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?
Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
I can't understand how you would think that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an interstellar flight I need to catch ... A ... B -- here we go. Chat with you later!
Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.
...pointless job like....slashdot editor?
We literally canned the thoughts of our client's managers, and packaged them in powerpoint for their CEO.
And the firm was paid $1M/month for it.
The anthropology professor could have got his/her pretty little lily-clean hands dirty and fixed the shelf him/herself. Just because you're in academia doesn't mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
It basically says "I don't know what these people are doing, so it must be nothing", which is the most dangerous kind of ignorant. Once you've run a business, you realize that accountants, lawyers, and others are there to make it so you can focus on doing the "important" stuff, and good ones are worth their weight in gold. Think you're a smart developer? Trying doing the company books and getting the taxes right for millions of dollars worth of revenue, and do it internationally. Or defend the company against a vicious lawsuit. When these people are doing their jobs, you won't see much of anything.
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.
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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.
I mean, what do they actually do?
Do people care their jobs are pointless? I suspect the answer is no. Most people are only interested in doing the minimum to get by. They will say and do what's necessary to get by, but little more. Most people won't go above and beyond or make the effort to go beyond what they need to get by. Lots of people live in their own little bubbles where they convince themselves they're incredibly busy with their everyday tasks and never go beyond that. They don't concern themselves with bigger ideas or the world around them, just the mundane tasks of their daily lives. But as long as they have enough to live on comfortably, they're more than content to not really matter. Maybe people are aware their jobs don't amount to anything, if they take the time to reflect on it, but most of them just don't care.
What about all the people devoted to complying with pointless regulations?
Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.
We are their children.
Without my pointless job, id be homeless. I thank god every day for my pointless job. And i share this fortune with others when i can. Every meal, every night under a roof, every piece of clothing, is something that millions of people dont have. Something they die for trying to reach on migrant ships. Trying to flee war and tyranny. They would give everything they have to have my pointless job. I try not to take it for granted. I know that my pointless job could disappear at any time. For any reason. This pointless job is only pointless from one perspective. Its only as pointless as i allow it to be.
There is a theory that this is the underlying cause of the rise in depression. It surmises that the human need to be useful causes the drop in seratonin when it is not met. Antidepressants only treat the symptom, not the underlying cause.
So if I perform useful work for people doing a useless job, does that make my job useless?
I was going to say the same thing. Probably a union guy. Did the light bulb on your desk burn out? You dare not lay a finger on that bulb or you'll be taking someone's job away. Submit a request to the union electrician and he'll be by in a week or so. Spill something on the floor and need a broom? Don't even think of looking for one. A floor sweeper by show up sometime this week.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
.. of capitalist society. In capitalist society most people must sell themselves in order to acquire resources to survive and the oligarchs and their state have to keep creating nonsense jobs to keep revolutionary politics from reappearing and thereby getting the funny people of the working class asking questions again.
The guy telling us this is a professor of anthropology.
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To some extent I agree with Anonymous Coward here in that accountants, lawyers and others can be doing something important and 'good ones are worth their weight in gold'. But I suspect that to some extent they are needed because of other inefficiencies. We've grown so productive thanks to technology that we can bear the strain put on us by non productive things that would have been impossible to support 100 years ago. One particularly dismal example is how many people are in prison now. Economically, we could not have supported that a century ago.
Famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1930 predicting a 15 hour work week by projecting how workers were steadily becoming more productive. But it hasn't happened.
Historian C. Northcote Parkinson came up with "Parkinson's Law" that work expands to fulfil the time available. So I suspect that is partly also what has derailed the 15 hour work week.
I think there's something in human nature that causes us to never be satisfied. If there's a society where things are all hunky dory, pretty soon neighbors will feud over what used to be trifles, fashions and manners will become very elaborate, new religious cults will arise, until the general level of stress is barely tolerable again. I suppose this is so because back in the days when we were all hunter gatherers, the tribes that were laid back got pushed out by the ones who never had enough.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The professor of anthropology naively assumed that the carpenter was qualified to correctly convey the procedure. The system has become deadlocked,
because the carpenter is waiting for the appropriate parties to signal the completion of their tasks so that the carpenter can safely return and repair the
shelving.
The actual procedure is as follows:
1. The professor submits a report to his superior in the anthropology department explaining that the carpenter was not qualified to perform the task.
2. The Anthropology department reviews the report for accuracy, signs and dates it, and forwards the document to the facilities manager.
3. The Facilities manager then brings in a consultant to assess the situation.
4. The Consultant then requests the services of three individuals:
A: A librarian - to personally enumerate, collect, and stack the books (because we need a qualified individual to handle those books)
B: A Garbage Truck Driver (with Truck) - To dispose the books (because we once against need a qualified individual to handle those books)
C: A Fire Marshal - To supervise the situation, ensure safe performance of the job, to inspect the room afterward
All three, upon completion of this sub-task, then submit reports directly to the Carpenter, indicating that the unsafe circumstance has been remedied and that he may now return and perform the requested repairs.
5. The carpenter then returns, observes that the metal frame is damaged, and declares that the services of a qualified metallurgist is required before repairs can be made to the shelving.
6. At this point, another report goes to the anthropology department, then facilities, then we bring in the consultant again.
