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In an interview, anthropologist David Graeber answers questions about the modern workplace and the purposeless jobs that fill it.
Not since Dilbert has truth been spoken to power in soulless work settings. But the cartoon character's successor may be David Graeber. In 2013 he achieved viral fame with cubicle zombies everywhere after he published a short essay on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to exist, which he called "bullshit jobs". The wide attention seemed to confirm his thesis.
Mr Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has expanded on the ideas in a recent book. He responded to five questions from The Economist's Open Future initiative. He rails against "feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies." As he puts it: "People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference."
[...] One thing it shows is that the whole "lean and mean" ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It's not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.
From The Economist : Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @06:06AM (7 children)
Doing tasks? Surely you just!
Before that horrible industrialization you lament, a huge percentage of people were unpaid apprenticeships, indentured servents, or in some other way bount to a master, doing whatever they were told, or tossed out on their ear. Their pay was at best rags to wear, an a pile of straw to sleep on.
Maybe after 20 years of this you might be able to open your own cobbler's shop with broken and worn out tools. The glorious pre industrialization never actually existed. Unless you were landed gentry or titled.
Tasks, my ass.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 02 2018, @07:41AM (4 children)
Yeah, all of that is common wisdom. Except, conditions weren't the same all over the world. Didn't we have a recent article, telling us that peasants in feudal Europe had more time off than we do today?
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/ [reuters.com]
I'm not finding our article on that, but the link above is very similar. No, I'm not saying that I want to be a medieval peasant or serf, but sometimes we exaggerate how bad things were, and how good things are.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday July 02 2018, @02:20PM (3 children)
Peasants did not get retirement or 20 years of education either. 45 years of working with 4 weeks/year of vacation is less than 4 years. You get abut 12 years of vacation before you die with retirement.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Monday July 02 2018, @03:46PM (2 children)
It's amazing that you don't have to go back very far to see people who did not get 20 years of education. I do genealogy and you find at the turn of the century, 1900 not 2000, there were a lot of people who had little or no education. This was particularly the case for rural farming families all throughout the 1800s. It is shocking to modern eyes to see the documents signed by "making your mark." It makes it a bitch to discover the "correct" spelling of a particular name that the owner may not have even known. The census forms had columns for literacy and/or highest grade attended.
In 1992, I hired a neighbor who was a retired concrete guy to pour me a new back patio. He knew his shit and did a great job but I was shocked to find out he was totally illiterate. His wife managed everything for him that required reading skills. He was in his early seventies then and I always wondered how he would manage if she died before him.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday July 02 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)
I know people right now in their late teens and early 20s who are in the same situation. Nearly everyone graduates from school these days, but that doesn't mean they actually learn. The schools are fully aware of this, but they claim they have to pass these kids because being held back a grade level would be more harmful to the student than simply not being educated. Of course, then the kid can't understand anything for the rest of their education, so they get no further education, and they can distract the other students from getting an education too...but we're so focused on pushing the metric of "everybody graduates" that we've stopped caring about whether or not that graduation actually means anything...life is all about hitting the milestones and everything else is just decoration...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:42PM
I was with the principal of my school when a group of parents busted in yelling that they were suing him because their kids had flunked and wasn't being allowed to pass, ie, graduate.
I think the schools realized it was going to be a hopeless battle and went off to fight another war.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:30AM
I think you're leaving out the effect of unions and organized labor, which evolved greatly over time. When you had apprenticeships and masters, the masters did organize, and they did even strike. Not the unions we understand today, and most often, the organizations were disbanded the moment they got what they want. So you could look at as periodic, and constantly evolving. The response of the "owners" so to speak, was to start employing the apprentices more, which caused quality to suffer and the wages of the masters to decrease through lost work. Again, labor organizing evolved by these proto-unions deciding to allow in the apprentices to close that loophole.
Forgot the name, but there was a very interesting guy in the north east that went around recruiting for unions in the middle of the 19th century. This was before the civil war I believe, and he had the audacious notion to allow blacks into the unions with the same thinking to foil the plans of the "owners" to pit one class of workers against the next. That plan being effective and widely used all the way up till today with White Nationalists screaming hysterically that Mexicans are taking their jobs. It's not the c-suites, regulations, or anything else, but some other guys that just want to work. *rolls eyes*
Industrialization was never the problem. It was the lack of living wages, as always. Again, as always, the war is between owners and workers. Currently right now, workers are at a real, real, fucking low. I predict labor organization to grow again, until we force them to give us some scraps, and the game continues unabated, but continually changing.
So it really depends on exactly when you're talking about in the pre-Industrialization age, and what industry you were referring to. In general though, you're probably right that the times could be referred as glorious never existed. However, there really WAS a time, however brief, that the workers were living it up. Afterwards, there was a much longer period of time when unions (again, not as we know them now), were extremely effective. That was the glorious golden age for the worker which lasted up till the late 70's. Union membership was near 1/3rd of every American, living wages were high, and union factory jobs were plentiful. I'd say maybe 15-20 years. Which is not a lot out of the last 300 years or so.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:51PM
Yes, tasks.
Much production of what we would consider low-end "consumer goods" (coarse wovens; collars, kerchiefs and linens; stockings and knit goods; pins and nails; pots and pans; etc.) were produced by non-guild home labour, and was paid as piecework--contracted at so much per item/task by a middleman who himself was contracted to deliver a set number of finished goods (another task), which were then resold to shops or vendors to unload individually (more tasks) to those who could or would not produce those items for themselves (apprentices, labourers, journeymen and their girlfriends/wives, actors, etc.).
A substantial part of non-guild manufacture was casual and task-based, with people filling their spare time and later, as this sector of the economy became more important, all their working time, with piecework, in order to make ends meet, to make their livings, or to make a few extra pence--the same folk who would later riot when the "dark satanic mills" deprived them of their livelihoods.