[D66] Bullshit jobs

[A.O.]

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work-service

The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

An interview with
David Graeber

A bullshit job is a job which is so pointless that even the person doing
the job secretly believes that it shouldn’t exist. And there are more
now than ever.

Interview by
Suzi Weissman

In his latest book, David Graeber, the best-selling author of Debt: The
First 5000 Years, argues that many jobs today are essentially pointless
— or, as the book’s title calls them, Bullshit Jobs.

Jacobin Radio’s Suzi Weissman sat down with Graeber to find out what
bullshit jobs are and why they’ve proliferated in recent years.
A Taxonomy
SW

Let’s just get right down to it. What is the definition of a bullshit job?
DG

A bullshit job is a job which is so pointless, or even pernicious, that
even the person doing the job secretly believes that it shouldn’t exist.
Of course, you have to pretend — that’s the bullshit element, that you
kind of have to pretend there’s a reason for this job to be here. But
secretly, you think if this job didn’t exist, either it would make no
difference whatsoever, or the world would actually be a slightly better
place.
SW

In the book, you start out by distinguishing the bullshit jobs from shit
jobs. Maybe we should start doing that right now, so we can talk about
what the bullshit jobs are?
DG

Yeah, people often make this mistake. When you talk about bullshit jobs,
they just think jobs that are bad, jobs that are demeaning, jobs that
have terrible conditions, no benefits, and so forth. But actually, the
irony is that those jobs actually aren’t bullshit. You know, if you have
a bad job, chances are that it’s actually doing some good in the world.
In fact, the more your work benefits other people, the less they’re
likely to pay you, and the more likely it is to be a shit job in that
sense. So, you can almost see it as an opposition.

On the one hand, you have the jobs that are shit jobs but are actually
useful. If you’re cleaning toilets or something like that, toilets do
need to be cleaned, so at least you have the dignity of knowing you’re
doing something which is benefiting other people — even if you don’t get
much else. And on the other hand, you have jobs where you’re treated
with dignity and respect, you get good payment, you get good benefits,
but you secretly labor under the knowledge that your job, your work, is
entirely useless.
SW

You divide your chapters into the different kinds of bullshit jobs.
There’s flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, task-makers, and what
I think of as bean-counters. Maybe we can go through what these
categories are.
DG

Sure. This came from my own work, of asking people to send me
testimonies. I assembled several hundred testimonies from people who had
bullshit jobs. I asked people, “What’s your most pointless job you ever
had? Tell me all about it; how do you think it happened, what’s the
dynamics, did your boss know?” I got that kind of information. I did
little interviews with people afterwards, follow-up stuff. And so, in a
way, we came up with category-systems together. People would suggest
ideas to me, and gradually it came together to five categories.

As you say, we have, first, the flunkies. That’s kind of self-evident. A
flunky exists only to make someone else look good. Or feel good about
themselves, in some cases. We all know what kind of jobs they are, but
an obvious example would be, say, a receptionist at a place that doesn’t
actually need a receptionist. Some places obviously do need
receptionists, who are busy all the time. Some places the phone rings
maybe once a day. But you still have to someone — sometimes two people —
sitting there, looking important. So, I don’t have to call somebody on
the phone, I’ll have someone who will just say, “There is a very
important broker who wants to speak to you.” That’s a flunky.

A goon is a little subtler. But I kind of had to make this category
because people kept telling me they felt that their jobs were bullshit —
if they were a telemarketer, if they were a corporate lawyer, if they
were in PR, marketing, things like that. I had to come to terms with why
it was they felt that way.

The pattern seemed to be that these are jobs that are actually useful in
many cases for the companies they work for, but they felt the entire
industry shouldn’t exist. They’re basically people there to annoy you,
to push you around in some way. And insofar as it is necessary, it’s
only necessary because other people have them. You don’t need a
corporate lawyer if your competitor doesn’t have a corporate lawyer. You
don’t need a telemarketer at all, but insofar as you can make up an
excuse to say you need them, it’s because the other guys got one.
Alright, so that’s easy enough.

Duct-tapers are people who are there to solve problems that shouldn’t
exist in the first place. At my old university, we only seemed to have
one carpenter, and it was really hard to get them. There was a point
where the shelf collapsed in my office at the university where I was
working in England. The carpenter was supposed to come, and there was a
huge hole in the wall, you could look at the damage. And he never seemed
to show up, he always had something else to do. We finally figured out
that there was this one guy sitting there all day, apologizing for the
fact that the carpenter never came.

