Last year, my firm-- an above average place to work-- added a new item to its menu of benefits. This one comes in the form of time. Specifically, it is an optional extra day of paid time off each year. It comes with a catch: the time must be spent performing some act of community service. In a recent recap of the kickoff year, some highlighted participant activities included serving lunch at a food bank, sorting diapers for a legal aid initiative, replanting saplings for a boy scout camp and participating in an event to commemorate the sacrifice of war veterans. One more thing: of course, your supervisor needs to approve your time off. Not an unreasonable condition of course. Oh, and of course the committee that regulates the benefit must approve the organization for service activities. It is noted in the announcement that 65 organizations have been pre-approved. Should an activity already performed not be approved for this benefit, pay would come out of the employee's own leave.
Service to what community? The dozen or so that the firm is situated in, naturally, but also in these unprecedented times of work-at-home, the much larger pool of them that comprise the home communities of the firm's employees. Beyond that, in theory, any community for which service could be provided would almost certainly count. It's inconceivable to me that an employee who happened to be in, say, Iran on firm business who chose to take their community service day to help out at an orphanage in Tehran would not be approved. One could imagine a scenario in which at some point in the future an employee who could be beamed to Mars for a day could get approved for a day terraforming that community. I don't think it's the community that matters as long as it could in the eyes of the community service committee be viewed as benefiting however modestly from the service.
Could an employee get approved for blocking access to an abortion clinic? Probably not at my firm. Would participating in organized actions on behalf of antifa or MOVE be service that could be approved of? How about painting signs to be carried in protest of the planet destroying activities of one of its many environmentally iffy clients? These could all be rejected categorically as political activities as distinct from service to the community. While I would argue that political activities are perhaps among the best service one could give to one's community, as a rule, the firm has made clear that a line exists beyond which the employee whose idea of community service is at odds with the "values of the firm" must surely tread on his own dime. Consequently there's a built-in anodyne flavor to the type of service for which the firm would be willing to spring for 8 hours.
Who benefits from this benefit? We presume employees who take advantage of it get the satisfaction of contributing to activities that benefit "the community."* And for employees who regularly volunteer a portion of their off-hours to acceptable causes anyway, compensating 8 of those hours once a year is perhaps the least the firm could do. What does the firm get? The firm gets the better society it is modeling by offering such a benefit to its employees. Ok, now that we've all had a good laugh, of course it gets materially nothing from the pittance of service that it enables in ostentatious dribs and drabs by doling out the redirected labors of an employee for approved public service one day per year at a time-- and neither does society! What it gets is really all that anyone could be expected to get from it which is the sort of easily conjured false liberal cred for itself that is so common these days among the meritocratic class of obscenely powerful and wealthy people at the helm of successful commercial concerns. It gets to imagine (and in any case to claim) that it has mitigated to a miniscule degree some of the harm it causes in its normal day-to-day year-to-year pursuit of profit. And not unimportantly, it gets to do this, as it does nearly everything, by the sweat of its employees.
My firm should not be singled out for hypocrisy. It's not like it's out on a limb paying human resources professionals handsomely to devise pretexts for marshaling its workforce in benign extracurricular activities that accrue to its own glory and wishful image of itself in a way that can plausibly be packaged as a benefit (without really doing anything that would threaten the existing social structure). Indeed, every firm should be singled out for hypocrisy. But as any subject of a modern first world neoliberal economy is already aware, hypocrisy is one of the many gears that drive the wheels of society. It seems to be the sine qua non of participation in it.
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* Is it too cynical to think that working 8 hours in a food bank once a year "helps the community" by providing cover for the way that the community is structured in favor of those who partner in firms and who own companies that pay those partners for services that contribute to outcomes that create so many hungry people in need of a meal to begin with?
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