Why do you care?

Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

This is part of the K-shaped economy.

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)

Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.

Not treating people like that requires a fundamental move away from capitalist primacy in the US.

You're barking up the wrong tree if you're expecting it to be corporation-initiated.

Really hope this is sarcasm..

Or do you also feel the same about the 6x14 hour workdays?

> It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd

Breaks improve employee health and reduces burnout. Not taking breaks harms performance.

Work breaks are also required by law in many states.

This sort of work culture ruined the world way more than social media ever did.

> It's no different than sitting

I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?

The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.

So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?