7. The Consultant then gives his qualified report indicating a need for a metallurgist to repair the metal frame, so in he comes.
8. The metallurgist then takes a look at the room and the damage, and states that the work environment is unsafe by reason of the many broken pieces of wood scattered around the damaged frame.
9. So, once again, another report to the anthropology department, then facilities, then the consultant, at which point the Fire Marshal, Garbage Truck Driver, and carpenter are brought in to manage the broken pieces of wood away, then the requisite set of reports to the metallurgist so he can return and safely proceed with the repairs.
10. The metallurgist then returns, repairs the damaged frame, and submits a report to the carpenter informing him that the frame has been restored to a functional state.
11. The carpenter then returns, observes that there are no undamaged wooden shelves, then submits a report to facilities stating that the task is complete and certifying the functional state of all wooden shelves in the professor's office.
12. Facilities forwards the report to the anthropology department, and the anthropology department informs the professor that his office has been restored to working condition.
By stacking the books himself, the professor performed part of the Librarian's job for him. There are no provisions for the librarian to simply enumerate already-stacked books. That librarian becomes subject to blame, should he deviate in any way from the procedure, so his only option is to have nothing to do with it -- meaning no report to the carpenter. Though the carpenter may get two of the three reports he needs, he'll be waiting indefinitely on the Librarian's report.
You bastard, you beat me to it. I logged in specifically to make that observation. Bastard. I bet you wear bastard T shirts and bastard shorts and have a bastard laptop. Bastard.
You are the 4th person making the same joke.
You are the 2nd person making the same joke.
You are the 3rd person making the same joke.
You are the 3.5th person making the same joke.
No, the useless person is the one whose job is to apologize that the carpenter can't come
That guy's job wasn't to apologize for the carpenter, it was to distract the anthropologist such that the carpenter could get some work done.
That's probably the foreman. There's that joke about how a small town wanted to hire a caretaker to take care of a work yard. Due to government regulations, any workman would have to have a supervisor. The supervisor would also need a superintendant. Because public funds were being spent, they would need an accountant. They would also need a recruitment coordinator. A health-and-safety advisor would also be needed due to manual labor. After a year, they were over budget and fired the caretaker.
I've worked in companies where they had a manager/worker ratio of 1:3. The director sits in the office behind three managers, who each supervised a lead engineer, who in turn supervised three engineers. The three managers and director were in their own office. The lead engineers/help desk manager were right next door. Everyone just spent their time printing out task lists (what would be Jira today) and getting them approved by each other. This was bedore the paperless office and a year later the entire management layer was then flattened to a ratio of 1:7 like the film Office Space.
The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect" who was allowed to describe how things were to be implemented but not actually see or review the source code.
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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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What could be more pointless than to have a job producing videos that everyone ignores?
How about
- Bellhops
- Free community newspaper editors
- Sign spinners
There was a Job in New Orleans
They called it a pointless job
and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
and lord, I know, I'm one
My mother was a receptionist
sold my commodore 64
My father was a program man
scripting in brainfuck
The only thing a scripter needs
is an editor and some luck
And the only time, he's satisfied
when he's, using, a thunk
Oh Mother, tell your children
Not to be a cunt
Spend your life in sincere misery
In the house of the pointless Job
Not attached to a platform
No, specific, tool chain
I'm goin' back, to New Orleans
To slowly go insane
Well, there is a Job in New Orleans
They call the Pointless Job
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself, but it's not that simple in this professor's case.
Don't forget that it wasn't his property to fix; It was the institution's property. He technically didn't have the right to fix it. In fact, he likely would've gotten in trouble with his building's facilities management team.
What if he was working in an older university building, and there was asbestos mitigation that had to take place due to federal and state regulations? That's legal liability that has to be considered.
And that says nothing about some union people getting upset about someone doing their job for them.
As much as it sucks for the professor, he probably did the right thing and let it go - other than cleaning up the initial mess, of course.
And you'd think a bunch of tech nerds who work in IT would know that you spend a lot of time apologizing for broken things that can't be fixed because nobody has enough money. It's just as likely the Carpenter knew they weren't going to be given the time or materials to do the job and so they're putting it off. It's a school, and we've been cutting funding to those for 30 years.
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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...
They also clean the toilet and check that there is toiletpaper and soap ..
Why were the books still on the ground!? What kind of company doesn't employ a book pickeruperer for such situations?
That's not a useless job. The apologizer was doing an extremely important job. Without him, the carpenter would become so distracted and completely bogged down in responding to status update requests that he wouldn't have any time to do any carpeting.
It's important to protect your most valued assets so they can focus on doing solely what they do best. This is why management is supposed to exist. This concept is everywhere in manufacturing plants, dev ops, software development, trade jobs, etc... You don't have your AI experts writing style sheets. The anthropology department was effectively trying to harass the carpenter. Why didn't they attempt to schedule an appointment for the future rather than constantly calling "are you ready now"? The people in the anthropology department who spent their time calling multiple times each day are the people with the useless jobs. Clearly they didn't have enough tasks to do. Couldn't it be understandable that there was more important things to work on than a broken book shelf? Wouldn't it be safe to assume the guy picking up the phone would have been doing something else if the anthropology folks weren't constantly calling him?
