Death to “Time to Lean, Time to Clean”

Putting the nail in the coffin for wage workers’ most hated phrase

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The first time I heard the phrase, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” was at my very first coffee job. I worked at a wildly busy shop in Times Square, and between 8-10 a.m., we’d get flooded, pouring hundreds of drinks for business people rushing to work. Sometimes it felt like I’d forget to breathe for two hours. 

After the rush, we’d usually get a moment to collect ourselves, but once the cafe was slow, that familiar refrain would run through my brain. “What else could I be doing?” I remember asking myself. I was making $9 an hour in New York City (and a laughable $40 a week in tips, or just about a dollar an hour), and yet I had already internalized the idea that my wages didn’t come from completing a specified task, but rather that, in exchange for money, my employer owned my time. 

You’ve likely heard this phrase if you’ve ever worked in any task-oriented or hourly wage position. The thinking behind “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” is that workers should always be looking for things to do—even if nothing presents itself as an obvious task, there’s always something that can be cleaned. But this phrase only seems to apply to the lowest-paid jobs: You wouldn’t tell an office worker or a CEO to pick up a mop if they had downtime. 

The less we pay people, the more comfortable we feel dictating their time and making workplace conditions more ambiguous. Most waged workers are not paid based on tasks completed. Instead, their time becomes wholly the property of their employer, who is free—even encouraged—to keep them working continuously, and finding minuscule jobs to fill their time. 

An Unequal Relationship To Time

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with Jenny Odell, author of “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” and “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” (if you’re a paying subscriber, you might remember I mentioned this interview a few weeks ago). While discussing the latter book, she talks about the “time to lean, time to clean” logic: 

I’m thinking about the part of Emily Guendelsberger’s book where she talks about the phrase “time to lean, time to clean.” She was describing working at an ice-cream parlor and had a very different idea of what was owed than her boss did. “Time to lean, time to clean” is what a boss would say. It’s like, if you’re physically present, you should be creating work for yourself. That’s versus someone in her position who’s thinking, I signed up to do the tasks that need to be done in any particular moment. That’s a lot more finite than “time to lean, time to clean,” which is like, if you’re here, you must be performing the image of work at all times, including making up nonsensical tasks. There’s a distinction between signing up to do a job and signing up to have every second micromanaged.

At their most fundamental level, jobs are an exchange of labor for money. Of course, that relationship isn’t always clearly demarcated: Most jobs aren’t quantified by the exact number of tasks done, nor are employees typically paid per report or accomplishment checked off a list. Generally, we agree to do a select quantity of tasks for a set amount of money. But in many low-wage jobs, that relationship is warped. If what you will be paid for is measured in time, it becomes the directive of those in charge to extract as much of your labor as possible in a given amount of time. 

After reading Odell’s interview, I checked out Guendelsberger’s book, “On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.” In the book, Guendelsberger picks up a few different low-wage jobs, and in every position, she experiences a boss or supervisor who implies that an employee taking a breather isn’t just inefficient but amounts to wage theft. When you are not working, you are stealing from your boss. She details this sentiment during her orientation in an Amazon warehouse:

“Now, they have asked me to talk about TOT – Time Off Task,” he continues. “Say they’re paying you to listen to me, but instead of that you’re on your phone. Are you on task or off task?” Off task, we mumble. 

“Or you’re talking to your closest neighbor. Are you on task or are you off task?” Off task. Miguel smiles encouragingly. “I’m going to put it this way so you can understand how it should be fair on both ends,” he tells us. 

Say you worked a full forty-hour week, but Amazon only paid you for thirty. Wouldn’t they be stealing from you? Wouldn’t you be mad? Yes! We chorus. 

So then doesn’t Jeff Bezos have a right to be mad if you’re clocked in for forty hours but only actually working for thirty? Aren’t you stealing from him? Yes, we agree, with less enthusiasm. 

Where to start with this passage? Do we begin with the implication that Bezos himself would be personally offended by a worker taking a break? (That said, given the fit that Howard Schultz threw after a senator called him a “billionaire,” during his Congressional testimony, this might not be a reach.) Do we consider how Amazon employees are monitored—which Guendelsberger details in her book—when doing necessary things like asking supervisors questions or even going to the bathroom?

Perhaps we should begin with the fact that wage theft happens all the time—and it’s much more likely that our employer is stealing from us than the other way around. As Mindy Isser reports for In These Times, “According to the Economic Policy Institute, wage theft costs US workers as much as $50 billion per year — a number far higher than all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined. While we’re taught to be vigilant and lock our homes and cars to prevent robberies, most workers are not trained on how to identify wage theft and claw back stolen wages.” Furthermore, stealing from an employer can result in myriad consequences, including facing charges and potentially serving time in prison for theft or larceny. But when an employer steals from you, they typically face few, if any, repercussions. 

