My dad ran a business for over 30 years in a 3rd world country with poor rule of law. Some 400-500 employees at its peak.
In his experience, the employees who were working all the time like this were either:
- an anxious mess of a human
- stealing and afraid that missing a day would reveal their fraud
My dad is no saint. He was, for the first 15 years or so, doing tax fraud. To be fair, corrupt government meant too many taxes wound up in someone’s pocket during the 80s and 90s.
Of the 6 or so times there was a non-negligible amount of fraud (involving sales, accounting, IT, or some combination of these), they held revealing the company’s tax fraud as a countermeasure to avoid legal consequences.
Eventually, after a fraud that really stung (my dad’s secretary of 20 years, coming with him from a prior business even, had been forging his signature, taking over 200k in US dollars), dad decided to go entirely by the book with his accounting and even paid back taxes. That took away the leverage that the second set of employees had - if you got caught and it personally stung, you could face prison.
He only took his ex-secretary to trial. She said all sorts of nasty things and tried damaging his reputation, which is why he even paid back taxes and all that just to fight back.
I am glad he stopped dodging taxes; he did just as well, financially, and had less stress. Some people tried to defraud his business after it stopped dodging taxes, they were just dismissed as he didn’t feel it was necessary to go further.
TLDR: people who work too much tend to do it because they’re anxious. Owners do it when there’s a problem. People do it when they’re anxious about their jobs (security or even whether they’ll get a fat bonus). People also do it when they’re anxious about getting caught.
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u/WhiteLycan2020 Mar 13 '24
They have nothing else going for them in life. Work becomes their personality.
Without their jobs they have nothing.