How could the department not have the foresight to move the books? Did they want the books damaged by someone who might not know how to properly care for them? Did they think the carpenter would know which things were ok to displace so that he could make room for a stack of books? Did they think he could do construction work while trying to carefully step around tripable and slidable objects on the floor? Did they want the books put back out of order? The people in the department have no common sense. Useless people.
What we need is less people making snap judgments and instead thinking things through a bit more before complaining.
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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Ask any MBA manager who does nothing but has meetings all day to set you straight. Technology is not important nor impacts productivity at all. Now back to generating wealth for the shareholders by having management who make up 50% of the office do more meetings
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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 :-) ]
No, if you create a useful output, (it meets the client criteria, and they pay for it), then by definition your job is "useful". Does not necessarily make it a "good" one.
Anyway, sounds like you need a change...
His own: anthropology professor.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
That dude must have started his own religion now, having magically disappeared of the face of the Earth for no reason.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
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.
This is hilarious on a number of levels, not in the least because the person writing about "bullshit jobs" is an anthropologist--a field of science that originally had a goal, had its goal branded politically inappropriate and scientifically not rigorous enough, and then transitioned into an eternal cycle of doing nothing but self-reflecting on par with some kind of Buddhist monastery.
The whole area of humanities--which I originally come from myself--and large chunks of social sciences are by and large jobs in search of a job. You need not look further than the most junior level entrants into the job: the Ph.D. candidates. I know a number of people both in STEM and in humanities and have been to general meetings and colloquia of both. STEM candidates usually have a work group that has a problem and a team leader that coordinates the new entrants to solve the problem and produce results. It's not perfect, but it's objective driven more often than it is not. Humanities candidates on the other hand each have their own project that they make up and meet on a weekly basis to discuss how they can "problematize" their research. The people who get the most ahead are the ones who are best are "problematizing" their research, whatever that research may be about. It still annoys me to this day to think of some of the mundane crap I had to sit through and then sit through some more as two dolts were discussing whether they should call something A or B for half an hour, because A sounds more foreign, but B is used in the literature.
Quite frankly, our dear anthropologist should probably do some more self-reflecting and determine if his job is not a "bullshit job". Out of all the candidates I have run across and I have run across many different breeds from humanities--mostly historians, area studies people and anthropologists--anthropologists are by far the most bullshitty of them all. At least the guy whose job is apologizing for why the carpenter didn't complete the task on time is working towards keeping the client--because the carpenter sure as hell can't--and thus a presumably profitable business afloat. The only thing Dr. Graeber is doing is wasting the taxes paid by the same business because some capital bureaucrat deemed his research worthwhile without having the slightest idea of what it is about. Everybody in humanities know that this is precisely how it works.
This is getting very religeous.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
He's saying that there was a guy who's primary job seemed
And this is fundamentally the problem with his premise. Most of the things he complains about is not someone's primary job, but rather some single side part of their job. The guy postulated that there's a man employed to apologise, but in reality there's a man employed to manage facilities with the incredible amount of shit that comes with it who occasionally will have to apologise because of backlogged work.
The key words were in the first line of the second paragraph: "to the outsider". In otherwords, you have no idea what's going on and don't claim to understand what people's jobs actually entail.
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.
Unions are my first thought as well. They often define these incredibly narrow jobs, in order to create more roles for more people. I've told the story before, but my first encounter with this was installing a sewage plant automation system. My company had programmed the computer, and we were installing the computer and the software. As part of these, I was sent around to all the various valves and actuators and such, with the job to test whether or not wire A on the one end really did correspond to the wire labelled "A" on the other end.
For this, I obviously needed someone from the sewage plant, who knew where all the valves and actuators were physically located. Fine, that's two of us. Now the union rules start: neither of us was allowed to do anything. There was the guy who opened the physical casings. There was the second guy who physically attached the leads from the multimeter. There was the third guy who was allowed to actually look at the multimeter. And there was the fourth guy, from operations, who had to be physically present because union regulations said so. Six people, in total, where only two were needed (as an EE, I was perfectly capable of handling the connections, multimeter, etc.).
Did any of these people resent having such a narrowly defined job? Imagine, for example, the guy who is allowed to attach the multimeter leads to the actuator, but was not allowed to actually look at the multimeter: does that job make any sense? I dunno, but I expect after a while you just figure it's a cushy job, requiring little effort, and you're glad to go home at the end of the day and drink a beer.
The result, of course, is higher taxes (in this case, because the sewage plant is paid for by taxes), or else needlessly expensive products (US auto makers' downfall: to stay price competitive, given union-driven labor costs, they have to cut corners on quality).
Of course, the other group are government bureaucrats. In private industry, cruft is eventually cleaned out by falling profits. The government has no such external constraint. So there are plenty of bureaucrats who shove papers around. They may not realize how useless their job is, because they are just complying with regulations - it's the regulations that need to go, thus eliminating the excuse for the useless positions. But that would reduce someone's little empire, so it never happens...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Anyone else find it hilarious that an anthropologist is complaining that *other* people's jobs are pointless?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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 write fairly well and sound intelligent, so I believe somewhere, someone would find you useful. I know unsolicited advice is probably least welcome to you right now, but it does come to mind that you might find it useful to continue to "think smaller" and more concretely about any possible dimension along which you could offer some value to someone in the short term. That may bear almost no relation to where you thought it would be, or what people had expected for you. Best of luck to you and keep trying!
