Bullshit Jobs: Who Designed YOUR Job?

[peristaltor]

Fun time! I got to receive two very different posts on two very different topics today in the same Friend's Feed. Trouble is, they aren't "different" at all.

The first comes to us from our Friends at Faux News.

Oh, a surf bum who eats well on the taxpayer dime! The horrors! I haven't heard about this since . . . the 1970s. Lobster-eating food stamp recipients were a common trope back then, too.

Next, compare poor Jason's chosen fate to that of others, like you and I, perhaps.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

(I, bastard that I am, emphasized.)

Well, not "no one." Hippie agitator Abbie Hoffman noted in his 1980 autobiography Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture that a minimum-wage recipient in a part-time job in the 1960s could support up to four people, perhaps not in luxury, but well. It doesn't take a lot of research to determine how improbable this is today, and it became ever-more improbable after 1970. After that date, wages stagnated in real dollars for most people in our economy here in the US (and, as the linked article notes, the UK). Why? Continuing:

A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away . . . .

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

The result of this explosion of bullshit employment—what might that be? "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error," Graeber continues. (Oh, did I mention this article was written by David Graeber?!?) Still, let's remember that "if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call 'the market' reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else." (I emphasized yet again, bastard that I am.) The priorities of this 1% will be the priorities of the nation, if not the world, as Graeber notes:

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. . . . And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

That last portion sounds a bit like Rattlife Jason, don't it? It also sounds like a post I made over a year ago after hearing author Conrad Schmidt describe his Work Less party. His bottom line: that though increased mechanization increases the amount of goods per worker, the increases fail to increase the buying power of those workers. The gap between worker buying power and increased production eventually leads to a recession/depression.

The solution? Work less, specifically at industrial production. Spend time doing other things. This has been proven to work. Mr. Kellogg of cereal fame tried an experiment near the turn of the last century. One of his factories ran a standard 8-hour-day, while the other went to a seven-hour work day. The latter had the same productivity per worker as the former; but the town surrounding the shortened workday factory was more vibrant, with greater community cohesion and more economic activity (From Daniel H. Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us). While the economic activity of both factories was almost identical, the lives of those working the latter factory were more enriched and rewarding.

You know . . . less bullshit.

Go, Jason. Blaze that trail.

X-Posted to talk_politics.