Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forum"On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by centurys end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. Theres every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didnt 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 didnt figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, weve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moments reflection shows it cant 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 worlds 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.
http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell, 1935
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
http://books.google.com/books?id=CnlbMP_vBmgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Response to limpyhobbler (Reply #1)
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TBF
(31,919 posts)if they are idle they may have time to think and realize it doesn't make sense for just a few families to control most of the $$$ in the country. Thus, busy-work.