Time-strapped workers remain vulnerable to clients who exploit time as leverage.

Evidence

Clients tend to experience their needs as individual problems and their demands as individual expressions of expectations and grievances. They often expect treatment appropriate to them as individuals, and are in large measure encouraged in this expectation by public institutions and society in general. On the other hand, street-level bureaucrats experience client problems as calls for categories of action. Individual client demands are perceived as components of aggregates. Expectations of proper treatment are framed in terms of satisfactory solutions for the optimal processing of the totality of the work rather than in terms of the best solution for individual cases. Clients seek services and benefits; street-level bureaucrats seek control over the process of providing them. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 459 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

My first inkling of such a duality hit me one evening when Mum complained to Dad that, at the fertiliser factory where she worked as a chemist, she got paid for her time but never for her enthusiasm. ‘My wage is crap because my time is cheap,’ she said. ‘My passion to get the right results the bosses get for free!’ — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 65 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Waiting costs fall on clients, not workers, to protect worker efficiency; Wages compensate time but not enthusiasm workers contribute freely — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 65; Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459

Related

• Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing (similarity 0.82)
• Frontline workers feel resource scarcity as a lived tension between client care and efficiency (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing #qualifies (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 459
• Wages compensate time but not enthusiasm workers contribute freely #expands (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 65