people who take regular breaks work more effectively during the time they are at their desk (or drawing-board, or computer, or machinery, or whatever) than people who don’t? Isn’t that why the morning coffee-break and the afternoon tea-break, in addition to the break for lunch, gradually became customary? Not because workshy employees demanded it, but because employers who allowed their staff these breaks got better productivity figures than those who didn’t. Wasn’t the absence of regular breaks cited as one of the possible reasons why productivity across the whole of Denmark went down by a whacking 30% immediately following the imposition of a country-wide workplace smoking ban? (Bearing in mind that a break doesn’t count as a break if it’s dictated to you what you can or can’t do in it – imagine if someone was told that they couldn’t read their newspaper in their break, but they were allowed to do the crossword. Or they couldn’t drink tea or coffee, but they could have a drink of water. It wouldn’t be a break would it?)
It’s a dying tradition, now, and employers these days do tend to expect the appearance of nose-to-the-grindstone-type activity right throughout the day, but that’s because most managers these days can’t see further than the end of their noses and it would seem incomprehensible to them that someone who spends slightly less time at their desk might be more productive than someone who spends more, and they have neither the skill nor the inclination to ascertain why.
It’s not just today, Jax. When I was about 21, I worked for a temp agency in London, and they gave me a three week stint as a warehouseman for a company. The warehousing system they had was a mess, and I, being inherently lazy, reorganised the system so it worked much better and I had to do much less work. The company was much impressed with the new improved system (it didn’t need an Einstein, it was just stuck in the Victorian age), and offered me a full time (recently vacated) position in charge of what they grandly called ‘Statistical Analysis’. It was just basically correlating sales figures etc. Once again, the system was a shambles which I reorganised to my advantage, giving all the boring, repetitive stuff to my nice-but-dim assistant and doing the more interesting stuff myself. After a few months, I’d got it all up to date, and the directors were getting current figures for the first time in living memory (they had always been 6 months late before). I also found I could keep on top of everything by turning up just three days a week! 🙂 Ha! That didn’t last long. I was expected to be there five days a week, I was told. No matter that the job was being done better than ever, the mindset was five days a week or nothing.
So I sabotaged the system I’d set up and left.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“So I sabotaged the system I’d set up and left.”
Very naughty, but it must have been so satisfying.
Having been a victim of a similar “must be in the office” mindset, but having been unable to sabotage anything except by my absence, I applaud your actions.
Surely the cigarette breaks taken by employees is a matter for their employers? If they are managed by objectives then it really should not matter. Just as the Tax Evaders Alliance about how much time public sector employees go online is the same sort of pathetic points scoring. Manage people by objectives and the “problem” goes away.
The Taxpayer’s Alliance has nothing whatsoever to do with tax evasion as you are well aware. What they do is highlight the state’s abuse and waste of the money it extorts from us as well as campaigning – rightly – for lower taxes. I applaud their efforts.
However, the rest of your point is spot on.
The Tax Evaders Alliance is a far right groupiscle ideologically committed to a “smaller state”. Except of course when the state invades our privacy in the name of “national security”. Then it has sweet FA to say about it.
They are not the Tax Evaders’ Alliance. That you persist in repeating this bare-faced lie smacks of either wilful ignorance or mendacity. A smaller state that does not piss millions of our pounds away on vanity spending is a good thing, not a bad one and has nothing whatsoever to do with tax evasion, no matter how you and the progressive left might try to peddle the myth. It is untrue – it always was untrue and will continue to be untrue. It is a lie. Nor, for that matter, are they “far right” – another canard used by the progressives to try and demonise those who dare to dissent from their orthodoxy. Their aims are perfectly reasonable and as a taxpayer, I am pleased that someone is seeking to hold the state to account for the money it takes from me and gives to the various fake charities, bloated and unnecessary government departments and quangos.
Ah, yes, that pathetic little rhetorical trick. It doesn’t work here because I can see it for the cheap little canard that it is. The TPA was set up to discuss tax. I do not expect them to comment on any other issues and nor does anyone else with a modicum of intellect.