Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
A bullshit job is a form of paid emplyment that is so completely pointless, unneccessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Great example of a bullshit job:
IT support subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of German military.
So instead of the soldier carring his computer for 5 meters, 2 people drive for a combined 6 to 10 hours, fill out ~15 pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.
5 major varieties
These are the basic bullshit jobs. But quite often they come in many flavours, colors and mixes.
Also, a there is a thing like 2nd order bullshit jobs - normal jobs for bullshit enterprises.
flunkies
jobs that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important (e.g., your office needs a receptionist just because everyone else in industry has one, even though she does not have anything to do at all.)
goons
the hired muscle (corporate lawyers, telemarketing, army forces) - agression and deception.
duct tapers
jobs that exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization. They solve a problem that ought not to exist.
IT example
Where 2 decades ago, companies dismissed open source software and developed core technologies in-house, nowadays companies rely heavily on open source and employ software developers almost entirely to apply duct tape on core technologies they get for free.
In the end, you can see people doing the nongratifying duct-taping work during office hours and then doing gratifying work on core technologies during the night.
This leads to an interesting vicious circle: given that people choose to work on core technologies for free, no company is investing in those technologies. The uniderinvestment means that core technologies are often unfinished, lacking quality, have a lot of rough edges, bugs, etc. That, in turn, creates need for duct tape and thus proliferation of duct-taping jobs.
box tickers
employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. (e.g. interview residents to fill out a form and never look at the form.)
taskmasters
- unneccessary superiors: people who only assign jobs to others that are perfectly capable of dealing with their tasks themselves;
- bullshit generators: people who create bullshit tasks for others to do, supervise bullshit, or even create entirely new bullshit jobs (these cause evil!).
Why people doing bullshit are unhappy?
Because of the feelings of: purposelessness, falseness, lack of value. People find it highly dissatisfactory when they are forced to do pointless tasks (there is no bigger punishment than to see your efforts be completely useless (some Roman tale?)).
When the job is useless, you feel like a lower person, because a big part of the identity is your job. This creates misery, depression and sometimes even sadomasochism.
A common sense definition of Value
When a good or service answers a demand or otherwise improves people’s lives, then it can be considered genuinely valuable. But when it merely serves to create demand, either by making people feel they are fat and ugly, or luring them into debt and then charging interest, it is not.
A lesson from make-work
A student was forced by family to get a job while studying. He got a make-work. In a make-work you learn:
- how to operate under other’s direct supervision;
- how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to be done;
- that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys
- that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important and that one does not enjoy
- that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying it.
Some history of work
A few centuries back (and a long time before that) work meant a wholly different thing. Work was split in cycles in your life:
As a kid, you lived with your parents at their house.
When you became a teenager, it was mandatory (for every class citizens) to become an apprentice and learn the art/master the skills your family/you wanted to pursue in someone elses household who is at least a little bit better off than your family. This was the part you were getting paid for your service (- from here comes the name service).
After 5-15 years when you are old and smart enough and have collected your starting capital, you get your own house and start your own workshop/studio/business.. You grow up.
Nowadays, we are stuck in the teenager phase. We never grow up.
Hourly pay
And there is another staggering difference - we get paid by hours, not by the work we do. The philosophical and emotional effect is that we are modern slaves at the time we work and our time at work does not belong to ourselves - it belongs to our bosses. (That’s why they act as dicks!) As modern slaves, we are better to be kept busy, otherwise we would have too much free time at our hands.
Productivity vs Compensation
Starting from the 1970’s, your productivity has no correlation with your income.
Caring vs productive jobs
Historically, women have done the caring jobs the ones that include empathy (taking care of kids, cooking) and men have done the productive jobs - the muscle work (hunting, building). Because in the productive jobs are easier to notice quick results and we live in a patriarchic society where men have the power, men have been the ones who get paid for their - productive - work.
In the last 2 centuries humans have radically minimized the need for productive work. We have inustrialized and modernized almost everything in the man’s land. And this has been highly effective - it takes just a few (5?)% of farmers today to make even bigger amount of food a few centuries ago. We don’t need productive work anymore. It’s automatized.
But when it comes to caring, it is very hard and often couterproductive to automatized the caring jobs. Do you really don’t need teachers and nurses? But, sadly, we don’t easily see the difference between caring and productive jobs or don’t want to see. what works for me, will work everywhere, right? So people try to measure the caring jobs by the same metrics as productive jobs and at the end, we put on a lot of bullshit on professors shoulders to get the feeling that they are being productive. Extra bureaucracy makes their work less enjoyable, less useful, less caring.
Bullshit by sectors
If we split work in the common sectors: Agriculture, Industry and Services, than we see that in the last century, Agriculture and Industry jobs have declined because of automation and productivity, but Services jobs are on the rise (now - 59%).
Now, if we split Services in actual services (as waiters) and Information jobs (as Marketing analysts), we see that actual service jobs have not changed much, the growing part is the newby Information. This is where most of the bullshit is happening.
I don’t know how was the life a 100 years ago, but it definitely had less bullshit, forms to fill and weekly status meeting to attend.
If 37% - 40% of jobs are completely pointless, and at least 50% of the work done in nonpointless office jobs is equally pointless, we can probably conclude that at least half of all work being done in our society could be eliminated without making any real difference at all.
#UBI - universal basic income
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit ti benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?
In a nutshell
In 1930’s, there was a prediction that by 2000’s we would not need to work at all. Well, this prophecy is quite true - we don’t need to, so we bullshit to be kept busy.
- most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living
- most people hate their jobs.