Une lecture intéressante sur la pertinence d'une bonne partie des jobs

[Neken]

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Posted on August 17, 2013 by admin

Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…

If you enjoy this article please help support the radical print revolution by picking up a copy of Strike!

here.

Illustration by John Riordan

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

*

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His most recent book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, is published by Spiegel & Grau.

This page has been so popular that our hosting fees have unexpectedly gone through the roof. We’re currently working on moving servers; in the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed reading this, or any of our other posts, please pick up a paper or you can also donate. We’re an anti-profit, radical publisher that needs your support. Thank you.

[Tovarichtch]

Si tu as aimé ta lecture, je t'invite à lire ceci : http://kropot.free.fr/manifestevstrav.htm

[Schadenfreude]

pourquoi tu ne résumes pas le texte et nous dis en quoi tu le trouves intéressant? partir un thread, c'est pas juste garrocher un lien et une brique dans le néant.

[Ghost Murmur]

Dans un bonne lecture il y a habituellement à la fin une conclusion qui résume tout.

Modifié 21 août 2013 par Nouveau Projet

[Neken]

pourquoi tu ne résumes pas le texte et nous dis en quoi tu le trouves intéressant? partir un thread, c'est pas juste garrocher un lien et une brique dans le néant.

Si tu y tiens je peux faire ça ce soir, ça me tente pas de faire ça à la job, tsé, faut bien que jfasse ma bullshit job

[Schadenfreude]

j'ai lu.

bien que je sois daccord sur certains points, l'idée de son texte semble plus s'intégrer dans la logique du discours "anticorporation" qu'autre chose. les bullshit jobs ont définitivement un rôle important à jouer dans la mesure où tous ceux qu'il pointe si sévèrement du doigt comme faisant des bullshit jobs: "CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants", vaquent leurs occupations à assurer l'existence et la bonne santé des entreprises privées. ils ont une raison d'être, en autant que l'on adhère au discours capitaliste.

tous ceux qu'il pointe comme faisant de la bullshit job sont en fait, et par un drôle d'hasard, tous des acteurs qui navigent autour de l'existence et de la structure managériale corporative. sans eux, il n'y aurait tout simplement personne pour faire vivre et croître l'entreprise privée.

le fait qu'il insinue que les écrivains de science-fiction et les musiciens font un travail plus substantiel que les bullshit jobs en dit long sur sa position sur le sujet (hint: il est anticapitaliste et probablement communiste).

il y a quelques éléments intéressant, mais c'est essentiellement un texte partisan qui nous renvoie à l'éternel débat sur le bien-fondé du capitalisme.

[Cr@ck Whore]

j'ai lu.

le fait qu'il insinue que les écrivains de science-fiction et les musiciens font un travail plus substantiel que les bullshit jobs en dit long sur sa position sur le sujet (hint: il est anticapitaliste et probablement communiste).

Pire: David Graeber est un célèbre anarchiste dans le pays. Détail amusant, il a aussi été syndicaliste.

[Schadenfreude]

well, ceci explique cela.

[The end]

J'ai trouvé la lecture effectivement intéressante, mais un peu comme Ecce Homo, je la trouve un peu trop extrémiste dans ses idées. Ce qu'il faut en retirer je crois, c'est une réflexion personnelle sur ce que nous apportons au monde présentement et ce que nous voudrions apporter, et prendre les décisions nécessaires pour y arriver. Si tu penses que le temps que tu passes à ton travail n'apporte rien de positif à la société, mais que tu en a personnellement besoin pour x raisons, tu peux toujours essayer de changer la direction de ton poste, sinon de prendre du temps hors-boulot pour faire une différence dans ton milieu.

Je suis d'accord pour dire que la plupart des nouveaux emplois n'apportent peut-être pas beaucoup d'externalités positives au bien-être des individus et de la société en général, mais plus aux entreprises privées. Là où je diffère, c'est de porter le blâme sur une classe dirigeante qui ferait tout pour occuper les gens pour mieux les contrôler. Les emplois que l'on peut trouver inutiles ou avec des externalités négatives aujourd'hui sont plutôt le fruit de l'évolution de la société capitaliste, des technologies, des meurs, etc. Une grande partie des emplois d'aujourd'hui n'existeront peut-être même pas dans 5 ans, ou auront tellement évolués qu'ils ne seront plus les mêmes. On peut penser par exemple aux emplois qui tournent autour des réseaux sociaux, de la technologie en général, d'Internet, du commerce au détail, du transport en commun, etc.). L'analyste financier, quoi qu'il peut sembler inutile pris hors de son contexte, reste tout de même important pour une partie de l'entreprise. Cette même entreprise qui doit payer plus d'impôts à la société plus elle est profitable (bon.. ce serait une autre discussion sur l'efficacité de notre modèle d'imposition). Chacun des emplois doit être analyser dans le contexte de l'entreprise et c'est ce que cette entreprise produit qui doit être analysé, pas l'emploi en tant que tel, qui lui est nécessaire.

Bref, l'article mène nécessairement vers un débat sur: Est-ce que l'entreprise privé produit plus de bien-être aujourd'hui qu'il y a 50 ans? Et vers un débat sur qu'est-ce que le bien-être (qui n'est pas du tout comparable entre les deux époques). Qui mènera vers capitalisme versus socialisme.

Finalement, oui les emplois "de base" sont nécessaires au bien-être de l'individu, ainsi que les emplois artistiques. Ils produisent beaucoup plus d'externalités positives au bien-être, mais je ne pense pas qu'on peut les comparer directement. C'est une relation exponentielle, dans laquelle l'analyste financier est caché sous plusieurs couches avant d'être "découvert" et le vidangeur à la base. Si on les compare directement, comme une relation linéaire, c'est certain que le vidangeur est vu comme apportant beaucoup plus. Par contre, le vidangeur est à quelque part soutenu indirectement par un système derrière qui comprend plusieurs autres emplois dits de "bullshit jobs".

[nulle part]

Il parle aussi de tous les emplois de service qui se sont multipliés parce que les gens n'ont plus le temps de rien faire par eux-mêmes.