He’s very good at the job, he’s very likable follow who always seemed a
little sad and melancholy, and it was very hard to get angry at him,
which is of course what his job was. Be a flak-catcher, effectively. But
at one point I thought, if they fired that guy and hired another
carpenter, they wouldn’t need him. So, that’s a classic example of a
duct-taper.
SW

And then the box-tickers?
DG

Box-tickers are there to allow an organization to say it is doing
something which it isn’t actually doing. It’s sort of like a commission
of inquiry. If the government gets embarrassed by some scandal — say,
cops are shooting a lot of black citizens — or there’s somebody taking
bribes, there’s some kind of scandal. They form a commission of inquiry,
they pretend they didn’t know it was happening, they pretend they’re
going to do something about it, which is completely untrue.

But companies do that, too. They’re always creating committees. There’s
hundreds of thousands of people around the world who work in compliance
in banks, and it’s complete bullshit. Nobody ever actually has any
intention of following any of these laws that are imposed upon them.
Your job is simply to approve every transaction, but of course it’s not
enough to approve every transaction because that looks suspicious. So,
you have to make up reasons to say there’s some things you looked into.
There’s very elaborate rituals of pretending to look into a problem,
which you’re not actually looking into at all.
SW

Then you go into the task-master.
DG

Task-masters are the people there to give people work that isn’t
necessary, or to supervise people who don’t need supervision. We all
know who we’re talking about. Middle-management, of course, is a classic
example of that. I got people who would just tell me flat out, “Yeah I
got a bullshit job, I’m in middle-management. I got promoted. I used to
actually do the job, and they put me upstairs and they said supervise
people, make them do the job. And I know perfectly well they don’t need
somebody to supervise them or to make them do it. But I have to come up
with some excuse to exist anyway.” So, eventually in a situation like
that, you say, “Alright, well, we’re going to come up with target
statistics, so I can prove that you’re actually doing what I already
know you’re doing, so that I can imply I was the guy who made you do that.”

In fact, you have people fill out all these forms, so that they’re
spending less of their time doing the work. This happens increasingly
across the world, but in America someone did some statistical study and
discovered that I think something like 39 percent of the average time an
office worker is supposed to be working, they’re actually working at
their job. Increasingly, it’s administrative emails, pointless meetings,
all sorts of form filling-out, and paperwork, basically.
Administrative Bloat
SW

In radical or Marxist thought, there’s this notion of productive and
unproductive labor. I wonder how the bullshit job category connects to
the notion of unproductive labor or jobs.
DG

It’s different. Because productive and unproductive, that’s whether it
is producing surplus-value for capitalists. That’s a rather different
question. This is subjective assessment of the social value of work by
the people doing it.

On the one hand, people do kind of accept the idea that the market
determines value. That’s true in most countries now, actually. You
almost never hear from people in retail or services saying, “I sell
selfie-sticks, why do people want selfie-sticks? That’s stupid, people
are dumb.” They don’t say that. They don’t say, “Why do you need to
spend five bucks on a cup of coffee anyway?” So, people in service jobs
don’t think they have bullshit jobs, in almost no cases. They accept
that if there’s a market for something, people want it. Who am I to
judge? They buy the logic of capitalism to that degree.

However, then they look at the market in labor, and they say, “Wait a
minute, I’m paid $40,000 a year to sit and make cat memes all day and
maybe take a phone call, that can’t be right.” So, the market isn’t
always right; clearly the market in labor does not work in an
economically rational way. There’s a contradiction. They have to come up
with another system, a tacit system of value, which is very different
than productive or unproductive for capitalism.
SW

How does the rise of these bullshit jobs relate to what we think of as
productive jobs?
DG

Well, this is very interesting. We have this narrative of the rise of
the service economy. You know, since the eighties we’ve been moving away
from manufacturing. The way they present it, in economic statistics, it
does seem that farm labor has largely disappeared, industrial labor has
gone down — not quite as much as people seem to think it has, but it has
— and service is through the roof.

