7 ms·

Though this is an older article from back when the book "Bullshit Jobs" was being promoted, this topic is perhaps worth a new look. In the era of COVID office c

Though this is an older article from back when the book "Bullshit Jobs" was being promoted, this topic is perhaps worth a new look. In the era of COVID office closings and lists of "essential workers," the past few months have amounted to a massive experiment in which jobs did productive work in our society, and which did not. Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place. In a related note, there's a front page news article about the PS4's manufacturing being almost completely automated by robots that have even replaced the fine motor skills of human hands, handling flexible tapes and ribbons. There is a series of photos of a factory with more robot arms than people. Much has been made over the past few years of automation and machine learning. Maybe, just maybe the prognosticators were not wrong, just early.

throwaway7281 6y ago
The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all). Sad to see, but not very surprising. Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.
- ngngngng 6y ago
  I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing. I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem. 1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use? 2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use? I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Yes but that does not change the fact that most of us are doing useless work in terms of value. Yes, there is a moat, yes one is not as replaceable (though that is not necessarily true) but a lot of our work is meaningless valueless crap.
  - newen 6y ago
    I think the stress that people with lower pay experience is related to what companies can get away with due to lax employment laws.
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    This is very interesting to me. Why did you feel higher stress in lower wage positions? I only ask because I worked low-to-minimum wage part time jobs from ages 14-22 before graduating from school and getting a "real" job, similar to SWE. I found the eact opposite: stress increased with $. I always felt low stress in service jobs because I knew exactly what to do every moment, and knew exactly what happens if something goes wrong. Moreover, I knew I could find another job pretty quickly if worse came to worse - there's just so many places that need waiters, factory workers, cashiers, baristas... In contrast, my new job often has vague tasks and expectations, constant evaluation against my peers, and much more complex outcomes - all of which drive stress for me.
    - Joof 6y ago
      So for me, I get stressed when I have less control over my work / time / etc. The less you make, the more they tell you exactly what to do, when and how to do it and you lose flexibility. There's no trust. As I've moved up, I'm largely trusted to know what I'm doing. I can basically set my own hours, do what work I think is impactful and nobody really checks in on me. Some days I accomplish very little and nobody cares, other days, I accomplish a lot. Bonus points in that I have tons of employee protections (I wouldn't be fired without at least a large severance) and I have so much money saved that I don't need to work for long periods of time. My healthcare is covered and my living finances are less than a quarter of my base salary.
    - clairity 6y ago
- nicbou 6y ago
  Essential workers are not scarce. You need someone to do the job, but there is no shortage of qualified candidates. Hiring and training them is not a huge investment, and they are somewhat fungible. A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity. On the other hand, a few disgruntled knowledge workers can send a company into a death spiral if enough of them quit at once. I guess companies don't care so much about their labourers, because there's an unlimited supply of them. Their skilled workers are perceived as an investment, because they're expensive to replace and shape the direction a company takes.
  - pointyfence 6y ago
    I was having a similar conversation a few days ago. I think that people are conflating how essential a function is with how essential any given person in that function is.
  - solarfair 6y ago
    While I mostly agree, I think it’s a stretch to say that an entire workforce could be replaced with no dip in productivity. Unless most of these workers were idle.
  - stuaxo 6y ago
    It's simply not true that all essential workers do low skilled jobs.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      It's not. I accidentally implied that, but that wasn't my intention.
  - blub 6y ago
    That doesn't apply at all to doctors, pharmacists, firemen, police and most essential workers.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      That's true. I guess I was just thinking about specific people and answered to that.
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  You are mixing up essential and scarce. Here is an analogy: Just because water is essential does not imply that water will be always more expensive than gold if water is available everywhere. This may sound harsh but it is almost a universally true law of human behavior.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  > Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society. Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.
  - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future. There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US. Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx. Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles). You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants. The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.
abakker 6y ago
The central argument about bullshit jobs (the book) was that automation did, in fact, replace a huge number of jobs in the economy. Maybe even as many as were predicted to be lost in the worst doom and gloom scenarios. Graeber's contention is that we simply watered down the work and spread it around to more and more people. I think that is not too unreasonable to suspect. OTOH, I find it particularly frustrating that we have so many large, structural and environmental problems that we need to solve and so much of the workforce feels that they are accomplishing absolutely nothing. Marx's alienation of labor is conceptually alive and well in today's economy. Sadly, it appears that capitalism has mis-priced the actual resource allocation - workers are complicit with low-value, low-effort jobs, and the market structure will not appropriately reward those willing to tackle "the big problems".
bsimpson 6y ago
It's unfortunate that "essential" became the label for shelter-in-place-exempt jobs, because it implies that non-exempt jobs are frivolous. That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid. I'm glad that the coffee shop can stay open for the sake of everyone involved, but I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist. The ability to build a search engine (or any other piece of the Internet) from home doesn't preclude its ability to be fundamental infrastructure for our lives. I know your point is more nuanced than that, and I know it's true: some jobs aren't very productive. But it also points to this false dichotomy of essential vs frivolous jobs that seems to be shortcutting a lot of people's ability to reason about the economy right now, so I thought it was worth tagging-on to your comment to point that out.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid. This is the closest we've come to an exploitable global crisis that could serve to precipitate the long-hoped-for revolution. Do not expect even the well-reasoned to leave it on the table.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist Very, very strong disagree. Though I do agree with the general concept here that many essential jobs can be done from home. I also think many companies chose to use their "essential" status to drag people to the office who should've stayed home. Management personnel by and large should've stayed home even when line jobs had to be done on-site. HR, finance, etc. are great examples of staff that should work from home even at an "essential" business, that I often found did not switch to WFH during stay-at-home orders. Many essential businesses could have half their staff working from home and continue essential services, but many would just say their business doesn't work remote and call it good.
_bxg1 6y ago
Most of the "past few years" discussion happened when many thought AGI was just around the corner, which would allow robots to take over virtually every job. But it's become clear that isn't happening any time soon.
kube-system 6y ago
> Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place. It's neither of those. The drop in demand for the fruits of that productivity has more than balanced out any drop in supply of productivity. Some products and services have a more elastic and/or variable demand than others.
tofflos 6y ago
I came up with two more explanations for not noticing productivity drops that I find as plausible as the ones you described: Companies are bad at measuring productivity and companies are trying to save face. I believe there is some truth in all of these explanations.

