From a left-wing magazine:
http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
This shouldn't be much of a surprise for RVF readers, but it's interesting to see this come from the radical left.
The author and commenters do not explore gender discrepancies in useful/useless jobs or the fact that people have to work so much at make-work jobs because the price of housing has been bid up so high. My own thinking about these issues came about from gaming professional women who had the attention spans of cocker spaniels and were working either in HR or PR.
http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
This shouldn't be much of a surprise for RVF readers, but it's interesting to see this come from the radical left.
Quote:Quote:
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.
The author and commenters do not explore gender discrepancies in useful/useless jobs or the fact that people have to work so much at make-work jobs because the price of housing has been bid up so high. My own thinking about these issues came about from gaming professional women who had the attention spans of cocker spaniels and were working either in HR or PR.