If you're a billionaire and your victim has $1000, it's easier to take $500 away from them than to make another billion, because ultimately only relative wealth matters to human beings. If you're the victim, it's better to perform poorly by not taking breaks because you can claim to have done nothing wrong while punishing your owner by performing poorly. Working extremely hard without producing actual results is basically a form of quiet quitting which is immune to detection because all metrics point towards the quiet quitter being extremely productive.