What would the U.S. unemployment rate be if all useless or harmful jobs were eliminated?
It would probably be equivalent to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Barack Obama, in an interview in 2006, stated the problem:
“I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have. … Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”
David Graeber, in his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, quoted public opinion polls that found 37 percent of UK employees and 40 percent in the Netherlands thought their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world.
Now maybe that is exaggerated. Maybe some of them think they make a contribution, but that it’s not “meaningful.”
Offsetting this, the inherent bias of people is to think we are accomplishing more than other people think we do or the objective facts indicate.
For example, public relations, advertising, lobbying, consulting and even speculation on financial and commodities markets have their uses. It is just that they play more of a role in the economy than they should.
I myself think the U.S. military and intelligence services are much greater than necessary to protect the homeland from attack. Of course, if the mission is to make the United States the world’s only superpower, no number could be great enough.
The question is: What would happen if all these people were thrown on the job market, all at once?
It would be a catastrophe, unless there were some sort of basic income guarantee (which Graeber advocates) or basic job guarantee.
Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.
The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet noone talks about it.
How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
David Graeber: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (2013)
David Graeber, in his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory, describes the frustrations of people doing jobs that they know are useless or even harmful, because the meaningful jobs are either unavailable or low-paid.
He said that forcing people to engage on tedious activities that serve no useful purpose, or, worse still, pretending to work when they actually aren’t, constitutes a kind of spiritual violence.
Not all useless or harmful jobs are BS jobs. Graeber defines a BS job as one you know is useless, but you have to pretend is necessary.
I think many of the people who invent BS jobs, or invent useless tasks for the useful workers, are under the impression they are making a positive contribution. Graeber said his strongest critics are business owners who deny the possibility that they could be paying anybody to do anything useless.
A certain number of people think the world is divided into predators and prey, and pride themselves on being successful predators. An example would be the bankers and financiers who, prior to the 2008 financial crash, made subprime mortgage loans to suckers who could never pay them off, then collateralized the mortgages and sold them to other suckers.
What all these jobs—hedge fund managers, telemarketers, diversity consultants, receptionists who never get phone calls, consultants whose advice is never heeded, supervisors with nothing to supervise—is that, if they went on strike, nobody would notice.
What Graeber calls the sh•t jobs are just the opposite. Food service workers, health care workers, trash collectors, janitors and cleaners—all these workers labor under worse conditions and for lower pay than in BS jobs, and, contrary to reason and justice, they get less respect.
Coincidentally or not, the sh•t jobs are disproportionately done by black people, Hispanics and immigrants.
∞∞∞
Graeber said many of us have come to accept the idea that work consists of following somebody’s order to do something we dislike. It follows, then, that if you want good pay, job security and benefits, you are lacking in moral character. He calls this rights scolding.
It takes two forms. Among right-wingers, if you think you are entitled to anything that working people in the time of Charles Dickens didn’t have, you are a fragile snowflake. Among left-wingers, if you think you are entitled to anything that the most oppressed person alive today has, you are told to check your privilege.
It also follows that people whose jobs are fulfilling, such as school teachers, are not really working. The idea is: You get to do work that is pleasurable, useful and respected. How dare you want good pay and job security in addition? Graeber calls this moral envy.
BULLSHIT JOB: A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the condition of employment, the employee fells obliged to pretend that this is not the issue. [David Graeber]
∞∞∞
Huge numbers of people work in jobs that they themselves think are completely unnecessary. Many of them would prefer to do something useful, but useful jobs on average pay less. Sometimes they quit and take a lower-paying useful job anyway.
Some five years ago, David Graeber, an American who teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics, wrote an essay for an obscure left-wing magazine called Strike!, about the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
The article struck a nerve. It got more than a million hits on the Internet, crashed the Strike! web site several times and was translated into more than 10 languages.
A YouGov poll soon after found that 37 percent of full-time employees in the United Kingdom thought their work made no meaningful contribution to the world. A survey in the Netherlands put the number as high as 40 percent. I imagine a survey in the United States would be much different.
Graeber himself communicated with hundreds of unhappy, useless employees via e-mail.
The result is his new book, Bullshit Jobs: a Theory.
He learned about a museum guard whose job was to report if a certain empty room ever caught on fire; a military sub-contractor who drove more than a hundred miles in order to give a German soldier permission to move a piece of equipment from one room to another; a receptionist who, to fill her time, was tasked with jobs such as sorting paperclips by color.
But most of his reports are about people who worked in offices—making studies that were never read, making proposals that were never acted on or not doing anything at all, but doing their best to look busy.
How can there be so many admittedly useless jobs? We live in a time of austerity and layoffs. Full-time jobs are being replaced by temporary jobs. That is true of government as well as the private sector.
One thing that free-enterprise advocates and Marxists agree on is that competitive capitalism produces economic efficiency. Free-marketers think everybody benefits and Marxists think that only the capitalists benefit, but they agree on the drive of business to maximize profit.
Back in the days before the French Revolution, the peasants, who were the main producers of wealth, paid so much in taxes and rent they could barely live. They supported an aristocracy, who, in turn, supported an economic class of coachmen, door keepers, lace makers, dancing masters, gardeners and the like, who were generally better paid than the peasants.
Just like the aristocrats of old, the prestige of managers in organizations is based on the number of people they have working for them. Prestige is not based on whether they are useful or not. In fact, employees whose work is essential are a threat. They have the power to quit or go on strike or to unexpectedly reveal they know more than the boss.
So the incentive is to diminish the role and power of those who do necessary work while inventing new jobs whose existence depends on the discretion of the job creators.
A large number of new jobs are administrative staff. They are different from administrators who make actual decisions. Their job is collect quantitative information about the work of the useful employees on the principle that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Offsetting this, the inherent bias of people is to think we are accomplishing more than other people think we do or the objective facts indicate.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 