The UK is a democratic socialist country which believes that capitalism is inherently incompatible with equality and that the state, therefore, has the charter to step in and order everyone's lives about to make things fair.
So of course in a place where everyone waits for the government to tell them what to do, those books are staying right there on the floor until a maverick comes along with common sense and picks them up.
That kind of schtuff doesn't happen as much in the US, because individuals are expected to act independently.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
You don't need unions to stop that abuse, just stop this ridiculous fetish the US has for salaried white collar labor. Take whatever your pay is today, do the math on what fraction of your time would be 50%/100% overtime and work out the equivalent base pay that would bring home the same paycheck. It wouldn't pay you less. It wouldn't cost them more. But it would take away all the perverse incentives to squeeze more "free" labor out of you. It doesn't make you a burger flipper chump, it's a reflection of the fact that most companies and most positions have an infinite number of things they'd like to do and most product backlogs has many man-years of work waiting to float to the top.
Effectively the only limit to a salaried position is when you say you've done enough and your typical 9-5 worker doesn't have that freedom. Keep it for management and special positions but not ordinary office workers. If they insist on extra crunch time, you get extra paid. If shit hits the fan you get extra paid for extra clean-up duty. If they're not happy with your work/pay ratio like that things go slow and always into overtime, well first of all that's a tap management controls. I can't work overtime unless I have my manager's blessing, so he can either decided it's not that important or to let someone else handle it or hire a consultant/temp or whatever.
If it's a general dissatisfaction with the work output to pay, we'll negotiate that through salary and promotions/layoffs. Not under the table "finish this and don't track the hours or else...", that should be a criminal offense leading to a company-wide audit, back pay and so on. Honestly I wouldn't mind if every person in management had to do a SOX-style sign-off that to the best of their ability these time sheets reflect actual hours worked under threat of perjury and jail time. You can set any hourly wage you want (beyond minimum wage, anyway) but it better be a truthful account of hours worked and overtime owed. That's IMHO it should work for everybody.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect" who was allowed to describe how things were to be implemented but not actually see or review the source code.
And like most things labeled "Agile", it has nothing to do with Agile development... Still, that's not bad at all!
I (briefly) held a job in which the architect not only described at a high level how things were to be implemented, but before you could start coding you had to provide the architect with a detailed implementation plan for him to approve, and at the end he had to review and approve the final code. There was one architect and some 40 developers. By the time I left, my entire team had been idling for an entire two-week sprint because the architect was still working through last month's paperwork, and we'd yet to be given the go-ahead to actually write any code. (This, management told us, was supposed to be Scrum.)
Which is probably why he went and asked people idiot, that is how you learn things you realize you don't know but someone else probably does.
He collected 250 stories of people who did not think there was any point in what they did. Is that all anecdotal or is 250 starting to become data; can't say don't know enough about the study objectives but it's a start
I am paid full time to work ~15 minutes a day 5 days a week. The rest of the time I am paid to sit in a chair and wait for work to happen. Realistically my work could be absorbed into some of my co-workers' roles but lucky for me they haven't chosen to do so.
"they needed millwright to get the bulb out of the closet"
I'm calling bullshit on this. Millwright, is that the right word? Is English your first language?
https://www.carpenters.org/cra...
Members of the carpenters union are called "Millwrights".
but suffering from bibliophobia.
How many people in the university actually live and work in the outside world, the real, physical world? Not many. So, they don't understand or appreciate the critical necessity for people who do, the carpenters, mechanics, technicians etc., people who can and do get things done with their hands. Not understanding means not appreciating means not valuing means not funding and manning properly the positions. It would be more economical and understandable to them to hire one essentially useless desk-sitting, phone- manning, "Dean of Apologizing," than to hire the correct number of carpenters. Must keep the budget down after all. And while the task the professor wants accomplished seems important to him the carpenter may just have looked it over and determined it was way down his list of priorities in his busy work day. Bookshelf for some entitled professor? Nope, not now. Besides, why did the professor expect the carpenter to move and pile his books for him? Did he call a servant?
E Proelio Veritas.
For those few who made it as far as reading the Guardian piece, here's an earlier version of Graeber's argument.
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.
A corollary to the useless job appears to be the important, but extremely scarce job. The carpenter probably had to join a union, spend years in apprenticeship, and the combination of limited intake by the union and a long training pipeline creates a labor cartel that is artificially scarce. What if, instead of an overscheduled carpenter and a full-time coordinator/apologist, there were two carpenters, likely for the same or less pay? How would that be accomplished in a modern labor market?
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 story describes a standard union work rules situation. The carpenter arrives on scene and notesthat there are books on the floor. But the Book-Stackers Local is tied up right now on a library addition. Eventually, the prof restacks the books himself. Now he can have the carpenter over, but when word gets out about the prof's unauthorized performance of union work, he will be denied tenure.
The good news is that there is a decent position waiting for him at Arizona State.
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. :-)
Yes, real estate agents are kind of a drag on the whole process, and I don't know what's going to happen to them. Most are adapting by charging lower commissions. But it's not like you can go on Zillow or Redfin and click "Add to Cart" on a house you like. They really did provide a service up until MLS was put online...they were the ones with the keys and the books of Polaroids showing their inventories, and you really couldn't go house hunting without talking to one.
