Graeber then talks about the effects of having a BS jobs. People are often unhappy. Our society acculturates us to find value in efficiency and productivity, so to be in a job that is pointless, silly, or downright stupid, but still requires you to be there for 40 hours a week -- that creates an internal conflict.
I’ve seen this in myself, too. After company command, I frequently complained about not knowing what I should be doing, and the pointlessness of what I actually did. I did the same as a new GS employee, until reading BS jobs helped me mentally reframe what my job really was –I’m a flunkie.
The problem is growing. As the economy has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing to the knowledge sector, we’re seeing a new kind of feudalism. Nowadays, there are a lot of jobs where “being available” is more important than actually doing something.
Graeber provides many anecdotes of people in positions where “it’s often entirely unclear what one is really supposed to be doing, what one can say about what one is and isn’t doing, who one can ask and what one can ask them, how much and within what parameters one is expected to pretend to be working, and what sorts of things it is or is not permissible to do instead.” [p143]
For example, a security guard described his job working in a museum. He sat in a vacant room, and guarded nothing (the museum was not displaying anything there at the time), but he was not permitted any sort of mental stimulation during his shift --- no reading, no cell phone, nothing. Yet the security company was required by contract to provide someone for that room, and the contract specified those work performance standards, so that was the deal.
The requirement to work at least 40 hours per week is even more humiliating, because one often has to “look busy.” As Robin, a temp employee, explained, “the worker is often effectively being tested for his or her ability to just sit there and pretend to work.” [p107].
And in the U.S., you have to work enough hours to earn your employer-funded health insurance. There might be nothing to do for 90 percent of the day, but you have to do something (“you’re on my time”), and the boss wants you at-hand in case there’s a question.
For people like Lilian, a project manager, this is maddening. She was given that job title, but not any authority or control over anything. “I get most of the meaning in my life from my job, and now my job has no meaning or purpose.” [p112]
To an entrepreneur, or any who – like me up to 2008 – had only ever had “doing” jobs, it sounds completely alien. But even in the free market, there are positions -- like on the general’s staff -- that only exist to make the boss look better than their peers.
There is also an incentive to preserve these jobs. We judge our politicians for the jobs they create, not the quality or necessity of those jobs. Barack Obama identified the disincentive to make things more efficient on a macroeconomic scale when he explained why a single payer health care system would be a bad idea.
“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross or Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” [p157, Link]
From the financial sector to university education to the unemployment compensation system, we have put people in charge of leaky pipes. It’s their whole line of work. So the question for them becomes, “do you fix the pipe, or do you let the pipe keep leaking?” p166. What we’ve learned is that “when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.” [p169].
“No, you can’t work fewer hours. No you can’t get paid more. No, you can’t choose which BS projects to decline. But you can sit through this seminar, where the bank tells you how much it values flexibility.” [p172]
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