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?

This is what astonishes me in the public sector.

Despite services being pared back to the bone, councils being in dire financial straits and some even going bankrupt, their management efficiency is still appalling. They don't seem to have even looked at this. When they need to cut back, they cut services. The big failing they have is bloody awful staff management, which means far too many staff with little to do. The managers though never seem to want to do anything about this, as presumably they feel it could negatively impact them.

I was running about on my knees during COVID lockdowns. It was so busy I managed to only get 2 days off in 2 years.

I am in e-commerce, hardly essential and yet providing a service people wanted rather than needed in the traditional sense.

I tried to go back into agriculture during that time because I felt that was more important but despite qualifications and experience they preferred to employ office workers. I connected with other ex farm workers who all said the same thing, we were unwanted. Some industries spotted the opportunity to score political point during COVID so all this discussion about essential workers being the real deal during lockdowns is somewhat negated by the actions of industry and individuals at this time.

Who says what is or isn't essential? Obviously my work isn't essential in the community sense but it filled a need at the time. Honestly we need to look beyond what we perceive as having value because there is value in things that appear frivolous and wasteful in comparison to others.

There are no unimportant jobs, there are no little people, there are no small acts of kindness. However, there are individuals who seek to demoralise everyone else for their own ends whatever they are. Yes sometimes work feels pointless but it really isn't economic activity is important to find out current ways of life.

How long have you worked in the NHS? This is a serious question, I’m not being flippant.

It just really pisses me off when people state “office job” my job may be office based but to be honest last week I had to deal with an investigation into a product the led to batches being held of the market (which is a BIG DEAL) if we had let that product go to market and something had gone wrong people would point the finger and ask why we didn’t investigate/do our job…but yeah…it’s only a. Office job.

Yeah, the managers in my team would say we are all pared back now and we have to cut back on what we can do due to lack of staff, too. And we can only do what we can do etc etc. Yet here I am, able to waste hours each day on Mumsnet and You Tube videos because I have next to nothing to do. 😐

Yeah, the managers in my team would say we are all pared back now and we have to cut back on what we can do due to lack of staff, too. And we can only do what we can do etc etc. Yet here I am, able to waste hours each day on Mumsnet and You Tube videos because I have next to nothing to do. 😐

Do you work in a university? If so, I'd be very worried if I was in a position where there wasn't much to do. The financial crisis isn't going anywhere!

I don't think jobs are pointless but there is definitely a huge discrepancy in the type of work and pay.

If someone is good at their job, great - they should be paid accordingly! Kudos to them for working their way up the ladder and earning the big bucks!

But for us folk who work in the NHS, we've continually been in an "overworked, understaffed, underpaid" institution that, I don't believe, will get any better. Most people in those jobs (like myself) don't go into it for the money but more the role itself.

Having said that, the fact my BIL (who left college with no qualifications and didn't give a toss about his education) sorts out some air con units and fridges and is on way more money than me is baffling and definitely makes me believe that I should've become an engineer instead.

The problem in the public sector is that there are endless rules to follow, that no-one on the ground or even in middle management has any power to change.

A lot of it is due to supply contracts with large private sector service providers who make a fortune acting as a middleman for supplying goods and services at extortionate rates.

For example, if I want a train ticket, I can't just buy one and claim back the cost like a normal person, I have to fill in a form, which needs to be signed by my manager and then it's sent to the team PA to book it with the external travel agent, which involves some back and forth as the price will have changed during all the faffing around also they can't book all types of ticket and won't book open returns even when cheaper than fixed trains (fuck knows why) so we lose so much time because we're hanging around for the train we're booked on, or we have to buy a flexible ticket anyway because the event over-ran, also they add on their cut so even when it all goes to plan it costs more.

Then if I have to fly anywhere (for hands on work in places like the Isle of Man) I have to fill in another form to justify my frivolousness and environment destroying activities and I have to fill in an extra risk assessment, because going to the IoM counts as 'dangerous' because I am going alone to a rural area outside the EU (seriously).

I do wonder what would happen if the higher ups said 'lets just quietly ignore all this nonsense and get on with the job how we like, which is much cheaper and more efficient'. My guess is it would take years for anyone who makes the rules to notice.

No, Local Government, but as I said upthread, I have been recently recruited to this pointless, nothing to do job, at at time when the council is in a dire financial state and desperately looking to save money by cutting services, and where the previous post holder clearly had fuck all to do.

None of that stopped management wanting to keep their staff levels up by recruiting to this post, despite not needing the staff.

Its bloody unbelievable. And its immoral on staff like me who believe they are going to a real and meaningful job when they accept the job, only to find out it only exists to satisfy a manager's ego, and its immoral to the public purse. Other people's taxes are wasted on my pointless wage!

Not just the DM. How many public enquiries and 'lessons to be learned'

You can compare individual workload. Dh was actually bored because he didn't have enough to do. He's just applied for and got a different role within the university which he thinks will be a vit more From what he says, there's more hanging around in offices chatting than there is burnout.

