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I take this type of mindset often. It's something I'm trying to change.

The better mindset, in my opinion, is that you can choose to do something nice for others for no reason other than to help someone else out.

The point I was making is that someone else's job isn't being nice to them, because you aren't doing something nice FOR THEM you are instead doing something nice FOR THEIR EMPLOYER as the amount of money they are paid or the load of tasks they are being given will adjust behind the scenes. It isn't intuitive, but once pointed out I hope it becomes obvious? If you do enough of their job for them, they get fired :(. If you cause then enough work, maybe you can get them a raise. (And yes: capitalism sucks like this if this makes you feel bad somehow, but you are moving in the wrong direction if you are trying to work on it: you should strive to have solidarity with workers!)

>you should strive to have solidarity with workers

Kind of weird to make this point at the end, right after you apparently say you intentionally make the cleaning jobs harder. As a cleaner if people make more of a mess of things, you'll just get overwhelmed with too much work and then things will look messy and you'll get fired. Cleaners usually don't get raises, and especially not raises for doing more work. You maybe get token raises when you threaten to leave due to low pay and the managers can't find a replacement straight away.

Nobody ever saw a clean office and came to the conclusion, "Our cleaning staff must be lazing about because someone else is cleaning for them, we should fire them all!"

Again, where did this meme about 'doing someone elses job'? The point made was, be respectful of them when they're doing their job, by cooperating and not winging about it.

This has become a tortuous argument which on the surface seems to be for justifying being disrespectful or lazy.

I see your point. There's no reason to hire a janitor if there's nothing to clean. I don't think there's a simple answer.

I don't know about other people but I go through my life trying to make things easier for other people, or failing that at least not make things harder, in the hope that someone else will do the same for me.

The people at a company are all hired to fill specific positions and accomplish specific tasks. The entire goal of working for a living isn't kind to begin with. Here: let's say you literally donated your time every night to do the janitor's job entirely, so they didn't have to do anything, as you love cleaning anyway and it makes you feel really happy to see them not having to do all of this work... now the janitor is going to be fired, because the janitor isn't adding value to the company anymore. It is frustrating to be sure, but if you want to actually show solidarity with workers in a capitalist system it involves realizing that the incentives are already screwed up.

Yeah that's fair enough I suppose.

I guess it's just another way in which capitalism abstracts what is really a relationship between people into a relationship between bits of capital.

I bet you don't clear your table at McDonalds either :p

I actually do, but the reasoning isn't because I am deluding myself into thinking I am being kind to the employees (it is because I am trying to be kind to the customers, by making the food cheaper). I realize you want to be nice to other people, but you should realize you are doing it wrong (or at least doing it to a different set of people than you intended)... as noted, I treat the janitors with respect and don't ignore them and even do things they ask me to do as I tend to know who they are in a way most people don't (partly as I tend to be the only person still hanging around in the middle of the night, but also because I don't have any issue talking to them as I don't do the bad thing the article is complaining about). I have even hired janitors for my spaces and I make sure to pay them well and treat them with respect. You aren't being kind to people when you pick up their job function... you just aren't.

Following the logic here and above, do you make sure to create very large and annoying to clean messes in office spaces / spaces were janitors will clean so that, by the nature of the work, pushes their employer to increase the pay for the job?

No, because 1) in cases where it is a building I am working in/for such a thing is likely to have direct and potentially significant negative blowback on me for increasing the company's costs; 2) in other places many people (I am guessing including yourself) are sufficiently privileged to not see the "us vs. the overlords" dynamic and so look at people who increase these sorts of costs with contempt; and 3) as noted elsewhere in this thread, helping the janitors isn't the only goal: keeping costs low for society IS valuable and so it can be perfectly rational to avoid creating messes you know someone else will have to clean in order to lower the costs on society to clean them... but only if you realize you are not doing this to be nice to the janitors.

