“Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout
the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend
to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes
serve any meaningful purpose.”
A few years ago, I made a video titled, “Bulls**t Jobs and the Elusive 15 Hour Work Week”.
It was taken down a while back probably due to the large amounts of profanity I used within
(although I was never really given that as a reason).
Anyway, in the name of keeping this video online, I’m going to use the more civil
term BS in order to keep the YouTube censors at bay.
(Does anybody else think that a YouTube censor is a BS job?).
Anyway, enjoy!
Last week, I was saddened to hear the news of the passing of David Graeber on the 2 September
2020, who died in a Venice hospital aged 59 from apparently natural causes.
He was an American anthropologist and anarchist who popularised the term “BS Jobs”.
From Graeber’s perspective, it’s important to note that BS jobs are not the same thing
as s**t jobs (let’s call them S-jobs from now on).
A BS job is one which doesn’t really need doing.
If the job didn’t exist, society would continue along just merrily.
S-jobs on the other hand, are ones that are demeaning, or don’t pay very well, or ones
where you work in difficult, dangerous, or dirty conditions.
Most S-jobs are actually not BS jobs.
Things like ditch diggers, or sewer cleaners, or fruit pickers.
They might not be very appealing jobs.
They might be a lot of hard work, but they’re jobs that need doing.
For this reason, they should not be classified as BS jobs.
But certainly, one day they’ll be automated.
Nobody really wants to clean a sewer, but society needs clean sewers.
BS Jobs on the other hand, don’t really need doing.
As Graeber once said, “If we suddenly eliminated teachers or garbage collectors or construction
workers or law enforcement or whatever, it would really matter.
We’d notice the absence.
But if BS jobs go away, we’re no worse off.”
Graeber posited that there are basically five types of BS jobs:
1.
Flunkies.
These are basically jobs that exist that serve to make their superiors feel more important.
Jobs like administrative assistants, receptionists, door attendants, and so on.
They do stuff, but it’s often just trivial stuff like passing emails, or organising meetings,
or letting people know that Mr. Johnson is busy right now.
Mr Johnson could probably do all of these things by himself, but he’s too important.
2.
Goons.
Essentially hired bullies and thugs.
They only exist to oppose the other goons hired by other companies.
Companies don’t really need them unless other companies have them.
Jobs like corporate lawyers, telemarketers, lobbyists, and public relations specialists.
If telemarketers didn’t exist, I don’t know about you, but my life would be better
off, not worse.
3.
Duct Tapers.
Duct tapers are essentially there to temporarily fix problems that simply do not need to exist.
It’s essentially like hiring somebody to mop up water from a leaking pipe, when obviously
fixing the pipe would be the much more permanent solution.
Example jobs include programmers whose job is to repair shoddy code.
Airline staff who calm passengers whose bags have gone missing.
Duct tapers are essentially underlings employed to undo the damage caused by mismanagement
or faults in the organisation.
4.
Box Tickers.
Box tickers exist basically to allow an organisation to say that they’re doing something that
they’re not doing.
Jobs like survey administrators and corporate compliance officers.
One lady’s job was to interview people in aged-care to find out what sort of entertainment
they would like to see during their stay.
Most of her job involved collecting and tabulating data which was promptly forgotten about the
next day.
The problem with box tickers is that their job takes up so much time, when instead that
time could have been spent accomplishing the goal itself.
Instead of spending days collecting information about how the residents would like to be entertained,
why not actually entertain the residents.
5.
Taskmasters.
The job of the taskmaster is essentially to manage or create work for those who don’t
need it.
Think of all those middle-management positions, team leaders, and leadership professionals.
There are basically two types of taskmasters.
Ones who are simply there to assign work to others.
They don’t actually do anything themselves.
They are simply a gateway between those who generate the work and those who actually do
the work.
Most of these types of taskmasters secretly know that if they weren’t there, their workers
beneath them would still do their jobs and would not behave any differently.
The second type of taskmaster is the most damaging of the BS jobs.
They’re the ones that actively create BS jobs.
They supervise bulls**t, and if they see people slacking off, they’ll create entirely new
bulls**t tasks.
They are quite literally, bulls**t generators.
Look, I don’t blame people for doing BS jobs.
People need money.
If they get paid for doing something that’s meaningless and they need the money, then
they’ll do it.
And many of us do exactly that.
Perhaps many of us secretly know that our jobs are BS, but unfortunately, we have bills
to pay and mouths to feed, so obviously it’s not in our interest to tell our superiors
that our job is BS.