Real estate transactions in general are very expensive because you have so many people involved at every phase (the agents, the buyers, the sellers, the title search company, the mortgage company, etc.) But, I'm not convinced that suddenly pulling all middlemen form the economy and causing double-digit unemployment overnight is the answer either.
Real (inflation adjusted) median household income has in fact increased 265% since Keynes wrote that. Average home size has also tripled, because apparently we'd rather buy ever larger homes and TVs instead of working less.
Unfortunately the labor market for any particular skillset tends to be very small, to the point of oligarchy. Especially now that menial jobs are more and more commonly being "outsourced" to contracting organizations so that instead of 3,000 businesses in a city all needing janitors, you have 3 or for "janitorial service" contractors that service most of those businesses.
The result being that there's near monopoly level of abuse across much of the available labor pool, and people take whatever job they can get, despite it paying far less than the work is worth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Anyone who has worked in a large defense company has observed people who had no identifiable skills or duties, yet were hanging around on the payroll. A common characteristic is that they were buddies with lots of other people and had been there a long time. Some of them were managers who were known to have "retired on the job" - which did not appear to interfere with their continued employment.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Btw when I wrote "Average home sizes have tripled, because apparently we'd rather buy ever larger homes and TVs instead of working less", I was sitting outside my 3,500 square foot house. I share this house with my wife and daughter.
My mom grew up in a 1,200 sq foot house, in a family of six. They had 1,200 sq feet for the family, I have 1,200 sq feet PER PERSON. My dad's family home was probably 850 sq feet, for a family of five.
I might be silly. I *could* instead work a three-month contract once a year, taking 9 months off each year, and have a standard of living more like my parents grew up with.
They also know how to measure a house, create floor plans, propose a price that will help maximise selling price while still actually selling, know how to use the website to post the house to it and - here's the real value - handle all of the enquiries from prospective buyers, filter out the time wasters, validate the genuine offers and work with you to complete the process.
What, you thought the buyer was their customer?
The job described, managing the scarcity of carpentry at a university, isn't completely pointless so is a bad example. Our economy is not so advanced that it can avoid scarcity of a lot of things. That is why we use price to regulate demand. Sometimes we manage scarcity through rationing or long lines to get service instead. If you don't want riots, you probably need someone to manage the rationed or delayed people.
In this particular instance, 2 carpenters would probably have been a better idea than 1 carpenter and an apologist. But for all I know, that area has a carpenter shortage. I don't think the guy who has to manage the big faculty egos is doing nothing.
A humongous amount of jobs these days revolve around marketing and sales. Apart from the small minority that actually brings some fun to our lives (I'm talking about you, Red Bull) or actually provides some useful information about innovations that I might like, they are utterly pointless. The software they use is pointless and we have thousands of marketing software packages with overlapping features. All pointless.
Then we have the vast majority of software engineers that work on making and integrating these useless solutions. All pointless, just like the people maintaining their offices and sitting at the desk in front of it.
That's what capitalism is. Practically nobody does anything because it is useful. They do it because they can make some money. The alternative is communism, which trades pointlessness for inefficiency.
There used to be some jobs that were less pointless. They still exist, but they're a monitory. Those are the jobs that provide us with homes, food, fun, care and knowledge. The rest is all pointless. Or maybe they all are, because what is the point of humanity anyway?
0x or or snor perron?!
what do most professors do? regurgitate others works. most are as replaceable as tissue paper. the professor is as unnecessary as the faux carpenter. Doubly so since he was such a lazy useless ass he didn't want to pick up books.
Anyone whose job title begins with "Chief" and ends with "Officer", for example.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Not sure where you got that from, neither "productive", nor "non-union" means higher wages. Nor does either productive or non-union mean the job is not labor oriented.
A man can be highly productive, and not be a member of a union, and make equal or lesser pay than less productive union members. Union contractors for a telco have a division of labor. Not being a union employee there is no division of labor on my part. I can fix a problem in one visit that for a telco might require three visits at $70 a visit, plus parts.
Warning, the planet is doomed! Please grab your belongings and head to the Ark Ships.
If you are a scientist , engineer, or a doer Take Ark Ship C.
If you are in a management or political position Take Ark ship A
All others, Hairdressers, Telephone Sanitizers, etc..Take Ark Ship B.
The first Ark ship to depart will be B so hurry and get your things... Time is running out...
The answer to online competition is not to lower prices but to offer more added value than a website can.
If they don't add any value, then bye bye, society doesn't need them.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
But most real estate agents don't do most of that even for the seller. Most just want to sell your house as quickly as possible. It's common for real estate agents to brag about selling a house in under a week. Some even brag about selling it over the asking price. If you get multiple offers in under a week and sell it for more than the asking price then your real estate agent conpletely failed at his job because it means you could probably have asked for a lot more.
I was describing their role. I didn't say whether they were any good at it.
The role exists. Some people do it well. Some people do not.
