Comment on Happy Labor Day!
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 16 hours agoen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs which cause psychological harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive (when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth) because workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be.
The word meaningless is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it meaningless to sort and file reports? In the grand scheme of things, and to society, maybe. But not to the company that’s paying you. They have value from it.
I’m not saying the companies are hyper efficient with only purposeful work. I’m saying that companies aren’t intentionally throwing out money on work that they know is useless. They’re too greedy for that.
Once a company reaches a certain size, being able to micro manage individual workloads to max efficiency become impossible and individual middle managers have an incentive to appear like their whole workforce is necessary.
They’re not intentionally throwing money away because to them, the appearance of growth has to come before actually growth. They consider useless hires the cost of doing business. And when it fails, “they can just make the though decisions” and do the layoff the shareholders want. Otherwise, how to do explain the waves of mass hirings and mass firings?
when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth
This was an important part that shouldn’t be discounted since it was still at the core of the argument.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 16 hours ago
I’m aware of Graeber’s work. I don’t really agree with much of his conclusions or analysis, as he is an anarchist and I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but we would agree that much of office work is indeed socially unproductive, if we were to pivot to a socialist economy. That being said, we exist in capitalism, and thus office workers are working class, regardless of how necessary the work they do is beyond helping generate profit.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yeah, I’m an anarchist who generally does agree with Graeber, but I do think that it’s vital to understand that he did see office workers, including ones in bullshit jobs, as working class. He resented the bureaucracy not the bureacrat. And it’s important to note that plenty of office work isn’t inherently within his definition of bullshit jobs. Hell, I’d argue there’s a fair chance that the largest portion of people working bullshit jobs are in the category of “industry does more harm than good and the worker knows it”.