Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense.

Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their bosses don't care even enough to set up a direct reward to bus performance and some way for them to have agency over that reward?

Though it would be cool if there was a bus service that had direct, fine-grained association between curteous behavior and reward in the form of immediate payment and future business, possibly mediated via ratings - I was making a joking reference to Uber here, but "Uber for busses" is genuinely something that I want to exist. Ie. not "Uber Bus", but the standard Uber model of engaging a driver directly, only this time applied to longer timespans to allow better schedule coordination. For instance, some way to say "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?" would allow for some pretty cool optimizations in routing. Possibly combined with a Kickstarter-like model where a bunch of people can express prospective interest.

BTW, this sort of smugness is why Detroit is a shattered husk of what it used to be.

When Deming still had all of his hair, he had trouble getting traction in the states. Japan, on the other hand, was intrigued by his ideas and wanted some quality time from him. If you look at the history of the Toyota Production System, they usually credit Taiichi Ohno and Toyoda, with the origin story sometime in the 80’s, after Detroit was already in flames, but before that was Deming, and for some reason he is usually not mentioned.

If I’m working for a private company. Guess how much I care about “equity” that will statistically be meaningless?

On the other hand, I did implementations as a Senior Develop/de facto “cloud architect” that moved the needle meaningfully at a company with $5 million in revenue. Those same types of implementations happen multiple times daily at a company worth over $1 trillion. Nothing I’m going to ever do will ever have a meaningful affect on the stock price of the company I work at now.

Kind of sounds like the company share price is too coarse-grained. That sort of thing might work better if the company was split into separately traded sub-units, of which the parent company owns some controlling fraction of voting shares. Admittedly the bureaucratic overhead starts being awkward.

There are four companies worth over 1 trillion. How could you split any of them in a way that my small implementations by their standards would make a difference? I purposefully focus on the “nose of the camel in the tent” type work.

I like smaller proof of concept + training type projects.

I agree there is not necessarily a good way to do this in any given company structure. However, if a company can figure out how to do it, other things being equal I would expect it to eat its competitors' lunch. (As with how Uber doesn't need to mandate that drivers should be nice; it just falls naturally out of the incentive structure.)

> "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?"

They could even make it so that the people who actually take the bus negotiate the time and place.

This would be great for events outside the city.

This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 - regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the municipal authority and Transport for London are still ongoing...

“Imagine if you could hire a bus”?

You can; groups of people hire a mini bus or coach and negotiate where and when it travels all the time for social events, work parties, school trips, etc.

> However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else.

Increases is a relative measure. It may be 10% or it may be 0.0001%. At very small values it becomes basically a zero because humans are non-divisible unit at which point your theory is basically in the rabbit’s hole of magic and wizardry.

If the bus drivers were paid by the number of people who take the bus sure, but when are paid by the travel route distance, they have no obligation to do what they are not paid to do.

What a nihilistic view. Not every aspect that’s part of your job needs to be included in your variable compensation in order to be done, does it?

They’re employed to do a specific job, if they’re not rewarded for bringing the company more money, why should they care?

The specific job includes customer service. It's what they are being paid for. Employees who do the job poorly are at greater risk for replacement by replacement hires. This is why many companies ask customers to rate individual service providers.

I would never rate a customer service employee poorly because they aren’t cheerful.

What sort of mad world do we live in where that’s even expected of minimum wage employees?

Because human beings are not coin operated robots?

So they should do unpaid emotional labour for free?

If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The world would be a happier and better place for it.

> If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

This entire conversation started based on an example that smiling brought economic benefits, not that you should do it because of socializing benefits. Answering in economic terms only makes sense.

Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole?

I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.

I didn't say not smiling makes you an asshole, I'm making two separate points. The first was that expecting people to be generally courteous to other people, whether they're explicitly paid to or not, is something we should expect from everyone. It's called just being a human being. And again, everyone's allowed to have bad moods now and then. But in general, if you go through life with a scowl on your face and approach things from a standpoint of "I'm not being paid for this so I don't care, I'm not doing 'unpaid emotional labor,'" you're just kind of a jerk. That's the context of the last couple comments in this thread so it's important to keep the "I'm not being paid to smile so I'm not going to smile because that's labor" thing in mind.

The second point, which is related but I think still separate, is that I wish just being an asshole was enough to get fired. I sort of had it in my head but didn't really articulate that I was thinking of being an asshole as a more extreme version of what we're talking about, what I refer to above as just being kind of a jerk. Maybe on a scale of 1-10 being a jerk is a 3 but being an asshole is a 7 or 8.

You keep confusing being polite (something rightfully expected from an employee) with being fake and with real emotional labor.

This are 3 different things.

Smiling is not pretending to be someone's friend. Seriously, if this all sounds like alien talk, you should see a counselor or therapist.

Many types of emotional interaction are meaningful and true only when they are unpaid. Some big examples: friendship and love.

For employees not to be rude to customers as part of basic work requirements.

But putting on a false smile and feigning warmth to get a tip is a very different thing.

It's quite common and accepted in the US. But also seen as soulless and emotionally manipulative in many other cultures.

Yes but if the number of people on the bus dropped to zero do you think their employers would keep running the route?

The passenger count is so heavily influenced by factors outside of the bus driver’s influence that this example doesn’t make sense.

Passengers don’t abandon bus routes because the bus driver didn’t smile at them. They abandon routes when the schedule is inconvenient, there are better alternatives to the bus, the fare is too high etc etc. None of these are in the control of the bus driver.

My old bus route to work used to amuse me greatly because on it there were two drivers who were the polar opposite of one another. One guy I assumed had previously been the pilot of a commercial airliner because he used to greet everyone who got onto the bus with that sort of demeanor and make announcements etc. Always brightened my day. The other guy was the grumpiest piece of shit bus driver I've seen anywhere in my life who would frequently berate passengers and oftentimes frighten unsuspecting foreigners. Everyone who needed to get to where they were going showed up and took the bus regardless. It's about the least important variable there is and it averages out to getting a reasonably OK bus driver almost all the time across the different busses you take and the different times of day you take them.