To believe most jobs are pointless?

[FirmBrickLemur]

Half of modern jobs just push paper around, while nurses and teachers get underpaid. Shouldn’t we rethink how we value work?

OP was a bit vague about which jobs she values. I wonder if she thinks running MN is a valuable job? Do all these threads 'contribute' to society?

I would say many businesses, and definitely the public sector, are not nearly as efficient as they could be, which creates extra work and therefore needs people to do it.

Some jobs also only really exist during the good times, when people have more disposable income, or businesses have more to spend.

There isn't a "glut" of delivery drivers. Demand is high and supply is low. It's hard for firms to find delivery drivers, especially for any vans bigger/heavier than a normal car licence, and especially for anti-social hours driving, such as overnight.

Hand car washes, nail bars, Turkish barbers, ethnic convenience stores are often more about money laundering, illegal working, modern slavery, etc., and aren't really anything to do with what they're actually doing/selling as they're just "fronts", so irrelevant when talking about the job market.

Healthcare and social care IS a massive problem, mostly caused by low pay and low respect, plus poor working conditions.

But, yes, we do need a "job audit" to actually look long term at where the shortages are going to be, what jobs will be created and what will be lost, over the next 10/20/30/40 years, and work backwards right back to the schools, to change the way we educate our future workforce whilst they're children, to provide relevant and required training for 16-21 year olds which must include far better provision of trade/manual/vocational skills and probably reduced academic/university choices, a return to our once World leading adult education sector so that people have more options to retrain once they've left formal education, at whatever age they are. The whole system from age 4 to 21 is a mess and still based on what we needed several decades ago, not what we're going to need in 10/20 years' time. And a new initiative for adult education, retraining, re-skilling, etc is an absolute essential and we literally can't start that soon enough - far too many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s are pigeon-holed because of their school qualifications and prior employment and are just "fodder" for the lowest paid and lowest respect jobs.

Surely a lot of jobs are there to make money for the employer? So would society collapse? No! Is someone somewhere prepared to pay this person because it makes the business profit overall - yes!

I do agree about some of the red tape. I see this in my job a lot and it drives me mad. But (most) of that red tape is there for an actual reason and I’m not sure we’d be better off as a society without it

Yes but that was a task within the job not the actual purpose of the job.

I know someone who works in an office in long meetings that don't go anywhere and lots of time spent on the phone on tasks that fail more than they succeed, and endless paperwork that takes months to get approved or fails in its purpose. His job is trying to get aid into Gaza and life saving medications into Ukraine.

Well, according to a lot of my students, my job is pointless because 'we speak English already and when am I ever going to study a poem when I'm older?', so you can add English teachers to the list.

And Welsh teachers, because 'I'm never going to use it in a job, so what's the point?'

Which tabloid are you penning for?

Yeah it's very unfair how the physical/caring work is underpaid, yet does the most positive things for society.

Not in the public sector.

There is no advantage to a manager in not filling a vacant post, and every status advantage to filling it.

Time after time a post-holder leaves as their job is pointless and they have nothing to do, and the manager will recruit to the post. It happens over and over.

My school has 9 members of the senior leadership team who do no teaching at all. It’s extremely inefficient. There is no clarity on who you escalate what to. They also repeat each other’s work. It’s an utter shambles. Yet they get paid considerably more than the teachers doing the actual teaching.

I think perhaps they might be referring to the "middle management" in public sector jobs that are well paid but perhaps a mis-use of the public's money?

e.g. a friend of mine works for our local council. He is well paid (earns more than me as a teacher), and really doesn't have to do a lot, nor is it particularly stressful. He finds it quite amusing how little he has to do, and the same for his co-workers. In short, the job 10 of them do could easily be done by 5, and if it were a private company, there would absolutely only be 5 of them doing it.

I think another example that makes me FURIOUS is academy schools. In multi-academy trusts (where many schools are run by one "trust" or company), such a HUGE amount of money is siphoned off to pay for the layers and layers of additional people to manage "academy" stuff. I work in one of these as a teacher, and we have a "super head" that overseas the 4 secondary schools and 20+ primary schools. He is paid a large 6 figure salary. Then they advertise trust admin roles paying more than teacher salaries!! And yet, the EDUCATION, which is what should be paid for by the money coming in from the number of pupils we have, is getting more and more scaled back due to money going into the Academy Company. A Level classes of 25 for practical subjects and insufficient equipment with no funds to buy more. Classes of 34 at KS3. School trips being stopped this year due to insufficient funding (even though pupils pay a contribution, the school still has to pay for pupil premium children and subsidise the cost for educational purposes). Way to many pointless jobs that have been created due to a school becoming a business.

I used to work in an office. The task of pushing paper around was removed, then replaced with valuable work like generating money to pay wages. Wages that then get taxed to pay for vital service. Wages that are spent in shops keeping the economy going....

This is also true for many university administration roles. Not enough to do but still back fill the roles when people move on.