But that also is because they break down services to include clerical,
managerial, supervisory, and administrative jobs. If you differentiate
them, if you look at service in that sense, at people who are giving you
a haircut or serving you food — well, actually, service has remained
pretty much flat at 25 percent of the workforce for the last 150 years.
It hasn’t changed at all. What’s really changed is this gigantic
explosion of paper-pushers, and that’s the bullshit job sector.
SW

You call that the bureaucracy, the administrative sector, the
middle-management sector.
DG

Exactly. It’s a sector where public and private kind of fuse together.
In fact, one area for the massive proliferation of these jobs is exactly
where it’s kind of unclear what’s public and what’s private: the
interface, where they privatize public services, where the government is
back-stopping banks.

The banking section is insane. There’s this one guy who I start the book
with, actually. I call him Kurt, I don’t know his real name. He works
for a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a subcontractor to the German
military. Basically, there’s a German soldier who wants to move his
computer from one office to another. He has to make a request to someone
to call somebody to call someone — it goes through three different
companies. Finally, he has to drive 500 kilometers in a rented car, fill
out the forms, put it in a package, move it, somebody else unpacks it,
and he signs another form and leaves. This is the most inefficient
system you could possibly imagine, but it’s all created by this
interface between the public-private stuff, which is supposed to make
things more efficient.
SW

So much of the ethos, as you point out, from the Thatcher–Reagan days is
that government is always the problem and government is where all these
jobs are. So, it was an attack on the public sector. Whereas you show
that a lot of this comes from the private sector, this
bureaucratization. Doesn’t the need to maximize profits and cut costs —
which is what we think of in terms of capitalism and the stress of
competition — militate against the creation of these pointless jobs in
that private sector?
DG

You’d think it would, but part of the reason why it doesn’t happen is
that, when we imagine capitalism we’re still imagining a bunch of
mid-size firms engaged in manufacturing and commerce, and in competition
with each other. That’s not really what the landscape looks like
nowadays, especially in the FIRE sector.

Also, if you look at what people actually do, there’s this whole
ideology of lean and mean. If you’re a CEO, you get praised for how many
people you can fire and downsize and speed up. The guys who are being
downsized and sped up are the blue-collar workers, the productive ones,
the guys who are actually making things, moving them around, maintaining
them, doing actual work. If I’m UPS, the drivers are getting Taylorized
constantly.

However, you don’t do that to the guys in the offices. Exactly the
opposite happens. Within the corporation, there’s this whole process of
empire-building, whereby different managers are competing with each
other, primarily over how many people they have working under them. They
have no incentive whatsoever to get rid of people.

You have these guys, teams of people, whose entire job is to write the
reports that important executives present at big meetings. Big meetings
are kind of like the equivalent of feudal jousts, or the high rituals of
the corporate world. You walk in there, and you’ve got all this gear,
and you’ve got all this stuff, your power points and your reports and so
forth. So, there are whole teams who are just there to say, “I do the
illustrations for this guy’s reports,” and “I do the graphs,” and “I
tabulate the data, and keep the database.”

Nobody ever reads these reports, they’re just there to flash around.
It’s the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just
to tweeze my mustache, and another guy who’s polishing my stirrups, and
so forth. Just to show that I can do that.
SW

You also see a parallel to the rise of the bullshit jobs, which is the
rise of the non-bullshit jobs. You call them the caring or care-giving
jobs. Can you describe these jobs? Why is there a rise in those jobs,
and what sectors are they in?
DG

I’m taking the concept largely from feminist theory. I think it’s very
important, because the traditional notion of work, I think, is very much
theological and patriarchal. We have this notion of production. It comes
with this notion that work is supposed to be painful, it’s punishment
that God inflicted on us, but it’s also an imitation of God. Whether
it’s Prometheus, or it’s the Bible, humans rebel against God, and God
says, “Oh, you want my power, fine — you can create the world, but it’s
gonna be miserable, you will suffer when you’re doing it.”

But it’s also seen as this quintessentially male business: women give
birth and men produce things, is the ideology. Of course, it makes all
the real work that women do, of maintaining the world, invisible. This
notion of production, which lies at the heart of nineteenth-century
theories of the workers’ movement, the labor theory of value — it’s a
little deceptive.

You ask any Marxist about labor and labor-value, they always immediately
go to production. Well, here’s a cup. Somebody has to make the cup, it’s
true. But we make a cup once, and we wash it ten thousand times, right?
That labor just completely disappears in most of these accounts. Most
work isn’t about producing things, it’s about keeping them the same,
it’s about maintaining them, taking care of them, but also taking care
of people, taking care of plants and animals.