The point of most jobs, in the private sector at least, is that someone thinks money can be made by paying someone to do them. While that remains the case the jobs will exist and the more money made from doing them the higher the price they'll command. I agree that some roles should be more highly valued and better rewarded, but these tend to be those that don't generate profit and are funded via the finite amount in the public purse. So unless people pay higher taxes this won't change. However this is unrelated to whether there's a 'point' to other jobs or not.

I work in IT and finance and I automated myself out of my last three roles, a fact that I'm very proud of. There are a lot of jobs where things are being done inefficiently because it's easier to get one person to keep doing a job slowly (or in a way that made sense 20 years ago) than take 10 people to automate the work to remove a job altogether.

It doesn't mean the jobs themselves are valueless though - my last job kept payment systems going and if the automation hadn't been done properly millions of card payments could have failed from day 1.

Except look at the admin jobs that have been pushed away to give way to ‘please check our website’ when a real person could help, look at banks being shells. Ai etc can do these jobs but at the expense of having the comfort of a person to help when eg something has broken down and you need help now

For a minute, I thought I was reading the daily mail, not MN.

I also work in a bullshit job then. But, my pushing paper around (it's 2025, it's all digital) makes sure that the charity I work for complies with the law, keeps everyone safe and doesn't get hit with a legal battle or massive fine. You do realise that someone needs to set up the infrastructure for delivery teams to do the jobs that they are best at? Make sure they are covered by insurance? Make sure funding flows in and out?

Just because you don't understand what people do for a living doesn't mean that we only need teachers and nurses in the workplace.

Covid lockdowns proved that.

Most jobs are superfluous.

Yep. Dh did do something about it. He streamlined the office he was in charge of by not replacing people. With no discernible reduction in productivity (in fact the opposite). I'm a teacher still, and it makes me quite envious to hear about these people being paid to do so little. Unfortunately I don't have the higher level management experience dh had, so I wouldn't be able to go for roles anywhere near as well-paying as I'm getting as a head of subject with decadea of experience.

Huge numbers of people still worked during covid to keep things moving.

Perhaps we should look at who were the ones living on furlough for months to see what jobs were really unnecessary.

All "essential" jobs carried on one way or another.

Having just come off a call with nurses, they seemed very grateful I was able to get the paper work (design, website updates etc) sorted and enable them to do their job. In hospitals, a lot of work is there to support nursing and clinical teams.

Do you believe that hospital responses to Covid were organised and planned by doctors and nurses?

Nurses and teachers are public sector jobs and whilst they are invaluable they don't actually contribute to the economy. Manufacturing jobs and service jobs are what are actually needed in a capitalist society.

Indeed, most office workers were working remotely during COVID.

Many people still went out to work.

The people who weren't working were those in hospitality, airlines, entertainment, personal services like hair, beauty and 'wellness'.

Of course jobs that provide those sort of services are rarely 'essential' but they contribute significantly to the economy, enrich people's lives and provide employment. They probably don't make up 'most jobs' but our lives would be much less satisfying without access to these services.

But there are some tasks that can very easily be automated that don't take large numbers of people or lots of money.

These days, there's really no excuse for small armies of admin workers to be copying figures from one screen and entering them on another screen. It's usually very easy to automate the extraction/export of data from one system and import it into another system.

Yet, my sister works in an NHS admin role and her entire day job is re-typing data from one computer system to another computer system - she has two computers and two keyboards/screens, and literally spends all her day looking at data on one screen and typing it into the other. She says there's a room full of them all doing the same kind of thing, but just different data/different systems. They don't even use "copy and paste" as it's on different computers, not just one computer with two screens where copy and paste would be possible as you'd be using the same computer/keyboard.

Not only is it a monumental waste of time/money to manually do something like that which could quickly and easily be automated (or at least semi automated), it just creates a massive risk of error/omission when manually copying data from one screen to another, especially as a lot of the data is to do with test results etc. where 50.1 wrongly entered as 5.1 could literally kill someone if treatment/drugs are based on the wrong number!

I 'push paper' which ensures that people with disabilities are able to access safely designed & built wheelchair accessible vehicles. Is that pointless?

Before this, I 'pushed paper' checking that overseas job applicants genuinely had the qualifications they claim. Would you want your NHS trust to employ a surgeon who says he qualified at the University of Tripoli, without checking he is qualified to operate on your child. Or is fluent enough in English to communicate with the rest of the surgical team. Is that pointless?

I suggest you rethink your view of administrators. Life would be terribly dangerous without us.

Yes that's absurd. I work in the private sector so all the easier efficiencies were taken years ago. I can only hope in your sister's example, that there are IT people in the background working to remove the need to do it because that sounds incredibly risky as you said.

If MN is anything to go by, there seem to be plenty of "non-jobs" out there.

Lots of posts by people claiming to get all their work done in 2 hrs because they’re supposedly so efficient at what they do - translated this means doing a part-time job, could easily take on more work, but choose not to.