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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?
Eventually, the carpenter is going to come back, and he will either:
1. See that his work has been done and go away, saying nothing.
2. Complain, likely resulting in a written warning to the professor.
Is it worth the risk? Or did you forget that he already asked for help?
OR 3. See that his work was done, spend his time to undo the work, and submit a formal complaint through union channels that unauthorized work was done, causing management to discipline you, and force you to wait 1 month to have the work done by authorized labor using work-to-rule levels of efficiency and have your manager's department be billed for both the undo work and the re-do work.
As you might have surmised, #3 has happened to me... If I only had to live with a warning, it might have been still worth a warning, but having to wait an extra month and see your work be undone, and re-done poorly, certainly tips the scale the other way (which was of course the point of the whole exercise).
Give people too much power and they will abuse it, it happens with unions but also without them it would happen in the opposite way - you would be expected to do everything, and work longer hours at no extra pay etc.
There's a happy medium where employers cant abuse employees and union workers do their jobs efficiently, but we never seem to get there.
It seems all of these people campaigning for equality or fairness want nothing of the sort - they all want inequality to remain, just that they want it to be in their favor instead of against them.
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