Some people keep track of the time they work to the last tenth of an hour. Others round up or down to the nearest hour in some cases, perhaps, more often up than down. It s all on the honor system anyway. We fill out our own labor sheets and total our credits ourselves. It s hard to cheat much when you know your employer isn t a bloated multinational corporation but the friends you sat at dinner with last night.
Visitors sometimes see our labor system as too uptight, too regimented.
But as Robert Frost might have put it, good structures make good neighbors. It s the structure of our labor system that allows us to relax, trusting that the work of the community is being taken care of and we are all doing our share. Perhaps that is what would please B. F. Skinner the most. As a behaviorist and a Utopian thinker, he believed that improved social structures would lead to personal happiness and the communal good. We may not be Utopia yet, but our labor system works well enough to have kept the community together and growing for over thirty years.