Like, the issue I am having with this thread is that a ton of people who seem to have some concept of what the ethical thing to do here is--and I don't even necessarily disagree with the concluding actions!--but I don't think they actually have the perspective to realize that the reasons why those actions might or might not be ethical are completely different from what one might intuitively expect due to the incentive structure of working for a company under capitalism. And so then you are all taking this idea of that ethical conclusion and trying to make me feel shitty for how I treat the janitors somehow when the janitors are categorically not the people you are helping with your ethical outcomes :/. Yes: the result of this thought process applied en masse would be horribly inefficient and seemingly costly for a ton of people, but the janitors would call you a hero as they are paid by the hour.

My context: while I myself am yet another privileged software developer, I am also a strongly-left-leaning elected government official who often has deep heart to hearts with friends who are union organizers... people who fight daily on behalf of people in these situations, and it is when I channel them--not some heartless asshole who refuses to even look at janitors--that I feel most strongly about these issues. The idea that you are doing someone a favor by going out of your way to not help them in their personal life but to do part of their job is just such a strange thought process to me... I have houseless people in the area CONSTANTLY asking for work, and if there were tasks that needed to get done maybe we could hire them to the beautification program we're in charge of (which explicitly works with houseless employees); so sure: if you care about them, you might literally litter our streets with trash ;P.

The reason to maybe not cause messes (and I don't, because while I am not an asshole to the janitors I am not optimizing for them over everyone else) is not to be kind to these people in the way the person I replied to seems to think: it is because it is an inefficiency--a cost to the system as a whole--and that cost to the system will be born by someone else, whether it be tracked directly back to you or indirectly cause increased costs for food or other staples. The fewer people who work at supermarkets or restaurants, the cheaper food will be--your taxes are paying for our beautification program, so your taxes might be lower if there is less work to be done--but this comes at a disproportionate cost to the people who relied on those jobs, so don't think you are doing them the favor... if you were truly wanting to do them a favor, you would, in fact, do this awkward thing of trying to cause messes.

What I don't do, though: go out of my way to clean up messes caused by other people when I know someone else has a job to clean them. Example: I now no longer clean streets myself if I walk past a pile of trash... I pull out an app on my phone and take a photo of the trash so the aforementioned local beautification program sends a person out who is excited to be paid money and the program can show that it is being successful to the community and thereby people will be OK with the taxes being paid for it. The person who was sent out to pick up the trash gets to have the dignity of a job instead of me handing them money (which I also do!!! but they really hate taking the money from me like that, and it frankly isn't scalable or fairly allocated anyway). Meanwhile, I spend my time working on software or whatever I do which earns more money than this person was paid to pick up the trash in the same amount of time, which helps bring money into the area to pay for the local taxes. This is almost entirely a win/win/win.

Trying to guess what the lesson is here. Don't lift a finger to cooperate with coworkers, because it's "not my job"?

We're talking simple respect. The strawman of 'pick up their job function' appeared out of thin air.

It's like 10 seconds of your time.

It takes even less time if they were already planning on walking from the trashcan to a central location anyway.

Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it. These are people who are often looking for hours and picking up multiple jobs and you seriously think you are helping them by doing literally any of their job for them? (FWIW, I also haven't ever experienced a janitor asking me to do this kind of stuff for them and I am actually the only person at the various buildings I work at who has bothered to talk to the janitors, because I actually try to treat them like humans who have needs.)

> Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it.

Sounds to me like a very inefficient way of accomplishing tasks. Marginal cost of everyone doing their own simple task is less than the cost of employing a janitor. Furthering the logic, we should litter the place for more janitors to get employed.

I agree! But the person at the top of this thread wanted to help the janitor, and that's not what they are doing: they are, at best, helping the people who pay for the janitor, whether you want to model that as the company or the customers of the company. And that's a reasonable (or even "noble") thing to optimize for (though if you work at the company and are being paid to do something else with your time or mental effort you aren't helping the company either as you are just reassigning peoples' roles that were carefully chosen), but it simply isn't the same thing as helping the janitor, which is what everyone seems to think they are doing. You 100% shouldn't be an asshole to the janitor: they are people like you and you shouldn't avert your eyes or ignore their presence as if they are a pariah... but I think if you talk to them for a while you will realize more of them than you seem to think understand how this works as they are often a unionized position and their organizers are making sure everyone knows to keep work up and not tolerate their job being redistributed to others.