Which is why he is ideally qualified to speak on the matter.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
One could argue that being an anthropology professor is a completely pointless job.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
All jobs are pointless. If you have meaning in your life it's because you managed to create it yourself out of the pointlessness of your existence, not because there was inherent meaning in it.
given that the anthropologist has a high likelihood of being better able to describe the social dynamics at play than, for example, me, no, I don't.
> No I do not live in Silicon Valley. I live in a crappy, somewhat iffy, part of Orange County California. You can't pin this on lack growth/development.
You anticipated my question. I lived on Orange County when I was a kid. I now live in a very nice Dallas suburb. For 3,500 sq feet, I paid $240,000, 18 months ago. I say I paid $240K - I paid about $19K or $20K out of my pocket. The rest of the down payment was seller concessions, a rebate from the agent, etc.
If I had bought a brand new house in a nice neighborhood, I would get maybe 2,100 sq feet for the price. My house hadn't had updates since it was built in the 1990s. The sellers should have spent $10K on updates and sold the house for $35,000 more. Stupid shit I fixed in 15 minutes, like an incorrectly wired outlet, cost them thousands of dollars at resale.
Along with wondering where you live, I also wondered exactly what your "STEM degree" is and if you actively manage your career.
.. of communist society. In communism, you wait for some bureaucrat to decide your worth for you, from cradle to grave. Those who dare to take individual initiative are sent to reeducation gulags lest their fascist questioning of state mandates spread to the working class.
I haven't held a pointless job, but I've sure had pointless tasks added to a job that I was doing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have to confess that in my younger days I was part of turning Ft. Lauderdale into a mess. i mover there in 1953 as a child and went to work doing such things as concrete work, clearing land, installing traffic and street lights and other things. like most people i had been told that making a place more desirable was a good thing as it attracted tourists as well as new residents who were impressed with area. What we did was create a horrible mess. People came by the millions to Ft.Lauderdale and surrounding suburbs. the town has killed off almost all wild life, polluted the waters, now has crime rates and morals of the lowest type etc.. Doing most of the work that I did has helped to ruin a good place to live. The public would have been better off if they payed me to do nothing. I am one of millions that should admit that. All i can tell you is that when you hear the word growth look at the person who wants growth as if he was Satan's best friend.
I make more than your run of the mill CWA thug that cuts fiber cables every time his mafioso isn't happy. After all, what makes the world a safer, better, more productive place than severing communication lines that provide access to unproductive things that we don't need, like health care services?
Oh wait did I say mafioso? Sorry, "union management" is the correct term.
well, who ever this anonymous coward was who wrote this, he only wrote it here, at least according to google. so, I'm guessing not a bot or a shill. personally, I'm willing to believe.
Might makes right irrelevant.
If all goes well, we'll be skipping the cyberpunk age pretty quickly and move into diamond age style post scarcity. No need for too many jobs then anymore.
15 hours per week and person would do perfectly fine already. All over the planet.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Except that without the Union, the asshole would get fired for not working and for being an asshole, while the old timer's work ethic could be rewarded by getting paid more instead of based on how many years he's been in the job.
Incentives matter.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So you'd have us believe that an anthropology professor is such a dysfunctional human being they wouldn't even pick up some books after a shelf collapsed? Or that a carpenter that apparently never shows up anywhere can make it to the office so promptly that he gets there before said books are picked up, and then never shows up again after that? Something about that story doesn't add up. In fact, I think it's just made up. And what's more pointless than making up a story about someone with a pointless job? That's like the most pointless job of all!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The anthropology professor/major has been the but of more than one joke on a pretty useless profession. And I do understand they fill a niche.
That sewer is nothing but a drain. Pointless jobs, including the 435 members of congress, and the 100 senators.
I've quit two jobs because they were pointless like this. The punchline: I'm a software engineer, not a bureaucrat. There was definitely meaningful work to be done in both cases. I knew what had be done & I very much wanted to do it. However, my immediate managers were very bent on managing me, and they managed me in a way that I could not get real work done, at least not at any meaningful rate. After wasting countless days of my life being managed in each case, I ultimately said "f it" and quit.
Yeah, that's probably one of the worst places for this.
As has been discussed elsewhere, you'll have people being sent left and right on health and safety courses, telling you what you can and cannot do. If you try and complete a job that is not your official job (Just put the bloody shelf up yourself), and it doesn't have the paperwork to go with it - good luck with that.
There are Administrators. And Administrative Administrators. And Office Administrative Administrators to administrate the Administrative Administrators. The Vogons were likely based solely on the administrative system of a UK university.
Whereas the academic side of a UK university is whichever race can get to a villa in southern France the fastest.
I started reading the article with interest, and got down to where he defined Goons,
The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies
Call the military goons if you like, but the logic behind calling it a bullshit job is, well, bullshit. It's like saying that we wouldn't need programmers if there weren't computers. Or, we wouldn't need police if there was no crime.
Just another day in Paradise
Real estate transactions in general are very expensive because you have so many people involved at every phase (the agents, the buyers, the sellers, the title search company, the mortgage company, etc.) But, I'm not convinced that suddenly pulling all middlemen form the economy and causing double-digit unemployment overnight is the answer either.
Actually it's not as expensive as you think (or maybe it's different where you are). My friend just sold their house for $1.5M. The costs for that transaction were Agent commission, legal fees and taxes and that's it. The lawyer handles the taxes and agent payment from the proceeds of sale, and from memory their fee is about $1500 (title searches/inspection fees etc are all part of this).
