A senator from North Carolina is trying to get Solitaire and Minesweeper banned from state workers’ computers, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Republican Senator Austin Allran has sponsored the piece of legislation, saying that taxpayers would be outraged to find out how much time state employees waste at work playing these games.
Allran’s bill is seen as a very specific response to the rising concern of the productivity of America’s newest worker class, the information-technology (IT) professional. Research done by the IRS shows that half the time an IRS employee goes on a computer is spent shopping, gambling, or playing games online.
“We can’t expect people to be saints in the office, but once the fingers have been pointed and the accusations made, there does have to be a standard established for how people use software games and when they use them,” says Peter Sepp, a vice president at the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va.
Some argue, however, that allowing workers to spend time playing games on the company dime improves productivity. For workers who spend their day staring at a computer screen, pursuing leisure activities on the job could be seen as an expression of individuality that improves morale.
“If you go back to the middle of the 19th century and the writings of Karl Marx, workers under the factory system would lose a considerable amount of their identity and a sense of ownership with what they were doing,” says Bill Snizek, a work sociologist at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. “What employers today have to decide is whether permitting employees at certain prescribed times to gain some amount of psychic enjoyment by playing games will make up for some of the lost identity and pride in work.”
IT workers in North Carolina say that Allran’s bill belittles what they do.
“A popular view of government is that you sit around and take a day to sharpen a pencil, but it’s not like that,” says one woman in North Carolina’s Department of Cultural Resources public-affairs office. “When I was not in state government, sure I’d see [some people playing games], but it’s quite the opposite here. People are just scrambling to get their work done within a normal business day.”