throwaway7281 6y ago

The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all). Sad to see, but not very surprising. Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

ngngngng 6y ago
I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing. I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem. 1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use? 2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use? I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Yes but that does not change the fact that most of us are doing useless work in terms of value. Yes, there is a moat, yes one is not as replaceable (though that is not necessarily true) but a lot of our work is meaningless valueless crap.
- newen 6y ago
  I think the stress that people with lower pay experience is related to what companies can get away with due to lax employment laws.
- curiousllama 6y ago
  This is very interesting to me. Why did you feel higher stress in lower wage positions? I only ask because I worked low-to-minimum wage part time jobs from ages 14-22 before graduating from school and getting a "real" job, similar to SWE. I found the eact opposite: stress increased with $. I always felt low stress in service jobs because I knew exactly what to do every moment, and knew exactly what happens if something goes wrong. Moreover, I knew I could find another job pretty quickly if worse came to worse - there's just so many places that need waiters, factory workers, cashiers, baristas... In contrast, my new job often has vague tasks and expectations, constant evaluation against my peers, and much more complex outcomes - all of which drive stress for me.
  - Joof 6y ago
    So for me, I get stressed when I have less control over my work / time / etc. The less you make, the more they tell you exactly what to do, when and how to do it and you lose flexibility. There's no trust. As I've moved up, I'm largely trusted to know what I'm doing. I can basically set my own hours, do what work I think is impactful and nobody really checks in on me. Some days I accomplish very little and nobody cares, other days, I accomplish a lot. Bonus points in that I have tons of employee protections (I wouldn't be fired without at least a large severance) and I have so much money saved that I don't need to work for long periods of time. My healthcare is covered and my living finances are less than a quarter of my base salary.
  - clairity 6y ago
nicbou 6y ago
Essential workers are not scarce. You need someone to do the job, but there is no shortage of qualified candidates. Hiring and training them is not a huge investment, and they are somewhat fungible. A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity. On the other hand, a few disgruntled knowledge workers can send a company into a death spiral if enough of them quit at once. I guess companies don't care so much about their labourers, because there's an unlimited supply of them. Their skilled workers are perceived as an investment, because they're expensive to replace and shape the direction a company takes.
- pointyfence 6y ago
  I was having a similar conversation a few days ago. I think that people are conflating how essential a function is with how essential any given person in that function is.
- solarfair 6y ago
  While I mostly agree, I think it’s a stretch to say that an entire workforce could be replaced with no dip in productivity. Unless most of these workers were idle.
- stuaxo 6y ago
  It's simply not true that all essential workers do low skilled jobs.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    It's not. I accidentally implied that, but that wasn't my intention.
- blub 6y ago
  That doesn't apply at all to doctors, pharmacists, firemen, police and most essential workers.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    That's true. I guess I was just thinking about specific people and answered to that.
cscurmudgeon 6y ago
You are mixing up essential and scarce. Here is an analogy: Just because water is essential does not imply that water will be always more expensive than gold if water is available everywhere. This may sound harsh but it is almost a universally true law of human behavior.
pmiller2 6y ago
> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society. Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future. There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US. Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx. Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles). You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants. The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.