I think most of us really do want to believe that we are contributing to the world in some
way, so if we think our job is useless, or somebody tells us that it’s useless, we
either go crazy or become quietly miserable.
It’s funny, in 1930, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological
change and productivity improvements would eventually lead to a 15-hour workweek by the
end of the century.
But that simply didn’t happen.
Most people today still work 40 hours or more per week often doing tasks that they see as
having little to no value.
There used to be a time when work was defined as the production of something.
Growing wheat.
Sheering sheep.
Making parts.
All value came from labour.
But now that production costs have plummeted and factories can reproduce the labour of
thousands of men, we just don’t need so many people making stuff anymore.
Consequently, we live in a world of party planners and property evaluators.
“Four bedrooms, triple garage, in a nice neighbourhood…
$1.7 million!”.
Even though most of our jobs in the modern world don’t actually produce anything with
most of us now working in the service sector, we still don’t like the idea of people sitting
around being idle.
“Idle hands are the devil's playthings”, as they say.
The fear is that if people don’t have anything to do, they will get up to mischief.
But I would suggest that it’s not a lack of a job that makes a person behave badly,
but a lack of resources and purpose in their life.
If you don’t have any food or money, and you have no way of getting food or money,
then you’ll probably resort to stealing something.
So this idea of you must work to be a good person has permeated throughout society.
You need to be working harder than you want to be at something that you don’t really
want to do, or else you’re a bad person.
If you’re doing something that you like, well you shouldn’t really be paid for it,
or at least, not paid as much.
Historically, we often associate BS jobs with state socialism.
In the Soviet Union for example, they would literally make up jobs that were just completely
unnecessary.
20 people to fix a pothole which should take two weeks.
But the reason for the Soviet Union having BS jobs was quite clear.
They had an underlying ideological principle of full employment.
Their unemployment rate was 0% by design.
It didn’t matter if you had a job that was meaningful or not.
As long as you did something.
But yet, here in the West where capitalism reigns supreme, we’re still seeing these
BS jobs.
I mean, isn’t that exactly what capitalism is meant to avoid?
Why would a private company hire a person and give them a good salary when actually
they don’t even need them?
It doesn’t make any sense.
But yet, when you hear from people who work for these large corporations, that’s exactly
what happens.
Lots of people working jobs that pretty much have little to no purpose.
Efficiency experts, teamwork consultants.
I mean it’s just endless BS, and I’ve experienced it all firsthand.
But why?
Why are we obsessed with work, especially with work that doesn’t really need doing?
Well I think one of the main reasons is politics.
There’s huge political pressure from both sides of politics to create more jobs.
That’s one thing that both the Left and the Right truly do agree on.
We essentially accept the idea that rich people or the government are job creators, and the
more jobs we create, the better.
It doesn’t matter if those jobs are complete BS, as long as we have jobs, no matter how
menial, society is better off.
Just look at recent tweets from politicians.
The Australian Government are set to “create over 1000 new jobs”.
“The Australian Labor Party”.
I mean, it’s in their bloody name!
Labor!
“A fair go for Australia.
Standing up for middle and working Australia”.
There it is again.
“Working Australia!”.
If you don’t work, you’re a bum!
“Creating the jobs of the future.
The Greens’ Jobs Plan”.
Isn’t it funny that politicians from both the Left and the Right are in the business
of “creating” jobs.
Why do we need to create them?
If these jobs are inherently necessary in society, wouldn’t they already exist?
JobKeeper.
JobSeeker.
We are literally obsessed about everyone having or looking for a job.
Look, I’m not against work.
I think if work brings you purpose and meaning in your life, then that’s a good thing.
But creating jobs just for the sake of creating jobs, regardless of their usefulness, is just
BS in my opinion.
Personally, I want to live in a world where the basic needs of people are provided.
They don’t need to get a BS job just to provide food for their family.
Whether that’s achieved through a basic income, or something else, that’s yet to
be seen.
People should be free to decide for themselves how they want to contribute to society.
Some people will choose to be doctors.
Some people will choose to be builders.
Some people will choose to write a novel.
But obviously, there’s lots of other ways to contribute to society.
In our current economic system, there’s plenty of important work that goes unrewarded.
Things like carers and volunteers and so on.
I think ultimately society just needs to adjust its values to recognise that there’s plenty
of ways to contribute to society without having to work a meaningless BS job.