A good column at Strike! Magazine for your Labor Day entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” (h/t Tipsy) The author considers the phenomenon of our continued toil despite our technological ability to probably do what needs to be done with 3-4 hour work days. Instead, most of us, particularly in the West, spend endless hours doing work that is essentially bullshit. He sees this system as benefiting the people who control most of the resources and as being effective in keeping civil unrest to a minimum in a system from which those people benefit.
The author points out that the “market” has a relatively limited demand for poet-artists; and a seemingly endless demand for corporate law specialists. He would doubtless include my job in the list of bullshit jobs and, depending on the day, I might agree. Certainly, I can’t claim that what I do is productive; but, when I am doing my job well, it is at least preservative in nature from the perspective of my clients.
I think a lot of the non-productive jobs the author sees are devoted to administering resource allocation. Some times these jobs aren’t bullshit since the efficient allocation of resources minimizes waste and allows the productive jobs to produce more and better things. Other times, these jobs are devoted to addressing disputes about who gets what stuff. That’s often what my job is — when I’m working on defense litigation, reviewing endless boxes of paper for evidence or potential evidence; the heart of it is that someone has gone to court and demanded an order that my client give them money. My client wants to keep its money. And, so, they pay me money with the hopes that I can make it so they won’t have to pay out even more to someone else.
In those cases, I’m not creating value; but maybe I’m preserving value from destruction. I get paid reasonably well for that. Arguably, I produce more value from something like this blog where I get paid nothing. One difference is that, when I’m getting paid, I’m generally preserving value for specific persons with resources to defend. Whereas, when I’m creating value (to the extent what I do here is valuable), the utility is abstract and it is for an amorphous group of people who can get similar value elsewhere for free.
In any event, a lot of the bullshit jobs probably have something to do with what Marx was talking about with his ideas concerning abstraction of labor that I never really understood.
Dog, I think that alot of the B/S jobs exist because of labor budgeting in a firm. I do not think that it is any conspiracy on the part if the ruling elite to keep the proles and Epsilon semi-morons in near perpetual motion, although they would like to if they could.
Perhaps it is my economic view to reduce things to accounting and inertia. A firm has a business model where its labor cost is X, its output is Y, and when allowing for costs A-W, ceteris paribus, the firm makes a
margin of Z.
If the owners of the firm are satisfied with Z, then X is not examined. Micro attempts at different models of production may be considered, but as long as the lunch pails stay within X, management is happy with Z. The available labor expands to X the schlubs work more more hours doing less, and only a few people are the wiser.
Only when ZY is threatened, disrupted, or missed, is a hard look taken at X.
My hypothesis is that laborers in the bullshit jobs mostly probably serve the function of a pump that pumps water uphill. Only, instead of water, it’s money. And, instead of uphill, it’s to people with lots of it.