There was a debate, I remember, in London about Tube workers. They were
closing all these ticket offices in the London Underground. A lot of
Marxists were saying, “Oh, you know, it’s probably a bullshit job in a
sense, because you wouldn’t really need ticket-takers under full
communism, transport will be free, so maybe we shouldn’t defend these
jobs.” I remember thinking there was something rather sketchy there.

And then I saw this document that was actually put out by the strikers,
where they said, “Good luck in the new London Underground without
anybody working in the Tube station. Let’s just hope your child doesn’t
get lost, let’s just hope you don’t lose your stuff, let’s just hope
there aren’t any accidents. Let’s just hope that nobody freaks out and
has an anxiety attack or gets drunk and starts harassing you.”

They go through the list of all the different things that they actually
do. You realize that even a lot of these classic working-class jobs are
really caring labor, they’re about taking care of people. But you don’t
think of it as that, you don’t realize it. It’s much more like a nurse
than like a factory worker.
Beyond Bullshit
SW

One of the things that you say in your book is that you thought Occupy
could be the start of the rebellion of the caring class.
DG

There’s this “We Are the 99%” Tumblr page, and it was for people who
were too busy working to actually take part in the occupations on an
ongoing basis. The idea was, you could write a little sign where you
talk about your life situation and why you support the movement. It
would always end, “I am the 99%.” It had a huge response; thousands and
thousands of people did this.

When I went through it, I realized that almost all of them were in the
caring sector in some sense. Even if they weren’t, the themes seemed to
be very similar. They basically were saying, “Look, I wanted a job where
at least I wasn’t hurting anybody. Really, where I was doing some sort
of benefit for humanity, I wanted to help people in some way, I wanted
to care for others, I wanted to benefit society.” But if you end up in
health or education, social services, doing something where you take
care of other people, they will pay you so little, and they will put you
so deeply in debt, that you can’t even take care of your own family.
This is totally unfair.

It was that feeling of a fundamental injustice which I think really
drove the movement more than anything else. I realized that they create
these dummy jobs, where basically you’re there to make executives feel
good about themselves. They have to make up work for other people to do.
In education, in health, this is incredibly marked. You see it all the
time. Nurses often have to spend half their time filling out paper work.
Teachers, primary school teachers, people like me — it’s not quite as
bad in higher education as it is if you’re teaching fifth grade, but
it’s still bad.
SW

We all dream of this society that frees us from mind-shattering work, so
we can pursue our passions and our dreams and care for each other. So,
is it just a political question? Is it one that UBI, universal basic
income, could address?
DG

Well, I think it would be a transitional demand, that makes sense to me.
Marx somewhere actually suggested that there’s nothing wrong with
reforms, so long as they are reforms which ameliorate one problem, but
create another problem, which can only be resolved by even more radical
reforms. If you do that continually, you can eventually get to
communism, he said. He is a bit optimistic, perhaps.

You know, I’m an anarchist, I don’t want to create a statist solution. A
solution that makes the state smaller, but at the same time ameliorates
conditions and makes people freer to challenge the system, that’s hard
for me to argue with. And that’s what I like about UBI.

I don’t want a solution that’s going to create more bullshit jobs. A job
guarantee looks good, but, as we know from history, it tends to create
people painting rocks white, or doing other things that don’t
necessarily need to be done. It also requires a giant administration to
run that. It does seem often to be the people with the sensibilities of
the professional-managerial class who prefer that kind of solution.

Whereas universal basic income is about giving everybody enough that
they can subsist on; after that it’s up to you. (I mean the radical
versions, obviously; I’m not for the Elon Musk version.) The idea is to
divorce work and compensation, in a sense. If you exist, you deserve a
livelihood. You could call that freedom in the economic sphere. I get to
decide how I want to contribute to society.

One of the things that’s very important about the study that I did on
bullshit jobs is how miserable people are. It really came through in
these accounts. In theory, you’re getting something for nothing, you’re
sitting here being paid to do almost nothing, in many cases. But it just
breaks people down. There’s depression, anxiety, all these psychosomatic
illnesses, terrible workplaces and toxic behavior, made even worse by
the fact that people can’t understand why they’re justified in being so
upset.

