https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38217638-bullshit-jobs
Interesting ideas. Probably overstated, but worth reading.
Outline of Bullshit Jobs:
- medieval model - wage labour as a path to adulthood
- industrial revolution - wage labour forever
- 70s - scientific management stole productivity increases
Medieval model of work:
- apprentice under someone else for 10s/20s
- become an independent adult in 30s with own craft
- adults are 'self-governed in the domain of production', responsible only for output
- work is punctuated rhythm, not sustained
Industrial model of work:
- wage labour - adolescent forever
- managed - told what to do
- employer is buying your time, so idleness is stealing from them
- managers are from ranks - know domain
- Keynesian bargain - improvements in productivity turn into improvements in wages
Modern model of work (since ~70s):
- micro-managed - told what to do and how to do it
- professional managers - switch domains, aim to treat workers are replaceable cogs
- rise of 'strategic visions for excellence'
- improvements in productivity diverted to executive and managerial classes
We're not in a capitalist free market:
- profits increasingly driven by regulatory capture created by lobbyists (eg can't declare bankruptcy on student debt)
- big companies are more feudal internally than capitalist
- use advertising to create wants instead of satisfying them
'The pleasure at being the cause' - people derive joy from exercising control over their environment
Why do we have to always look like we're working:
- can't measure value, so measure effort
- actually on call, but they're paying for our time
- tyranny by ambiguity (what am I supposed to be doing, when am I done, how much time can I take off, what can I do with my dead time?)
- quitting is expensive, so no pressure against bullying
Power games are human, but jobs are power games without a safeword - "I quit" is too expensive
Wasted time in bullshit jobs is hard to use productively, because of stress, guilt and the need to look busy
I used to have to go literally insane to get into work. Scrub away 'me' and become the thing that can do this work. Afterward, I'd often need a day to recover; to remember who I am. (If I didn't, I'd become an acerbic, nitpicky person to people in my private life, enraged over tiny things.)
Obama on health insurance jobs - example of publicly preserving millions of bullshit jobs
It's hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem
Universities used to be run like craft guilds - by academics for academics
[on box-checking] ...one ends up spending so much more time pitching, assessing, monitoring and arguing about what one does than on spends actually doing it.
If the market pays you 40k to browse facebook all day, are you sure that market really knows what is valuable?
'Conspiracy by elite' - 1890s robber barons started a campaign to convince people that capital is source of value, not labour - it worked
Social effects of consumerism:
- source of status changed from ability to make things to ability to purchase things
- source of identity changed from skills to tastes
Paradox of modern work:
- most people's sense of self-worth is derived from their work
- most people don't like their jobs
Compensatory consumerism - the nice things you can buy to make up for the fact that you don't have a life
Trying to automate stuff often causes more work overall in making things legible to machines - bureaucracy reproduces
The left-wing used to be drawn from workers unions, now run by managerial class who actively support bullshit jobs
Entanglement of finance, education, health:
- main cause of bankruptcy in us is medical debt
- can't leave bullshit jobs because of student debt
- lenders lobby to require expensive credentials for professionals
Foucault made distinction between power and domination - power games have boundaries and players are allowed to quit
Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract ... but we don't think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean.