Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of the Pointless Job (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article via The Guardian, written by David Graeber: One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I'm a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I would have to stack the books and not touch anything else, whereupon he would return at the earliest available opportunity. The carpenter never reappeared. Each day, someone in the anthropology department would call, often multiple times, to ask about the fate of the carpenter, who always turned out to have something extremely pressing to do. By the time a week was out, it had become apparent that there was one man employed by buildings and grounds whose entire job it was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter hadn't come. He seemed a nice man. Still, it's hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his work life.
Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job. Graeber defines a "bullshit job" as "one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there's a good reason for them to be doing it." Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job. Graeber defines a "bullshit job" as "one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there's a good reason for them to be doing it." Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
He wasn't saying the carpenter was useless. He's saying that there was a guy who's primary job seemed to be apologizing for why the carpenter couldn't come and help them just yet. That was the useless job.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
My favourite e-book site has a copy, and I've posted it here.
Also some bad news - I'm not going to post the address of the site I pulled it from, as I still want to be able to use it...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
We have Big Dave, our Speaker to Electricians who does all the hand-off stuff between a site's electricians and our own kit when we set up shows and displays since he's a qualified and experienced sparky. He has a posse of knowledgeable but unqualified people who are allowed to plug stuff in on our side of the panels, and no-one else.
We told Sarah (not her real name) not to plug anything in to the exhibition centre's distribution box which was rated 6A per circuit. Sarah plugged a 3kW heater into the breaker box and switched it on because her photo-shoot models were cold. It cost us a couple of hundred quid for a call-out to the site electrician to reset the breaker on the exhibition hall side of the panels. Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong.
There's a reason for the seemingly-bullshit restrictions on working conditions and who can do what, where and how. Dunning-Kreuger is alive and well, unlike some of their victims.
If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net.
I can't really speak for Denmark but here in Norway it's mainly solved through employment taxes, which are kinda like income tax except they're not deducted from my nominal salary but rather added to the company's taxes. Basically, if my employer wants to pay me $100 he'll have to pay $8.20 in "trygdeavgift" and anywhere from $0 to $14.10 in "arbeidsgiveravgift", usually the latter which together make up something like a social security tax. And that money then goes to pensions, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. And then they take a good ~30% of my pay in taxes. And the general VAT is 25%.
So essentially, my employer pays $122.30. My pre-tax income is $100, my post-tax income $70 and when I buy something 25/125ths goes to VAT so $56 end up in someone else's pockets. So companies are not keeping people on for charity, not private ones anyway but you're pretty well covered for. And you get a free education, free healthcare, in fact a whole lot of services are free or subsidized and my mum and dad have been living on public pensions for a long time now. But we're sure as hell paying for it somehow...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Except, unions have become everyone's favourite whipping boy. There's an entire political culture based upon relentless attacks on unions. It's as empty and thoughtless as you would expect.
I used to work for a union. Sure it was bureaucratic, but you know what? That was the corporate culture, the union simply adopted the corporate culture to succeed.
Lots of times I would challenge people, people bashing on the union:
- imagine that tomorrow, the union is gone, 100%;
- no one resents the union being gone. In fact they don't remember the union;
- no one wants a union in the future, nor any kind of organization that even looks a little like a union (no 'staff associations', for example);
- in short this is the best possible scenario for removing a union, because there are no consequences at all to that action.
Now tell me with a straight face that this bureaucratic organization suddenly changed it's culture as a result. Do they become less bureaucratic as a result? No. Does the face of work change dramatically? No. Do they suddenly become customer-focused, responsive, adaptive, nimble? No. In fact nothing at all will change.
Sure, the union didn't improve on the bureaucracy, but they didn't make it worse either. And that isn't their job or role in the organization anyway.
If you have a problem with unions, that is your personal hobby horse and rarely has much to do with reality. Take up your problems with the corporate bosses, the politicians, and the suits who create the bureaucratic corporate culture in the first place, or at minimum do nothing to change that corporate culture.
Except that changing corporate culture is hard work and nowadays, the suits aren't into working hard. They want to collect golden parachutes, or stock options, or performance bonuses that somehow get paid even when performance is terrible.