Because, you know, why am I complaining? If I complain to someone
they’re just going to say, “Hey, you’re getting something for nothing
and you’re whining?” But it shows that our basic idea of human nature,
which is inculcated in everybody by economics, for example — that we’re
all trying to get the most reward for the least effort — isn’t actually
true. People want to contribute to the world in some way. So, that shows
that if you give people basic income, they’re not going to sit around
and watch TV, which is one objection.

The other objection, of course, is that, maybe they will want to
contribute to society, but they’re going to do something stupid, so that
society is going to be full of bad poets and annoying street musicians,
street mimes everywhere, people developing their crank
perpetual-motion-devices and whatnot. I’m sure there’ll be some of that,
but look: if 40 percent of people already think their jobs are
completely pointless, how is it going to be worse than it already is? At
least they’re going to be a lot happier doing that stuff than they are
filling out forms all day.


On 01-07-18 16:17, A.O. wrote:
> https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/05/31/zowel-links-als-rechts-denkt-hoe-meer-banen-hoe-beter-a1604983
>
>  ‘Zowel links als rechts denkt: hoe meer banen hoe beter’
> 
> By Tim De Gier, www.nrc.nl View Original
> 
> € 23,99
> 
> Over twee weken verschijnt de vertaling bij Business Contact.
> 
> In mei verscheen zijn nieuwe boek: Bullshit Jobs. A theory, een 
> uitgewerkte versie van zijn spraakmakende essay On the Phenomenon of 
> Bullshit Jobs. A Work Rant (2013). Volgens Graeber hebben grote
> groepen in de samenleving werk waarvan ze zelf het nut niet inzien.
> Ook in Nederland, waar vier op de tien werknemers hun baan zinloos
> noemen, zo blijkt uit een voetnoot. We zijn werk gaan zien als doel
> op zichzelf, in plaats van een methode om iets gedaan te krijgen. „En
> daar heeft de hele samenleving zich naar georganiseerd”, vertelt hij,
> wanneer we in zijn opgeruimde kantoor zitten, waar alles verkleurd is
> door de zon en veel stof dwarrelt.
> 
> „Ik heb het niet gewoon over een shit job, zoals een grafdelver of
> een schoonmaker van dit kantoor. Zij worden slecht betaald en slecht 
> behandeld, maar ze weten dat wat ze doen belangrijk is. Dat is een 
> essentieel onderdeel van wat werken zou moeten zijn: weten dat de
> wereld er slechter aan toe zou zijn als jij je werk niet zou doen.
> Een bullshit job is een baan waarvoor je goed betaald wordt, en
> waarvoor je met respect behandeld wordt, maar die ook aan je knaagt,
> omdat je eigenlijk vindt dat je baan niet zou moeten bestaan.”
> 
> Waarom neemt een werkgever iemand aan om een ‘bullshit job’ uit te
> voeren?
> 
> „Tsja.. Dat is de grote vraag, hè? Want een bullshit job is precies
> wat niet hoort te bestaan in een kapitalistische staat. De
> standaardgrap is natuurlijk dat in het communisme gewerkt werd om het
> werken. In het kapitalisme blijkt het net zo erg, zo niet erger. Het
> enige waar links en rechts het altijd over eens zijn, is hoe meer
> banen hoe beter. Het maakt niet uit wat die banen voorstellen. Dus de
> druk om banen te scheppen komt uit de politiek. Bovendien staat het
> hebben van veel werknemers voor grote bedrijven gelijk aan
> prestige.”
> 
> Toch zijn er aan de lopende band bezuinigingen. Je had in de media 
> moeten werken de afgelopen tien jaar! Er kunnen altijd meer mensen
> weg.
> 
> „Werkgevers zijn er trots op als ze lean en mean zijn. Het probleem
> is dat wanneer de bijl valt, het altijd de zinnige functies zijn die
> worden aangepakt. Bij de post zijn dat eerst de mensen die
> daadwerkelijk de post bezorgen. De personeelsadviseur met een
> onduidelijke functie mag altijd blijven zitten. Vaak gaat het in
> reorganisaties niet om efficiëntie, maar om politieke macht. Het
> lijkt in die zin op belasting. De last komt altijd terecht bij de
> mensen die het minst weerbaar zijn.”
> 
> Denkt u dat vrijemarktprincipes, in theorie, het bestaan van
> ‘bullshit jobs’ moeten voorkomen?
> 
> „Er is een principe dat ik de ijzeren wet van het liberalisme noem.
> Elke hervorming die de bureaucratie zou moeten verminderen door de
> vrije markt erop los te laten, zorgt voor meer regulering,
> bureaucraten en papierwerk. Mijn favoriete statistiek gaat over de
