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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?
This is pretty common in Japan and comes in various forms. Back in 2013 the NYT did an article about workers sent to the boredom room. Many of these workers were hired into the company back in the period when lifetime employment was the way things went, so I guess many workers had contracts that made it impossible for them to be laid off. When Sony closed down a number of their older products such as Betamax or the Walkman, they couldn't fire a lot of these old timers that only knew about their specific product, so they stuffed them in 'boredom' rooms where they'd come in every day and read the newspaper or a book, and then go home after 8 hours.
I've also personally experienced similar redundant jobs in Japan. When I went to the city hall to pick up some official tax form information, they had someone that took my request form and handed it to someone who printed out the document. The printer-person confirmed the document, stamped it, and then passed it to the person sitting next to them. This next person looked it over for all of 5 seconds, stamped it and passed it to the person at the head of this block of four desks and he glanced it over and stamped it. Then the person that took my request form took it to another guy sitting in a separate desk about 5ft away ("section chief") and he stamped it and then I got my tax forms. I have no doubt that 2 of the people in this process were completely useless in most of the work they do.
I think the lesson here is that if you want to find pointless jobs, just look in highly bureaucratic systems -- there are bound to be tons.
So if I perform useful work for people doing a useless job, does that make my job useless?
There are exhibition and conference venues like that. Vendors could set up their own stands. They could unpack, move, place and connect their equipment together. But any electrical plugs had to be installed and turned on by the union electrician. Mainly because some bozo would daisy chain a bunch of extension cords to one socket, having everything switched on, and then turn on the switch at the socket. Instant power surge.
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You need to watch those old black and white movies more carefully. The elderly guy with the white gloves operating the elevator cab would make note of when each person used the elevator, take bookings and anticipate when executives would be arriving at the elevator room. Effectively operating the cab like a limousine chauffeur. "There's Mr Goldberg, he always goes up to the executive meeting room at 2.00pm every Monday. Always have the cab waiting for him 10 minutes early."
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
This happened to me --
Back in the remote past, my cubicle fluorescent light burned out. The storage closet that had replacement bulbs was 20 feet away from my cube in the hallway. Being a union shop, I stopped and asked a passing electrician if he could set me up with a bulb and he responded that I had to go though "Facilities" and submit a request. I duly filled out the request. A week went by in the dark. I returned to "Facilities" and between the 7 guys in there standing around joking and drinking coffee, asked them what the holdup was as the closet was so close and had plenty of bulbs and wouldn't take but a minute. They responded that they needed millwright to get the bulb out of the closet deliver it to my cube and then the electrician could then install it, but that all the millwrights were extremely busy in the moving of furniture! I tried to explain that the darkness made it almost impossible for me to work in my cube and my lost productivity was needlessly costing the company money. He just shrugged.
On the way back I retrieved a bulb and replaced it in about a minute. One of the "busy" millwrights that was chatting up one of the secretaries while he watched an old timer co-worker struggling to single-handedly navigate a heavy filing cabinet on a moving dolly spotted me and reported me to the union!
It ended up our dept had to pay the union for 8 hours of labor because I had the audacity to "infringe on their livelihood" when I changed a frickin light bulb!
I spoke with the friendly old timer later and asked him about why he wasn't getting any help from his union buddies and that most of them were literally standing around doing nothing. He responded that his old school work ethic was alien to the new younger union members when they realized that they get paid whether they're working or not! Absolutely no frickin shame!
Since that incident, fuck the unions and the horses they rode in on! It's even worse now...
I wish I could get hold of a copy (electronically or in dead tree format, but I recall vividly a story by the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell. Several of his stories and novels had a slightly anti authoritarian and anti establishment feel (Next of Kin, Allamagoosa and Wasp being prime examples which are available in ebook formats).
His "Study in Still Life" though is the classic. It was written in the late 50s/early 60s but is still 100% relevant. Essentially it's about a bureaucrat who games the system to prioritise life saving equipment: the request and its approval / traceability / fulfilment process is described in detail at each stage for what is basically a bundle up and put in the mail activity -- it would be comic if it were not (still today) very true. The twist in the tail about bureaucratic hierarchies is a real gem.
Read it if you get the chance [and please post a link if you find a copy online as I'd love to read it again :-) ]
Most U.S. states require workers compensation insurance, whose premiums are based on the type of work an employee does. A "clerical" worker like a professor "dirtying his hands" and fixing a shelf would be doing something more risky and outside the scope of his job description. If the insurance company caught wind of it, the school could lose its insurance, or worse yet all its professors could be reclassified as a different type of employee with a higher rate, and the school's insurance premiums would go up. So yes, being in academia may in fact mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
I ran into exactly this type of situation at a previous job. We had a restaurant on our resort, and all the restaurant employees were categorized as restaurant workers with about a 8% insurance rate (i.e. we paid the workers comp insurance company 8% of their wages as a premium). Someone in another department began a school camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class for a week-long stay at our resort (located in a rural area), learning about nature and the environment. They ate meals at our restaurant. When the state workers comp insurance board caught whiff of this, to our astonishment they reclassified all of our restaurant staff as camp workers at a 15% insurance rate, even though there was nothing camp-related about their duties. The vast majority of the restaurant staff weren't even preparing meals for the camp kids, and the ones who were weren't doing anything they wouldn't normally do for regular restaurant customers. But the board insisted that because the kids were there for a camp and eating meals prepared in our restaurant, our restaurant workers were camp workers.
