Are ‘bullshit’ jobs taking over the world of work and promoting inequality?
The Covid pandemic has focused a lot of attention on work – what we do, where we do it, how we do it and to some extent, why we do it. The concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ was popularized by an American anthropologist before the pandemic. Now a French researcher has revisited the concept, and argues that such jobs contribute to inequality.
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“A bullshit job would be when you tell someone you have a job and the person in front of you doesn't understand. And then you try to explain and the person still does not understand,” says Nicolas Kayser-Bril, author of Imposture à temps complet: Pourquoi les bullshit jobs envahissent le monde (Full time imposters: Why bullshit jobs are taking over the world).
A data journalist, he says he has worked his fair share of bullshit jobs.
He starts the book with an example from 2018 when he hired by an NGO to run a 300,000-euro project, to train "data journalism multipliers" using "blended learning".
The terms were unclear in the job description, and they were not clarified while he did the job. He quit before the end of the contract.
“In terms of which jobs or tasks are bullshit, if you've worked in an office you're familiar with reporting, and you're familiar with meetings that no one really needs,” Kayser-Bril explains.
Find the full interview with Nicolas Kayser-Bril in the Spotlight on France podcast:
He is building on a concept made popular by the American anthropologist David Graeber in his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, in which he argued that jobs that serve no real purpose are a product of capitalism, which requires everyone to work in some form or another.
The idea took off in the popular culture around the world. But Kayser-Bril found that Graeber’s relying on employees self-reporting the meaninglessness of their jobs was imprecise.
Some jobs or tasks are objectively bullshit, he says; they are “opaque”, and ”unclarifiable”.
Endless reporting
Kayser-Bril singles out endless meetings, along with reporting, which he says came to Europe from the United States in the 1980s, along with a trend towards auditing.
“French companies, but also the French public administration, tried to imitate what they think is the US way of doing things. And in doing so created a lot of pointless tasks,” he says, adding that the pervasiveness of reporting serves to keep people employed.
“Reporting still exists even though we've known since the beginning that it doesn't work, in my opinion, because many middle managers need to have something to do because otherwise they will have to fire themselves and they cannot do that."
And that is the crux of his argument. 'Bullshit' jobs exist to justify a salary, and yet salaries are used to justify the existence of pointless, meaningless jobs.
“Much of the economic theory that we learn at school – the very basic idea that there is a market for work and that companies pay people to do useful things – this theory seems to be totally detached from reality. So itself bullshit,” says Kayser-Bril.
“However it's useful in that it's a very efficient way for office workers to accept their position, and say ‘Because I’m getting paid it means that I’m creating value for society and for the company that pays me.”
Covid enters the picture
His investigation intersected with the Covid pandemic, which raised many questions about work. So-called “essential” workers were allowed – even required – to go to work, while office workers were told to work from home.
“What I found fascinating is how little controversy this provoked,” says Kayser-Bril, giving the example of farmers who were struggling to find people to pick fruits and vegetables in the spring of 2019, with lockdowns keeping the usual migrant labour out of France.
“Almost no one proposed to do what textbook economics says should happen, which is to raise salaries so that people in France would pick up the vegetables,” he points out.
“It did not happen. And not only did it not happen, but no one really believed that it would happen.”
Office workers continued their work at home, and farmers had to find ways around the labour shortage.
Cafes and restaurants that started reopening after lockdowns and restrictions have found it difficult to hire people, who had decided to leave the industry, tired of long hours and low pay
While France is not facing the same “great resignation” as in the US, people are shifting how and where they work.
And as office workers take advantage of telecommuting and leave big cities for the country, they might start to realise the pointlessness of many of their daily tasks.
- Why France is struggling to embrace the work-from-home revolution
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Quitting bullshit
Not everyone realises they have a bullshit job, but when they do, Kayser-Bril says the most frequent reaction to is not to quit, but rather, “to detach oneself from reality, and to become totally cynical about the job in question. And to say, well the job doesn't make any sense but I don't really care because it's just a job”.
When economies are strong and jobs are abundant, employees have more freedom to shop around, and can quit when they realise a job is meaningless.
But with shrinking economies, and a need to curb growth, because of climate change, Kayser-Bril says the solution will have to come from a deeper rethinking of the role of work in society.
“What I advocate is more to take a step back, and to stop considering work as the best thing in life,” he says, pointing to moves to shift the focus from GDP to other indicators of a country’s economic health.
In France then-president Nicolas Sarkozy initiated a commission in 2008 chaired by American economist Joseph Stiglitz to reflect on economic performance and social project. Since then, little has changed in how France measures its economic well-being.
Embracing bullshit
“The problem of bullshit jobs has had everything to do with the issue of inequalities,” Kayser-Bril points out. Meaningless office work is frequently paid better than jobs that serve more of a social purpose.
He argues that raising taxes could make high-paid 'bullshit' work less attractive, financially. Universal basic income is also worth considering, though he says it is not often clear what it would involve.
Society should also “embrace bullshit”, accepting that people do things that are “maybe useless and irrelevant", he says, pointing to artists, and authors, like himself.
“When you're a book author, people will ask you, but what's your real job? When they ask this question they probably think this is bullshit what you do, and you should do something productive. What I’m trying to say is that instead of focusing on productivity, we should focus on what people enjoy. And if what people enjoy is not productive, it doesn't matter.”
Find an interview with Nicolas Kayser-Bril in the Spotlight on France podcast.
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