I've been burning to post these past couple of weeks, but the secretary who usually transcribes my words (from my state-of-the-art personal voice recording device to the computer) has been on strike, along with the rest of the support staff at the firm. It's been a frustrating situation, for sure. It's long been our practice at the firm to pay secretaries only for the time they spend performing certain tasks for us: answering the phone, making photocopies, sharpening our pencils, cutting our meat. As a matter of philosophy, we've felt it unnecessary to pay them for being idle, when they can be sitting at their desks doing other income-producing work if they like. (One secretary, for instance, earns almost $400 a year selling magazine subscriptions to recruiting candidates she pressures into buying while they wait for her boss to be ready for their interviews.) So, just like attorneys, they're required to clock every minute of their time, and we determine, at the end of every two-week period, how much time they've spent on productive work, and therefore how much they should get paid.
And now they've gotten greedy.
We've always maintained, as a matter of philosophy, that we can only pay for the kind of work that we're absolutely certain provides value, because otherwise there is room left for abuse. The secretaries are insisting that we pay them for the time they spend on the Internet. And since we're not yet able to distinguish productive Internet time from wasteful and unproductive Internet time, we've maintained that time spent on the computer counts as unproductive time and we will not pay for it. Three weeks ago, they decided they cared enough about this issue that they all banded together and struck. In response, we assigned our associates to do double duty, and have dug in our heels. We can afford a long strike more than they can, and, as a matter of philosophy, we refuse to cave in to their ridiculous demands.
After all, who hasn't passed by a secretary and seen her on MySpace? Or playing solitaire? Or online shopping? Why should we pay them for that? They can be using eBay to sell their possessions, or Craigslist to make extra money on the side for what the young people are calling "casual encounters." It's not our duty to double-pay them. Just like we can't double-bill our clients except in certain circumstances.
As more and more of them lose their homes, I feel confident they will come to their senses and return to work. In the meantime, although it's a strain on our associates, they're certainly paid well enough to handle it, and it's not like us partners aren't feeling the strain as well. Many of us have started working part of the day from home, putting our spouses to work as support staff. Of course, many of our spouses are less than entirely competent. So we're definitely feeling the brunt of this. When the Internet is proven to actually add value to the business process, perhaps we will consider paying the secretaries for their time spent using it, if we're feeling generous and can make up for it by trimming their health insurance benefits. But for now, we fight the good fight, and hope for a just and proper outcome.