And ironically, often the more people you have, it just makes the inefficiency even worse. It's often counter productive when you bring in more people, as that's more people needing admin support, more meetings, more training, slower response times when a specific task is now broken down and done by 2 or 3 people instead of 1 who did it all themselves, etc.

A classic case is my OH's chemotherapy which is a fiasco every single month due to the NHS apparently "needing" several people to organise the steps, i.e. blood test taken, blood test review, prescription raised, prescription assembled, consultant appointment and finally handover of the drugs. Different people for each stage. So the appointments are never done in the right order - i.e. just this week, they pinged an appointment for drugs collection (a week too early!!), which is stupid because he hasn't even had the blood test done yet. Apparently "communication error" between appointment clerks. Bearing in mind this is all in the same oncology dept, so they can't even blame different depts (yes, the appointment clerks work in the same office, they're not using centralised appointment depts for oncology appointments done on the ward!). That just causes wasted appointments, and lots of wasted time as my OH usually has to make at least 2 or 3 phone calls every month to tell them what they've cocked up this time, all requiring them to spend time and communicate with eachother to rectify. Something that could so easily be standardised and streamlined, because it follows the exact same pattern every 4 weeks, yet "too many people" screw it up.

This is also true for many university administration roles. Not enough to do but still back fill the roles when people move on.

Not true.

Many universities have made huge numbers of professional services staff redundant and trying to back fill holes when people leave is becoming increasingly challenging.

About 50% of my job is pointless - nothing changes if l do it or not but l love it and it pays the bills!

Not understanding the value a particular role has, is not the same as it actually having no value.

Probably true to an extent, but it's a bit of a sweeping statement with not enough actual examples.

Dh recently quit teaching after decades including SLT roles and moved into a high level admin role at a (good) university. He was immediately astonished and baffled by how many people the uni employs to do very little, to the point that he thinks quite often 3 people are employed to do work that could easily done by one. It's pretty ridiculous considering the financial state of universities right now. He says absolutely everything is done at a snail's pace as well (compared with in schools).

I think perhaps they might be referring to the "middle management" in public sector jobs that are well paid but perhaps a mis-use of the public's money?
Well, the original post referred to 'half of modern' jobs which suggests they mean more than just middle management 🤷🏼‍♀️

Maybe not 'Most', but a lot of office based jobs in recent years I would say have become either pointless or overpaid. I include mine in that bucket.
I believe we have become very good at making our jobs sound far more important than they are.
A lot of the blame goes to the employers.
My role used to be worthwhile. I worked hard and was paid accordingly.
But in the past 7 years I find that I am paid a lot for doing something very wanky and pointless. Still at the same company, doing supposedly the same role. But the corporate world has changed so much. I no longer recognise what I do. I'm not the only one.

Society wouldn't collapse if I gave up job as an AHP either. But my partner was just discharged home after a surgery without an OT assessment. I couldn't drive him home safely, he can't get off the couch and on/off the toilet without equipment, he hasn't showered for 6 days because he can't get in and out of the bathtub. He is very lucky to have me as a skilled professional at home who can facilitate some of these things. He wouldn't die without them but he sure as hell wouldn't have had comfortable recovery.
I have quite a lot to say about private healthcare at the moment and I very much wish to see how many "ineffective middle managers" and "compliance time wasters" they dismissed as useless to have resulted in this unsafe discharge.

You are making a different point though.

My Council has very recently stopped filling empty roles, as they are so short of cash. If someone leaves, that post is not filled, unless its an absolutely critical role (such as the Council can't end up with no child protection social workers for example).

However, this is a blanket ban on recruiting to any (non critical) vacant post, even if there is a role for that post. (and the fact that the Council can do this and still function, I think does show you how many under-occupied people there were in the Council. If everyone already had a meaningful job and was working to capacity, they would not be able to do this).

What I and the other poster were talking about was in times when the LG does not have this restriction, but they still recruit to posts that have not real function or workload.

BTW I had a friend who used to work in admin at a Uni and she said she used to find an empty room and go for a nap for a couple of hours every afternoon...

This is changing. I don't know any university staff who aren't on the brink of complete burn out.
Universities are also far more complex and much larger organisations than schools so some things are slower. You can't compare the two.

BTW I had a friend who used to work in admin at a Uni and she said she used to find an empty room and go for a nap for a couple of hours every afternoon...

if that actually happened it certainly wouldn't now.

Due to the improved use of technology in the workplace. Jobs are definitely in the process of being redefined. Over time some will fade and new jobs will be formed.

Will we need as many people as we do now for society to work. i truly do not know but with more people requiring benefits to survive and the wealth gap increasing, something unpleasant is on the horizon unless the UK can find strong leadership to enforce the changes required but I do not hold my breath as the last few Governments has done nothing for the majority of society but has asset stripped as much as possible, in order to keep the rich wealthy.