> tien jaar ná de val van de Soviet-Unie. Dat was de tijd van abrupte
> liberalisering. Het percentage mensen in dienst van de overheid nam
> in die periode toe met 25 procent.”
> 
> Gelukkig hebben we straks robots die onze ‘bullshit jobs’ overnemen.
> 
> „Dat denken we al honderd jaar. Keynes had het over technische 
> werkloosheid. Hij voorspelde dat we werkweken zouden krijgen van 
> vijftien uur. Het is niet gebeurd. Ik voorspel je dat technologische 
> vooruitgang nooit zal zorgen voor minder werk. We zorgen wel weer
> voor nieuwe zinloze banen. Er is op dit gebied een verschil tussen 
> fabrieksarbeiders en wat ik noem de zorgende klasse (caring labour). 
> Daartoe reken ik naast de ziekenzorg bijvoorbeeld het onderwijs.
> Terwijl fabrieken dankzij de introductie van nieuwe technologie
> goedkoper gaan werken, wordt zorgende arbeid juist duurder. Dat komt
> doordat je onderwijs en zorg niet kunt kwantificeren. En toch willen
> we dat. Dus we dwingen leraren en verplegers om al hun werkzaamheden
> op formulieren in te vullen. De introductie van technologie en
> digitalisering zorgt daar voor meer werk dan ooit. Iedereen klaagt
> over dat papierwerk.”
> 
> Is de ‘bullshit job’ niet zo’n onderwerp waar nooit iets aan gaat 
> veranderen, want waar moet je beginnen?
> 
> „We zitten in een vicieuze cirkel. In Groot-Brittannië is de grap:
> we beginnen een comité om uit te zoeken waarom we zoveel comités
> hebben. Er zijn twee manieren om hier uit te breken. De eerste ligt
> voor de hand: minder uren werken. Maar dat is vooral technisch heel
> lastig, want mensen blijven met elkaar concurreren. Een betere
> oplossing, waar ik al jaren voor pleit, is het universeel
> basisinkomen.”
> 
> Wat is de stap van een universeel basisinkomen naar minder ‘bullshit
> jobs’?
> 
> „Haal met het basisinkomen de grootste druk weg om geld te verdienen
> en het wordt veel aantrekkelijker om betekenisvol werk te doen. Het
> is een eerste stap om werk en beloning los van elkaar te zien.
> Uiteindelijk wil iedereen betekenisvol werk doen. Van een
> basisinkomen gaan mensen niet stoppen met werken. In de gevangenis
> willen de gedetineerden veel liever toiletten schoonmaken of de was
> doen dan de hele dag niks doen. Het is een straf om niet meer te
> mogen werken.”
> 
> Een mooi begrip uit uw boek vond ik ‘moral envy’, morele afgunst.
> Dat had ik nog niet eerder gehoord.
> 
> „Ik ook niet! Het verbaast me dat dit niet een groter onderwerp is. 
> Morele afgunst richt zich op mensen die overduidelijk goed proberen
> te doen. Ik had een vriend, een activist die zijn leven lang armoede 
> bestreed. Andere activisten namen hem kwalijk dat hij voor zijn
> ex-vrouw en zijn kind een appartement betaalde. Hoezo gaf hij dat
> geld niet aan de armen? Terwijl hij al bijna al zijn geld weggaf.
> Wanneer je goed doet, moet je aan een absurd hoge standaard voldoen.
> Je moet perfect zijn. Dit is zo’n cynische tijd.”
> 
> Wat heeft dat met ‘bullshit jobs’ te maken?
> 
> „Het zorgt ervoor dat iemand met een betekenisvolle baan, lesgeven 
> bijvoorbeeld, niet mag vragen om geld en status. Betekenisvol werk
> wordt namelijk niet als echt werk gezien. Voor iemand uit een
> Amerikaans arbeidersmilieu zijn er twee opties: of je kan een zinnige
> baan doen, of je neemt een bullshit job waar je wel goede compensatie
> voor krijgt. Moreel prestigieuze banen die goed verdienen zijn
> uitsluitend bereikbaar voor de culturele elite. Het onderwijs is de
> grote ongelijkmaker. Om toe te treden tot de culturele elite moet je
> naar een dure universiteit. En dat kunnen alleen telgen van
> elite-families betalen. Rijk worden is moeilijk, maar kan nog wel.
> Rijk worden met een zinvolle baan kun je vergeten.”
> 
> In het laatste hoofdstuk schrijft u: de eerste keer dat er actie
> werd ondernomen tegen deze zaken was Occupy.
> 
> „In zekere zin was Occupy de opstand van die zorgende klasse. Het 
> protest is sindsdien niet opgehouden. In Amerika staken de leraren 
> voortdurend. Ik was vorige week in Frankrijk, waar toen verplegers 
> staakten.”
> 
> Maar je moet toch meer hebben dan afzonderlijke beroepsgroepen die
> meer geld voor zichzelf eisen?
> 
> „Dat is waar, maar je ziet dat in die groepen de grote onvrede zit. 
> Occupy was een beweging van leraren, studenten en andere groepen uit
> de zorgende klasse. Waarom hun boodschap nog niet is doorgedrongen
