On the seventh day God rested. At Amazon, they don’t rest at all. They have to work and work and work. The Sabbath enshrines the human need for rest and recharging. We need to sleep. We need to play and we need to have fun. Much reaction about the New York Times expose has been outrage as to how Amazon treats its employees, trying to squeeze out of them as much productivity with long hours. The reaction of some says that we live in dog-eat-dog world and because of competition we should get use to it. A follow up piece in the NY Times pointed out that Amazon, rather than being alone in squeezing workers, really is at the table with many whole sectors. Top law firms have used similar methods of high stress and long hours to weed out all but the top people. Joe Gibbs, the old Washington football coach was famous for having a cot in his office and never actually leaving the office. Law, finance and many other fields, the hardest workers, those that don’t take time off, are held up as models for success. All of which seems at odds with Christian theology and the Sabbath rest.
The culture of Amazon does answer a mystery, though. Amazon, unlike some others in the tech sector is a particularly uninnovative company. It makes it money as it always has, by being the biggest and through outsourcing innovation.
The Kindle Fire only offers price and access to Amazon over its rival tablets. The smart phone it created was greeted with a shrug. The Kindle really used technology already created and it outsource most its creative aspects. It success was due to the Amazon’s access to content. Amazon can find ways to do what it does faster and quicker, but not very creatively, despite recruiting many of the top people. The hyper-competitive environment of Amazon seems both bad for morale and also bad for creative thinking. Without Sabbath or rest, we are not as productive thinkers.
The funny thing is here science and Christian theology agree. Behavioral Economic researcher Dan Ariely discovered that putting people in highly competitive environments will help in increasing mechanical productivity, we can make more widgets if we are told what to do, but such environment stifles creative productivity. Finding a more efficient way of making the widgets is not going to happen. A worker must work harder, but certainly not smarter. Neuroscience agrees with Ariely as researchers have found out rest, relaxation and fun are all key ingredients to learning.
Cramming for exams get a good score, but the knowledge dissipates soon, and working at Amazon seems like one giant cramming session, where people fooled themselves into being more productive when they were the opposite. In other words Amazon’s culture is not only bad for employees, it is very bad for business.
Of course Amazon is not alone. When Americans have to start looking at our overworking into unproductivity culture we inherited from the Industrial Revolution, we find that we are not as creative as we would like to be. We need a Sabbath. In a global market place, where working smart and more creatively will become more and more a necessity, we have rediscover the wisdom of the Sabbath.
