fatguyinalittlecoat
Footballguy
OK, I only called this Bullcrap jobs to get past the language filter. I just read the book Bull**** Jobs and it blew my mind. If you are interested in rethinking some assumptions about the way our society is structured, I recommend it. The book defines "bull**** jobs" as "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 conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
Anyway, the book is basically a fleshing out of the author's premise in an article he wrote back in 2013 called On The Phenomenon of Bull**** Jobs. Here are a few excerpts from the article:
Anyway, the book is highly recommended, interested to hear thoughts on its premise from the brilliant posters here, who I suspect, have a very high proportion of bull#### jobs.
Anyway, the book is basically a fleshing out of the author's premise in an article he wrote back in 2013 called On The Phenomenon of Bull**** Jobs. Here are a few excerpts from the article:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The book discusses all this stuff in much greater depth, from what bull#### jobs are, why they're bad, why they've proliferated, etc. At the end he suggests that a Universal Basic Income could help fix the problem but makes clear that the book is about identifying the problem and generating discussion rather than proposing a specific solution. I'm interested to hear from anyone with thoughts about this. From a public policy perspective the book changes everything. Politicians are always talking about creating jobs and the dignity of work, when the real crisis isn't that too many people are jobless, it's that too many people are doing jobs for no good reason while they could be enjoying their lives doing other things.This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It's even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It's as if they are being told ‘but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’
Anyway, the book is highly recommended, interested to hear thoughts on its premise from the brilliant posters here, who I suspect, have a very high proportion of bull#### jobs.