> tot de politiek is een lang verhaal, maar laat ik er één ding over
> zeggen: een belangrijke reden waarom rechts zoveel succesvoller is
> dan links in Amerika, is omdat rechts begrijpt dat ze hun radicalen
> moeten koesteren om zelf redelijk te lijken.”
> 
> Hoe reageerde links op Occupy?
> 
> „In het begin had de beweging de steun van de Democratische partij.
> Ze wilden dat Occupy aan tafel zou aanschuiven. Maar het punt van
> Occupy is juist dat de politiek zelf corrupt is. Niemand wilde
> aanschuiven. En toen was het gedaan met de steun. Ergens werd een
> ruit ingegooid, in Berkeley geloof ik. Let wel, er waren meer dan
> tweeduizend Occupykampen in Amerika, allemaal vreedzaam. En die
> gebroken ruit werd aangegrepen om de politie in te zetten. Van de ene
> op de andere dag waren de liberale politici en tv-ploegen verdwenen.
> In New York sneuvelde ook een ruit. Eén ruit. Weet je waardoor? Omdat
> de politie een activist met zijn hoofd door het glas ramde. De video
> staat op YouTube, maar was niet in de media te vinden. Het
> gesneuvelde glas in Berkeley wel.”
> 
> Stemt het u niet ook optimistisch dat er zoveel georganiseerde 
> tegenactie is?
> 
> „Oh, ja zeker. Het heeft ook allemaal met elkaar te maken: de
> Arabische lente, protesten in Athene, Spanje. Filosoof Thomas Kuhn
> schreef dat een wereldrevolutie een paradigmaverandering is. Wat het
> ene moment als acceptabel wordt ervaren, is dat het volgende moment
> niet meer. Maar dat heeft tijd nodig. De studenten in 1968 wisten pas
> jaren later wat hun protesten precies hadden veroorzaakt. Het bleek
> een kantelpunt. 1848 was zo’n jaar, 1917, 1968. En 2011 zal ook zo’n
> jaar blijken te zijn.”
> 
> 
> 
> On 01-07-18 15:57, A.O. wrote:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
>> 
>> Enkele quotes uit 'Bullshit Jobs' van David Graeber:
>> 
>> • Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they
>> secretly believe do not really need to be performed. • It’s as if
>> someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of
>> keeping us all working. • 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. • How can one even begin
>> to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job
>> should not exist?
>> 
>> 
>> Summary
>> 
>> In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that
>> the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour
>> workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930,
>> because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role
>> isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber
>> contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both
>> large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of
>> entirely pointless jobs:
>> 
>> flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g.,
>> receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants goons,
>> who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists,
>> corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations duct tapers, who
>> fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing
>> shoddy code box tickers, e.g., performance managers, in-house
>> magazine journalists, leisure coordinators taskmasters, e.g.,
>> middle management, leadership professionals[1]
>> 
>> Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector
>> despite the idea that market competition would root out such
>> inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as
>> employers need underlings to feel important. In society, he credits
>> the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of
>> capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances
>> in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm,
>> they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they
>> find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound
>> psychological violence".[1]
>> 
>> Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea,
>> that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but
>> inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke.
>> The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of
>> the working classes as noble.[1]
>> 
>> As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income,
>> a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would
>> let people work at their leisure.[1]
>> 
>> 
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