They got completely ripped off and ended up paying about $50k to the agent for what was effectively photos($500?), an ad on the leading websites($100?), a sign out the front ($500?) and a couple of hours work showing the home and doing the negotiation($1000?). This part should really be a fixed price of no more than $5k max, which is about how much effort is expended to sell a property.
And people wonder what Bernie's "jobz for allz" will look like.
The fucking unions will be the ones crying about immigrants taking their jobs as well, immigrants who generally want to work for a living. Either get exploited by companies or unions, either way the average worker loses.
> I don't get what people see in big houses.
Aside from "impress your friends and family" (with your stupidity?) I can only tell you how *I* ended up in a house much too big.
I'm a tinkerer, with a lot of hobbies, so it's worth something to me to have room to work on model planes, DJ lighting rigs, and all manner of other things. Ideally I'd like to live at Jamie Hyneman's M5 Industries shop. :)
When I was shopping for a home, houses were being sold in about a day or two, so buyers really didn't have time to think much about a specific house, to analyze things before putting in an offer. I was shopping for about 1,900-2,100 sq feet when I came across one in the same price range that has 3,500. That's an extra 1,400 FOR FREE*. I don't need all that room, but I'll take it if I get it for free, I figured.
What I didn't account for, because I hadn't planned on buying something this big, was that insurance cost is based on REPLACEMENT cost, not purchase price. So my insurance is based on what it would cost to build a brand new 3,500 sq foot house. Taxable value also uses square footage as a major factor.
* One reason I got an extra 1,400 sq feet "for free" was because the previous owner hadn't done various simple maintenance and upgrade tasks. There were several jobs around the house that will each take anywhere from a few minutes (replacing worn door knobs) to a weekend (painting some rooms) which they never got around to doing. The kitchen light is the old style with two four-foot fluorescent tubes; recessed can lights are in style now. It'll take a couple hours to upgrade that. (But I'm waiting to see what new styles come out based on high output LED technology).
Federal governments around the world compete to master the art of creating such jobs.
I would hate being paid hourly. In most cases Iâ(TM)ve seen it would result in a net reduction of take-home. It means less accounting for me and the company, and I know how much Iâ(TM)ll make next month. And I can go to a school thing or be sick and still pay the mortgage.
Nobody forces me to overwork.
"while the old timer's work ethic could be rewarded by getting paid more"
Without the union the old timer wouldn't be paid more, would be working flat out overloaded all day/every day and would be sacked just short of retirement, so that his pension is void.
The problem isn't the union. The problem is the asshole.
It may surprise you but a _responsible_ union spends most of its time telling workers who slack off or get sacked for slacking off not to take the piss and that they have no case against their employer. They save the big stick for when it's actually needed - when the employer's actually behaving in an illegal an dunfair manner.
Without unions to combat exploitation and provide the ability to collectively negotiate wages, you can be assured that sweatshops, on the job injuries/deaths and starvation wages would still be "A Thing". If the neolibs who business seems to worship at the feet of have their way, that scenario wlll happen again.
petty vendetta "Demarcation disputes" are an indication of a toxic corporate culture and if unions are engaging in them, then it's an indication that they have become toxic. There many are unions that nobody has ever heard of because they've spent decades solving industrial problems amicably and never needed to call a strike - their members prefer it that way and would leave in droves if things became confrontational without a very good reason.
"Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong."
That's because you didn't make her pay the bill.
Wallets are a valid educational tool.
The traditional commish for real estate scumbags is 7%. Often split between buyer and seller agents.
If the buyer doesn't have an agent, the traditional solution is for the sellers agent to take all 7%. But that's all negotiable.
Real estate agents are a dime a dozen. Low ball them on their commission rate when shopping your listing out. Some will balk, fuck them, there are dozens just like them.
If all else fails, take the real estate agent test. _Morons_ pass it every day, one weekend worth of study should do it. You really should understand the process, just to prevent financial sodomy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Should have made her get the models nipples hard too.
She was just doing everything wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So you're claim is that all the unions people have heard of suck, while there is an invisible set of unions out there no one has heard of which don't have any of those very public problems?
Do you also have an invisible friend who agrees with you on your unsubstantiated political opinions? You can see why the rest of us may be less than convinced by a lack of evidence being the evidence, right?
So sure, give us your list of top 5 unions which "solve problems amicably" and don't have any featherbedding or disputes about work divisions and who don't protect workers who aren't doing their jobs.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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!
Sounds like they were already charging at least twice that between all of them, just standing around and chatting anyway. Looks like you saved your company some money!
If that charge made it up to the head of your department, it would be pretty clear to them that if they're going to work with a union company, they'd prefer to switch to one with more people having old-timer's ethic anyway.
90% of everything is crap, including the private sector.
Why is the web slathered with helpful little articles on how to put up with your asshole boss—especially in the private sector? People don't simply leave these asshole jobs, especially in America, because of systemic mobility friction, like a health plan tied to an employer who wields it as a club to get away with hiring cheap (and bad, and often abusive) bottom-tier management staff.
