It's pretty well-understood that a company does not function if everyone performs only the duties written on paper. There's even a counterproductive strategy that uses that as the hallmark: "malicious compliance." People aren't robots (if they were, they'd have been automated by now so owners could keep all the wealth by owning all the capital) and the challenges businesses face are too dynamic to survive a script-only approach to meeting people's needs.
I think the most important question to ask is "If the company dies, why don't the employees care?" And unpacking that box can answer all sorts of unasked questions about power imbalance in the modern (mostly service, non-union) economy.
We don't demand that. But (for a small one-off home installation job) we do expect carpenters to finish with a broom-clean workspace, even if that's not explicitly in the contract. It's a basic professional standard and "common sense."
This is an excellent point and goes to the unasked questions I was referring to.
Among the reasons this can happen is a variant of race-to-the-bottom cost / value creep due to competition. If some other carpenter is offering complementary deep-clean, then everyone else in the space has to offer it too (or risk losing work).
Now, they should of course ideally pay their staff to do the thing that has become the new norm. But it's easy for a frog-boil to cause something to creep into the new norm without corresponding compensation increasing (especially if the guy offering the deep-cleans originally has some kind of economic advantage the competition doesn't that allows him to offer it for free... Maybe his partner is co-owner and does the deep cleans, or they have kids who work for them for free).
There's a lot of power imbalances that I think become obvious if one asks the question "Why would the employees not care if this company went belly-up tomorrow?" The kids / partner circumstance, for example, involves employees working for below-market rate but they do care if the company goes belly-up tomorrow.
I think the most important question to ask is "If the company dies, why don't the employees care?" And unpacking that box can answer all sorts of unasked questions about power imbalance in the modern (mostly service, non-union) economy.