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from the better-living-through-chemistry dept.
The NYT reports that drugs like Adderall were once only prescribed to help children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work but then college students found those drugs could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace? According to Anjan Chatterjee, the use of neurotechnologies to enhance healthy people’s brain function could easily become widespread. "If anything, we worship workplace productivity by any means. Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world. Why not add drugs to energize, focus and limit that annoying waste of time — sleep?" Julian Savulescu says that what defines human beings is their extraordinary cognitive power and their ability to enhance that power through reading, writing, computing and now smart drugs. "Eighty-five percent of Americans use caffeine. Nicotine and sugar are also cognitive enhancers," says Savulescu.
But cognitive neurologist Martha Farah, says that regular use on the job is an invitation to dependence. "I also worry about the effect of drug-fueled productivity on people other than the users," says Farah. "It is not hard to imagine a supervisor telling employees that this is the standard they should aspire to in their work, however they manage to do it (hint, hint). The eventual result will be a ratcheting up of “normal” productivity, where everyone uses (and the early adopters’ advantage is only fleeting)."
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday April 23 2015, @02:14AM
In exchange for making less, if they're working for a larger company, there is less risk of the company going out of business and the larger the business, the better negotiating power they have for things like retirement plans (401k) and health insurance. Also, the larger the company, the more likely they can negotiate things like discounts on goods or services from other large companies. The pay cut in direct dollars make be made up for in "benefits."
A larger company has a greater proportion of parasites, people who do not actually perform the revenue producing work, siphoning pay away from those actually doing the revenue producing work. Each level of management is money out of the front line workers pockets. A larger company may be able to undercut and get 10 contracts that may have gone to as many as 10 separate smaller companies, but the pay for each contract is split among more people, with a much smaller share for the revenue producing workers. Cost cutting measures ensure that any health insurance offered is crap (workers can probably do much better on the exchanges, assuming the ACA survives) and good luck finding any such company that offers a retirement plan.