Bret Devereaux

An idea I hold completely seriously is that the right to reasonable entertainment during working hours should be a labor issue and would meaningfully improve quality of life for employees in a huge range of job types

Any cashier or employee who sits behind a counter for hours at a time should have the right to 1) sit 2) read a book. Anybody who does relatively menial or on-call work that involves sitting at a computer should be able to stream or listen to music/podcasts. Etc etc

Jobs where you perfectly well *could* read, or watch TV, or whatever else, and still accomplish your work - but are forbidden from doing so - are asking you to sacrifice potentially years of your valuable time to management's empty ideas about professionalism or productivity.

My own admittedly limited experience is that most jobs where there is actual policy against this sort of thing are customer-facing. They want to make you stand and not listen to music for the 'benefit' of the customer, who wants to feel like a medieval lord attended by servants.

That is obviously a hot-garbage way to view your fellow citizens providing you with valuable services you need or want. But it's connected to this issue: companies often want to sell anti-egalitarianism. We ought to shame them for doing so, it's contrary to the American creed.

Right - this should be normalized as a labor right customers have no reason to feel annoyed about. This would form a natural part of a more general reorientation away from assuming that the human subject is always a customer, never a worker