Driving these forces is the fundamental belief we’ve internalized in the U.S. about the relationship between work and time. Work is not simply about accomplishing tasks or getting things done—you belong to your employer for eight, 10, or however many hours you’re present at your job. 

McEfficiency

Guendelsberger mentions the phrase “time to lean, time to clean” on the very first page of her book. “I loathed this cheery little rhyme, coined by McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and favored by passive-aggressive managers everywhere. It felt like I was being called lazy for taking five minutes of rest after a solid four hours in the weeds, which I found infuriating.” 

“Time to lean, time to clean” logic seems antithetical to the productivity gospel our society uses to justify the success of high earners: We’re taught that working hard will amount to more success and more money, and those earning more are working harder than we are. But in most hourly jobs, working harder does not equate to more money for employees or more personal success. You might get a fraction more in tipped positions if you work on a hectic day, but for many hourly workers in non-tipped positions, a busy shift will never bring in more earnings for you, even if you worked much, much harder. 

You could argue that a watchful supervisor might see your so-called “hard work” and use that as a way to determine promotions and raises—Guendelsberger talks about some of the incentives Amazon warehouse pickers are given, and how many are working to get full-time positions. But even that is precarious, using a scarcity model to motivate people to work for limited rewards, many of which are paltry compared to the work and effort exerted by employees. One of the folks Guendelsberger talks to tells her about winning “power hour,” an incentive given to pickers who can pick a certain number of items an hour. The prize? A dollar of credit on the vending machine. 

What costs a company like Amazon a dollar per incentive can generate hundreds of dollars in value in terms of efficiency, again challenging the idea that hard work pays off for workers. Instead, hard work is a crapshoot: maybe a boss will notice it, maybe not, but there’s no guarantee your work will be recognized. And in a system with hundreds of employees and scarce incentives, any link between hard work and higher earnings appears even more tenuous. 

At one point in her book, Guendelsberger references a chart measuring worker productivity against wages and notes that while worker productivity is at an all-time high, wages have not gone up to meet worker productivity. (You can see the Economic Policy Institute’s graph of this relationship here.) Not only have we gotten more efficient, but the measures to keep us more efficient have gotten more efficient. 

A Perception of Work

As the managing editor for Fresh Cup, I edited a piece by my colleague RJ Joseph imploring employers to reconsider allowing employees to sit while working. “During many of my shifts, there were always lulls in service or tasks I could effectively accomplish while sitting,” she writes. “Whether stamping cups, running a register, or simply taking a break, allowing baristas to sit when and where possible doesn’t inhibit the quality of their service—and can even improve it.” 

In the piece, Joseph references the “time to lean, time to clean” aphorism: “The US service industry has a longstanding (pun intended) emphasis on looking busy and alert,” she writes. “No matter how little there is to do at any given moment—or whether a task can be done sitting—we equate standing and movement with productivity and that workers should always be looking for more to do.”

Our perception of “productivity” is often simply that: a perception, dictated by our beliefs about what productivity looks like instead of any measurable metric of what it is. Hundreds of jobs can be done while seated, but the image of a worker positioned comfortably seems to trigger a “this person is being lazy” response among managers. So much so that workers across numerous industries have documented the creative ways they’ve found to skirt their employers’ “you can’t sit at work” rules. That includes workers at a Dairy Queen who, without chairs, squat over drainage pipes, prop themselves between walls, and sit precariously over garbage bins to relax for a moment (I’ve sat on a lot of garbage bins). 

I remember the very first closing shift I worked at the cafe. We lived and died by our morning rush: Afternoons were considerably slower, and business tapered off until we shut at 8. I was working a shift with a boy named Daniel—who I was admittedly completely smitten with—and I was excited by the prospect of spending alone time with him after my manager left at 4. 

When it was just the two of us, I asked Daniel what I should be doing—it was slow, there were no customers, and I wasn’t used to lulls in the day. The “time to lean, time to clean” maxim felt virtually tattooed on my arm. Instead, Daniel poured himself a coffee, set it on the counter, and said, “The most important thing to know about closing is that your drink needs to be next to you as you lean on the counter and wait for the next customer to come in.” 

He leaned against the counter and took a sip of coffee. He didn’t lift a finger for the next 20 minutes.