Danes spend two-thirds of their work week doing nothing

"A root cause is the strong attendance culture that prevails in many workplaces, i.e., rather than measuring dedication by results and achievements, an employee's physical presence becomes an important measure."

This is because it's almost impossible to measure modern cognitive work. The result is seat warming and office politics. Bricklayers don't have this problem because it's easy to measure both the quality and quantity of work.

Article is spot on. I quit a well paid job at large corp for this exact reason.

They keep writing articles about this, but I have yet to meet a manager who cares.