I appealed and lost. There's a single state government insurance board which decides these things, so after your appeal is decided, that decision is final. But I did manage to convince them to charge camp rates for our restaurant workers only on days when this camp program was present (weekdays, vs most of our regular customers being on weekends). This increased my workload considerably since I now had to record the restaurant payroll day-by-day and cross-reference against days when camps were present. But the difference in insurance premium was over $10k/mo. I did this for close to a year, while we worked to spin off the camp program into a separate company. Then this new camp company became a "customer" of our resort, thus allowing us to legitimately tell the insurance board to rescind their ridiculous classification change because we weren't running any camps and didn't have any camp employees on our payroll.
Since that incident, fuck the unions and the horses they rode in on! It's even worse now...
It is easy enough to blame the unions, but remember that the old timer also was unionized.
The "busy" millwright didn't report you because of the union, he reported you because he was an asshole and he would have been that without a union too.
If you want change then unions is the wrong target to fight.
The problem is a culture that is endorsing assholes instead of promoting honesty, humility and being helpful.
Just getting rid of the union will only mean that assholes has to go through company management instead of the union to make your life miserable.
You seem to think society exists to support companies. On the contrary, there is no purpose to the economy, and hence no purpose to allowing companies to exist, unless the activity supports society. Companies exist and have a purpose purely because they can be a benefit to society.
To allow companies to burn out their workers and toss them aside is silly. Companies that are so dysfunctional should be dissolved, and then companies that work properly will take their place.
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
And actually it can happen without unions not just in the opposite way, but in the same way.
I work for a university. Our particular school (fyi: a university is typically divided into multiple "schools") has its own IT separate from the main campus IT. There are no unions involved here, but we routinely suffer from arbitrary delays which are very reminiscent of union behavior. When we need new computers, it takes multiple weeks (often multiple months) to procure them. The main campus IT also offers these exact same computers for staff and students to purchase for business and/or personal use. We could go to the main campus IT and buy the exact same thing (brand/model/specs), and their turnaround time is just a few days. However, if we did this, our school IT would refuse to image it with our mandatory configuration, so it would be useless for our job. So instead we just have to wait, and wait, and wait, and beg, and plead to finally get a new computer.
This is especially a pain for hiring new employees, though the inconvenience is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it takes multiple months to actually hire a person. Which is again another example of bureaucratic hoops even when no union is involved. In a past position, I was working as a temp worker for a department for several months, and they wanted to offer me the position on a permanent basis. From the day my boss "offered" me this position, it took 2.5 months before I actually got the job and benefits.
Back to my current position, and our school-specific IT...they recently made some major changes school wide which necessitated them re-imaging hundreds of computers over the course of nearly a year. The way the did it was they came and gathered up your computer, took it back to their office, kept it for an entire week, and then returned the re-imaged computer to you. Yes, you would be without a computer for an entire week. And this was the case even if you had personally backed up all your data and told them "I don't need anything saved...just wipe it all". Think about that...every employee without a computer for a week. Their helpful suggestion was that maybe employees could take some vacation time while they handled it. The whole situation is comical.
In a past job, I worked for IT at a different university. When we had to do a mass rollout of a new image, whenever possible we sent employees around to each department and had them go computer to computer reimaging them all. It takes about 10-15 minutes with one computer to get things started, then you move to the next computer while the image is installed. By the time you've gone through all the computers a few hours later, the first one is finishing up and you just cycle back through them doing the final touches. Half a day and you've handled an entire department. That's WAY less time then you spend walking to a department, collecting a single computer, transporting it back to the office, hooking it up there, and then after imaging having to unhook it, transport it back, and hook it back up. Less time spent by IT, and multiple days less inconvenience for each and every employee. Collectively this rollout had an unneccessary loss of productively that could be measured in man-years.
So indeed, the problem isn't unions. The problem is any environment where leadership gives anyone the power and authority to behave in such a manner and not having to worry much about the consequences of it.
The problem with pointless jobs is that we have the entire ecosystem built around earning and consuming. This isn't going to go away without a fight. And when you consider that most technical jobs are going to be automated, pointless work will be all that's left pretty soon.
I've worked in big companies for most of my career, and there are plenty of jobs like this. Not, "Oh, you don't see everything I do behind the scenes" type jobs, but jobs that could be automated with nearly zero effort. The techies among us will jump on writing whatever shell script is needed, but I don't think automating everything is a good idea.
"Luddite!" you cry...not exactly. Here's the problem...large companies provide semi-stable employment and are almost the only source of stable employment outside of government. Thousands of graduates come out of Big State University with some generic management, psychology or communications degree they partied their way through. If all the pointless jobs go away, there's nowhere to employ these people, and they won't buy houses, buy cars, go on vacations, pay property taxes, have children, and basically keep the consumer economy going.
tl;dr: Unless you want to break the work-for-money-so-you-can-consume cycle, think of the C students. :-)