BULLSHIT JOBS AND THE NEW FEUDALISTS
Have you ever felt like your job was a waste of time? If so, you are not alone. When Yougov asked people ‘does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?’, 37% replied that it did not and 13% were ‘unsure’. In other words, fifty percent of people polled either didn’t know whether their job was worthwhile or not, or were certain that it was not. If you are one of these people, chances are you have a ‘bullshit job’.
‘What is a bullshit job’?
It might be worth talking a bit about what the term ‘bullshit job’ means. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp this is to consider its opposite. When it comes to employment, we usually assume that some need is first identified, and then some service is created to fill that gap in the market. An obvious way to tell if that service is necessary to society overall would be to observe the effect when it is removed- say, as a consequence of strike action. If society experiences a noticeable and negative effect, then it’s almost certain that the job was a valuable one.
On the other hand, if a job could disappear without almost anybody noticing (because its absence has either no effect or is actually beneficial) that would be a bullshit job.
Here’s one such example of such a job, taken from David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs: A Theory’:
“I worked as a museum guard for a major global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused more or less permanently. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touch the...well, nothing in the room, and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones etc. Since nobody was ever there, in practice I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it”.
Now, some points are worth going over at this stage. Firstly, a bullshit job is best thought of as one that makes no positive contribution to society overall (since it would hardly matter if the position did not exist) rather than one that is of no benefit to absolutely anyone. As we shall see, it could suit some people to employ somebody to stand or sit around wearing an impressive-looking uniform. It’s just that whatever function this serves really has little to do with capitalism as most people understand it.
Secondly, one can always invent a meaning for this job, just as philosophers have made up reasons why Sisyphus could find meaning in his pointless task of rolling that boulder up-hill in the sure and certain knowledge that it would roll back down again. But, really, all this does is to highlight what bullshit such jobs are. After all, where genuine jobs are concerned one need not wrack one’s brains making up justifications, because the need pre-exists the job.
(The original pointless task? Sisyphus. Image from wikimedia commons)
So, with those points out of the way and with a definition of bullshit jobs to work with (‘employment of no positive significance to society overall’) we can return to the question ‘how come such jobs exist?’.
‘This cannot be!’
One reason, strangely enough, is because many people assume they cannot exist. The reason why is because the very idea of bullshit jobs seems to run contrary to how capitalism is meant to work. If one word could be used to sum up the workings of capitalism in the popular imagination, that word would probably be ‘efficiency’. Capitalism is imagined to be ruthless in its drive to cut costs and reduce waste. That being the case, it surely makes no sense for any business to make up pointless jobs.
At the same time, people have no problem believing stories of how socialist countries like the USSR made up pointless jobs like having several clerks sell a loaf of bread where only one was necessary, due to some top-down command to achieve full employment. After all, governments and bureaucracies are known for wasting public money.
It’s worth thinking about what happened in the Soviet example and what did not. No authority figure ever demanded that pointless jobs be invented. Instead, there was a general push to achieve full employment but not much diligence in ensuring such jobs met actual demands. Those lower down with targets to meet did what was necessary to tick boxes and meet their quotas.
Studies from Harvard Business School, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and others have shown that goals people set for themselves with the intention of gaining mastery are usually healthy, but when those goals are imposed on them by others- such as sales targets, standardized test scores and quarterly returns- such incentives, though intended to ensure peak performance, often produce the opposite. They can lead to efforts to game the system and look good without producing the underlying results the metric was supposed to be assessing. As Patrick Schiltz, a professor of law, put it:
“Your entire frame of reference will change [and the dozens of quick decisions you will make every day] will reflect a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong but what is profitable, what you can get away with”.
Practical examples abound. Sears imposed a sales quota on its auto repair staff- who responded by overcharging customers and carrying out repairs that weren’t actually needed. Ford set the goal of producing a car by a particular date at a certain price that had to be at a certain weight, constraints that lead to safety checks being omitted and the dangerous Ford Pinto (a car that tended to explode if involved in a rear-end collision, due to the placement of its fuel tank) being sold to the public.
Perhaps most infamously, the way extrinsic motivation can cause people to focus on the short-term while discounting longer-term consequences contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, as buyers bought unaffordable homes, mortgage brokers chased commissions, Wall Street traders wanted new securities to sell, and politicians wanted people to spend, spend spend because that would keep the economy buoyant- at least while they were in office.
With all that in mind, it’s worth remembering the one thing that unites thinkers on the left and right sides of the political spectrum in Western thinking. Both agree that there should be more jobs. I don’t think I have seen a current-affairs debate where the call for ‘more jobs’ wasn’t made, and made often.
Whether you are a ‘lefty’ or a ‘right-winger’, you probably believe that there should be ‘more jobs’. You just disagree on how to go about creating them. For those on the left, the way to do it would be through strengthening workers’ rights, improving state education and maybe through workfare programs like Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. For right-wingers, it’s achieved through deregulation and tax-breaks for business, the idea being that this will free up entrepreneurs and create more jobs.
But, in neither case does anyone insist that whatever jobs are created should be of benefit to society overall. Instead, it’s just usually assumed that of course they will be. This is roughly comparable to somebody being so convinced that burglary does not happen they take no precautions to protect themselves against theft. This just makes them more vulnerable to criminal activity.
If this analogy is to work, it has to be the case that we are wrong to assume modern markets actively work against bullshit jobs; that, actually, there are reasons why pointless jobs are being created. In that case, our assumption that such jobs can’t exist would work against the possibility of acting to prevent their proliferation.
In fact, such reasons do exist, and a major one is something called ‘Managerial Feudalism’. What is that? Well, that’s a topic we will tackle in the next instalment.
REFERENCES
‘Bullshit jobs: A Theory’ by David Graeber
‘Why We Work’ by Barry Schwartzh