Irreal

I haven’t written about Matt D’Avella for a while but he has a new video that fits into one of Irreal’s recurring themes: our working environment. The video is about the death of the 40 hour work week. For as long as most people alive can remember, there has always been a 40 hour work week. It seems like the law of gravity. Just something that always was and always will be. But the key phrase is “most people”. The 40 hour work week was established in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standard Act. If you’re in your 20s, that seems indistinguishable from the age of Plato but most of us almost certainly know someone—parents or grandparents, say—who were alive then. It really wasn’t that long ago.

It was a big thing when it was introduced. It ended the terrible working conditions that were prevalent at the time and ushered in the notion that people could have a life outside of their job. But like many useful innovations, its time has passed. The 40 hour work week was adopted and adapted for factory workers. Most of us no longer work in that environment but the majority of us still suffer under its yoke.

D’Avella makes the case that the 40 hour work week no longer makes sense. It isn’t rational even from the employer’s point of view. Productivity declines well before the 40 hour limit is reached. A much better criterion is “just get the job done.” We even have a term for it: ROWE.

A lot of this will be fixed by the remote work movement. When you don’t have to be in an office for a specific amount of time but just need to get the job done, the 40 hour work week will fade away on its own.

Article 16 of the GDPR says, among other things, that

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.

A normal person would take that to mean you have the right to have substantive errors in your records corrected. Things like age, arrest record, employment record and so on. Errors that can cause actual harm if not corrected. A Brussels court has ruled that it also means that European Union citizens also have the right to have their name represented correctly.

This is why everyone hates lawyers. The issue is that many names have diacritical marks—Erdős or Ceaușescu for example—and older computer systems are unable to represent them. This is a particular issue in the banking industry that, sadly, is often still running their businesses on last-century IBM mainframes that use the EBCDIC character encoding system.

It’s hard to imagine today but bytes weren’t always 8 bits, and ASCII, let alone UTF-8, wasn’t always the way characters were encoded. EBCDIC was IBM’s system and as the 800 pound gorilla they saw to it that EBCDIC’s use was widespread. The problem is that its standard code page had no diacritical marks so someone named, say, José Ramírez is going to have his name encoded as “Jose Ramirez”.

Someone with way too much time on his hands decided that was intolerable and sued under Article 16. Now the Court of Appeals of Brussels has agreed and demanded that the bank fix things. It’s hard to imagine a quick fix for this and it’s even harder to see how the fix is not going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course lawyers don’t know or care about any of this. They just want it fixed. Now. That’s why we all hate them.

If I were the bank, I’d suggest that this particular customer find another bank but the lawyers probably won’t like that solution either. Yes, yes. I know I’m intolerant. I know I’m not a European. I know my name doesn’t have a diacritical—but it’s misspelled so often it might as well have. But, you know, a little common sense would be appropriate here. No one—no one—is going to be confused when they see “Jose Ramirez” instead of “José Ramírez” but the lawyers among us still think it’s a critical issue. This is the very apotheosis of a first world problem.

UPDATE [2021-10-29 Fri 14:38]
Added verbiage to make it clear that José Ramírez is a made up example.