Effort is withdrawn to match perceived compensation, and the withdrawal is coordinated by common knowledge of it.
They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. The joke's force is that it is a statement of equilibrium rather than a complaint: both sides have priced the other's performance, both continue, and nobody involved is confused about what is happening.
In practice
- A team whose pay has been frozen for three years works its hours exactly, and no rule has been broken.
- A firm that cuts a benefit and expects unchanged discretionary effort has assumed the exchange was not an exchange.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is reciprocity in equilibrium: both sides have priced the other's performance and matched it, so the low-effort outcome is stable and neither side is deceived.
- In its favour
- The underlying reciprocity claim is well supported, since effort responds to perceived fairness of pay in field and laboratory studies, and the saying names the coordinated version of it.
- Against it
- It is an unattributed saying rather than a measured finding, and it describes an equilibrium without saying what sustains or breaks it, which is what a theory of low-effort workplaces would need.
- Standing
- Origin unattributed; recorded widely in the late Soviet period. The underlying reciprocity claim is supported elsewhere; the saying is not itself evidence.
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- The success literature and its sceptics