HIGHLAND, UT | 6 August 2008 | One hundred-fifty years ago, nearly everyone worked from home. Not much of a surprise; it was an agrarian society. People worked in their own fields or they had shops (such as a blacksmith or mercantiler) attached to their homes. Following decades found more people move their workplaces into town as the industrial revolution took hold. Over the past fifty to eighty years hardly anyone has worked at home, preferring to take a job rather than be self-employed at a home-based operation. But today with the high cost of fuel and other influences, more and more people are opting to work at home.

Today’s work-at-home environment poses new challenges that yesteryear’s work-at-homers perhaps didn’t have to deal with. Sue Shellenbarger, of the Wall Street Journal, reports that employers fear workers will take advantage of the lack of personal supervision and squander valuable time. The solution? Employing monitoring devices in employees’ computers to “look over their shoulders.” Naturally, questions of “Big Brother” arise both from employees and from critics of the process. So, is an employer justified in placing such monitoring devices? Or should the work-at-home employee have the right to work as he sees fit without the close electronic supervision? Several principles are at play in this this interaction.

Most recognize almost immediately in this story that force destroys freedom and that perhaps by using the monitoring devices employers are using force over their employees and therefore destroying their freedom. But other principles come into play that reveal a much deeper issue involved in the interaction between employer and employee: Productivity is the standard, and agency implies stewardship.

Key Points

• Employers own the businesses people work in.
• They own the equipment, the buildings, the hardware and the software associated with the business.
• They own the projects pertaining to the profitability of the business.
• They own the labor their employees have agreed to sell them.
• Owners recognize that labor rightly ordered (or as Napoleon Hill puts it, organized effort) is required to be profitable.
• Therefore, they have the right to monitor the productivity and effectiveness of the labor they have purchased from employees.
• To be honest, employees should be the most productive they can be during the times they sold their labor to employers.
• Employees often squawk about the monitoring of labor from their employers. They claim the employers take away their agency in this process.
• The best way to recognize where agency rightly exists is to answer the question: Who has stewardship in the matter? Regarding Employer/Employee exchanges agency and stewardship changes hands at different times.
  • Prior to the agreement, both parties have stewardship over their own self-interest—their personal and family welfare, business concerns, etc.
  • In the process of coming to an agreement both parties essentially say, “I see what you are wanting to do. My self-interest aligns with yours in ____ area, and I want to create value for you by ____.” The employee agrees to sell a portion of his life (time and labor) to the employer in order to accomplish both sets of self-interests. Or in other words, the employee sells a portion of his agency to the employer.
  • After the contract has been signed, the employee no longer has stewardship or agency over that portion of his life (time and labor). He must therefore fulfill his obligations in the contract by laboring in the manner and at the time his employer and he agreed upon.
  • The employer still carries the ultimate stewardship of the business, and has the right to monitor the employee’s productivity while on the job.
• Often employers like to share the responsibility of stewardship with their employees. Along with that responsibility, when properly executed by the boss, comes added agency for the employee. The employee then is able to make a few decisions regarding his time and labor.

Conclusion

Ms. Shellenbarger’s story dealt mostly with employers monitoring employees. Based upon the items listed above, this process appears perfectly right. However, often the comment was made that employers wish to monitor free-lance and contract workers at home as well. These types of individuals clearly fit into a more free category. While they have sold their time and labor to others, they generally do not sell those items in the same way an employee does. They have usually preserved for themselves a little of the agency and stewardship that the employee gives up. It would therefore be against principle for the employer to monitor the productivity of these people.  

The challenges between employer and employee have been around for generations. The boss wants the utmost productivity from his workers. The worker wants mostly to be left alone while working and to have the freedom to work as, how and when he chooses. A FreeCapitalist society—one in which both employer and employee choose voluntarily to live according to ancient principles of prosperity—can peacefully and easily solve these challenges by exploring the myriad solutions available to those whose brains are awake and switched to on.

Action Items

1. Review your own situation for creating value in the world, whether it be business owner, self-employed, freelance, contract worker, or employee.
2. Study out the level of agency and stewardship you possess by reviewing the agreements you have made for the exchange.
3. Resolve to stick to those agreements. If you do not like your agreement, stick with it until the opportunity presents itself to alter or abolish that agreement in advantage of a new one.
4. If you are the boss of work-at-home employees and you suspect that you are not receiving the level of productivity you desire or think is reasonable, discuss alternatives with your employees. Perhaps some of the following questions could be of help.
   1. What is the nature of the agreement you have with your employee?
   2. How much agency and stewardship have you afforded to your employee?
   3. Have you allowed the amount of agency and stewardship you intended?
   4. Is the amount of agency and stewardship facilitating or restricting the amount of productivity you desire?
   5. If no on #4, how can you make arrangements—including monitoring, or changing the employment status to freelancers or contract workers, etc.—with your employee to incite higher productivity?
5. If you are the employee in a similar situation, and you are dissatisfied with the current arrangements, it is also healthy for you to explore the answers to the above questions. If they are not to your liking, consider some of the following.
   1. Go into business for yourself.
   2. Seek to become a freelancer where you have control over your time and labor and whom you sell them to. Perhaps selling time and labor to several employers on a piece-rate method would be better than selling your productive time to just one employer.
   3. Become a contract worker, which carries a little more agency than an employee but not as much as a freelancer or a self-employed individual.

MRFC Principles:  (3, 7, 9, 10, 13) 

Sources

Sue Shellenbarger, Work at Home? Your Employer May Be Watching, Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2008.