When you form the Cantor map of government suckitude to private sector suckitude to determine which has the larger cardinality, a single Enron cancels out 10,000 small anecdotes. But we wrap up colossal stinkers like Enron in a tidy garbage bag with a red bow tie: the foolish shareholders deserved to lose their money, and then we neglect to gape over the majestic size of the Enron crater.
Who were the biggest losers? Hard-working California linemen, whose pensions funds were taken for a ride at the Arthur Andersen cleaners. Oh, they screwed up, too, bigly? Quick, hand me another garbage bag, and let's not gape at that majestic hole, either.
Bottom line: there ain't no monopoly on inefficiency in any walk of life. The Cantor map between private sector and public sector fuckitude takes a lot of brain power, because the sectors have very different shapes and ultimate loss functions.
So what people do instead is a stupid pet trick: declaring that every fuck-up of the private sector can be construed as "some foolish stakeholder deserved the shit outcome; they'll wise up next time, and the world will turn better soon." The whole point of Authur Anderson (and their ilk) was that society had come to a joint realization that having everyone in the entire country devoting 25% of their day to caveat emptoring basic business criminality was a colossal waste of human potential.
Caveat emptor—done right—is a substantially specialized skillset in the complex modern economy. This is why grandma missed Spectre and Meltdown and bought herself a fucked up Intel box, nevertheless; one that an active, private-sector vigilance (on the back of a caveat emptor PhD obtained in her well-spent youth) would have adequately warned her against. And now some Russian mobster has spent your inheritance. You go, private sector, FTW.
It's not unusual for there to be rules about moving books, papers, or anything with writing on it. So if someone sees a floor covered in books it's reasonable to wait until they've all been moved by someone responsible for them before restarting the work.
Only if there's a free market for labor - or if laborers don't need a job to survive. Currently, neither of those are true, and so there's no inherent connection between the value of the labor and the amount paid for it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I've been in almost this exact situation. However, instead of sitting in the dark, I had the light bulb flickering over my head. I was going insane!
The first day I notified the facilities team lead. (they can't be called a foreman anymore)
The second day I notified the team lead's manager.
The third day I notified the manager's director, and two electricians were at my desk within an hour.
The millwright excuse is BS. It needs to be in the contract that if it can be carried in one hand, no millwright is needed. That gets rid of a lot of BS. Millwrights are only supposed to be moving extremely heavy things, not lightbulbs.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I have done shows in halls where we could not unload our cars at the dock and carry boxes into the venue. There was a union that did that - for an extra fee.
Want to carry stuff yourself?
Come through the front doors - but no dollies allowed.
Take whatever your pay is today, do the math on what fraction of your time would be 50%/100% overtime and work out the equivalent base pay that would bring home the same paycheck.
The problem with this line of thinking is that people sometimes don't know how many hours of overtime are going to be involved until they accept the position. I know people where unreasonable demands started to be made once they had transitioned from hourly to salaried. This is the sort of thing that you can hopefully figure out from other employees before you accept the job. Things also change. I'm doing a lot more work these days then I was two years ago just because the company is now twice as big as before.
I recall a story years ago about exiled teachers who were either incompetent or being accused of various types of misconduct who are literally paid to sit around and do nothing because they can't teach because of the above, and not be fired because of their union.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3149...
Most people couldn't do what, exactly?
> mortgage/rent and bills takes up most of people's income.
You're right, that's a major expense.
The median home size has tripled. In other words, what most people do is they pay a major portion of their income for a home that's three times the size of what their parents or grandparents had. They *could* cut their rent, heating and cooling costs, etc by 66% by choosing a home the same size they grew up in.
You CAN upgrade to a new TV every few years, so you have the best 4K home theater experience, or you can keep a TV for 10-15 years like your parents did. If you choose the second way, you can work a six month contract and take six months off each year.
The traditional commish for real estate scumbags is 7%. Often split between buyer and seller agents.
That must be an American thing. We don't have buyers agents here (they do exist but rare), and selling agents commission is generally 2%-2.5%. The average house price here is somewhere around $1.5M so that's $30k-$40k for what is effectively a few hours work. It just doesn't make sense.
If all else fails, take the real estate agent test. _Morons_ pass it every day, one weekend worth of study should do it. You really should understand the process, just to prevent financial sodomy.
We've got a couple of startups that do flat fee selling for $6k. They are licensed agents and do all the same things with the same protection, but a little more no frills, which less face who cares. You should be buying a house because you like it, not because an agent has whiter teeth.
Not all of them, but a lot of them. Militant unions (like say, teamsters and dockworkers) which wield power disproportionate to their size and end up with leadership with political ambitions are the ones which end up in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Most engineering unions, for starters, along with most technical ones, seldom if ever end up taking industrial action.
Teaching and Nursing unions are another group who take a lot of provokation. When they do start taking action you can be assured they have some very real axes to grind.
Can you be more specific? i.e. actual union names?
My experience with teaching unions is that they are among the most militant. Where I live, in the last couple of weeks they had a 5 day strike at the end of the school year breaking their contract terms because the legislature hadn't yet gotten to voting on what the governor promised them in terms of a future pay raise.
My experience with nursing unions is that they spend a lot of effort co-opting other groups, like home health care workers, attempting to force their employers to become union-only shops.
I'm not as familiar with engineering unions, but here's the first Google result I found, which doesn't sound very promising...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.