abakker 6y ago

The central argument about bullshit jobs (the book) was that automation did, in fact, replace a huge number of jobs in the economy. Maybe even as many as were predicted to be lost in the worst doom and gloom scenarios. Graeber's contention is that we simply watered down the work and spread it around to more and more people. I think that is not too unreasonable to suspect. OTOH, I find it particularly frustrating that we have so many large, structural and environmental problems that we need to solve and so much of the workforce feels that they are accomplishing absolutely nothing. Marx's alienation of labor is conceptually alive and well in today's economy. Sadly, it appears that capitalism has mis-priced the actual resource allocation - workers are complicit with low-value, low-effort jobs, and the market structure will not appropriately reward those willing to tackle "the big problems".

bsimpson 6y ago

It's unfortunate that "essential" became the label for shelter-in-place-exempt jobs, because it implies that non-exempt jobs are frivolous. That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid. I'm glad that the coffee shop can stay open for the sake of everyone involved, but I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist. The ability to build a search engine (or any other piece of the Internet) from home doesn't preclude its ability to be fundamental infrastructure for our lives. I know your point is more nuanced than that, and I know it's true: some jobs aren't very productive. But it also points to this false dichotomy of essential vs frivolous jobs that seems to be shortcutting a lot of people's ability to reason about the economy right now, so I thought it was worth tagging-on to your comment to point that out.

bitwize 6y ago
> That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid. This is the closest we've come to an exploitable global crisis that could serve to precipitate the long-hoped-for revolution. Do not expect even the well-reasoned to leave it on the table.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist Very, very strong disagree. Though I do agree with the general concept here that many essential jobs can be done from home. I also think many companies chose to use their "essential" status to drag people to the office who should've stayed home. Management personnel by and large should've stayed home even when line jobs had to be done on-site. HR, finance, etc. are great examples of staff that should work from home even at an "essential" business, that I often found did not switch to WFH during stay-at-home orders. Many essential businesses could have half their staff working from home and continue essential services, but many would just say their business doesn't work remote and call it good.

_bxg1 6y ago

Most of the "past few years" discussion happened when many thought AGI was just around the corner, which would allow robots to take over virtually every job. But it's become clear that isn't happening any time soon.

kube-system 6y ago

> Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place. It's neither of those. The drop in demand for the fruits of that productivity has more than balanced out any drop in supply of productivity. Some products and services have a more elastic and/or variable demand than others.

tofflos 6y ago

I came up with two more explanations for not noticing productivity drops that I find as plausible as the ones you described: Companies are bad at measuring productivity and companies are trying to save face. I believe there is some truth in all of these explanations.