So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it?
If so, welcome aboard.
If so, welcome aboard.
You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.
In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.
Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.
> You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.
You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly enforced (corporate) law.
I mention this because...well, you might want to read more of Graeber’s work (or even just more of Bullshit Jobs) to understand why.
There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to track down those bags.
I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism but it is mine.
I'm sure airlines do a lot behind the scenes to make sure they don't lose their luggage. Even if they didn't, I don't see why a worker co-op wouldn't have the exact same incentives.
I'm far from an expert in this, and I'm no utopian, but I think it's important that we understand and identify where the problems in our society come from.
This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:
1. that existing model is bad
2. that alternative model for airline (or any other industry) exists
3. that alternative model won’t suffer from similar issues
Re. 1
— author uses anecdotal evidence from friends who consider their jobs ‘pointless’: (talking about a friend) “*Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.*”
- author extrapolates this anecdote to other fields and people: “*it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit*”
- after establishing negative nature of these jobs on this purely anecdotal basis, author then proceeds to blame capitalism for creating them: “*<…> 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*”
— he concludes that “*the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.*”
- author provides a hypothesis for the root cause of the issue: “*if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else*“
I’m sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted. Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at very broad and abstract problem (“ruling class”), with no solution provided by author. Anarchism is assumed to be a solution, but I hope at this point it should be obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we could also use a magic wand.
How I'd look at it (as a postmodernist) is like this: after the owning class moved all the "real" (ie, related to manufacturing) work overseas to places where labour is cheap, first world jobs have been increasingly focused on problems within the abstraction itself - we're not dealing with harvesting or processing grain or rolling steel, we're managers of managers of people who generate sales contracts for rolled steel made somewhere in China. Our jobs feel like bullshit because they're entirely removed from material production, and are generally quite "meta". It's a form of labour alienation, which is a consequence of the capitalist division of labour (as compared to the artisan/craft system under feudalism, which people in the West are often seeking to imitate now).
If yes, then modern jobs of US-based policy makers who write organizational scripts are also “real”, because they basically define exact same thing, only for people-based systems overseas instead of fully automated systems.
If everything were automated then labour would no longer be necessary at all. If we were still working at that time it would not only be abstract, but completely pointless.
For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it was under development.
No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.
But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax after all expenses were considered.