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?

David Dunning and Justin Kruger would have something to say about how you view your daughter's "pointless" job.

Many nail bars and car washes are a front for money laundering or other murky business. Plenty of uber eats drivers are foreign student scammers who have brought their entire families over. Many jobs are not exactly what they seem.

I’m not saying all jobs are pointless - of course, builders, engineers, and researchers contribute real value. But let’s be honest, there are plenty of office jobs where people spend their time on unnecessary meetings, reports no one reads, and tasks that don’t actually improve anything. If those roles disappeared overnight, would the world notice?

As someone who is in a classic "Bullshit Job", there are several reasons why this line of argument irritates the fuck out of me (leaving aside the fact that I need my job to pay my mortgage).

Number one: it's economically illiterate: yes "the world would notice" if a large percentage of white collar jobs disappeared overnight. They contribute to growing the economy and get people paid. People who work in marketing may not pass your ethical "sniff test" but they still need jobs.

You have also missed the point that if people in bullshit jobs lose their jobs there is less money to pay for the worthy work which you consider everyone should be doing, such as plumbing, electrical work, home renovations or working for the NHS. You may think that this doesn't matter because City people and marketers don't deserve to have jobs but let me tell you it would massively hit the wider economy if they all got fired.

Two: the sanctimoniousness of sitting behind a keyboard and opining as to who should be employed is breathtaking. You basically appear to be saying no one should have a job except healthcare professionals, builders and farmers. What about the rest of us? Do we not get the right to make our own money? Who gets to decide which jobs are important. Should the government maintain an "approved jobs" list to make sure no one is illicitly working on a marketing plan?

Three: this argument is almost always a Trojan Horse for some homespun bollocks about how women are better off being at home with their kids. That's all good and well if you have someone to support you. Not all of us have this luxury.

Can I keep my Bullshit Job please or would you prefer me to live on benefits so you and your more ethically acceptable pals can look down on me?

As you can see OP, capitalism is a essentially a religion and many people don't like having their beliefs challenged. Most jobs exist for the sake of generating profit for the corporate overlords, and that's all there is to it. I work in advertising - the ultimate bullshit job. There are many jobs like mine where there would be no appreciable difference if they vanished overnight. Unfortunately I don't see any way out of this system because it's just too big of a beast. Humanity made a mistake moving away from agrarian living, but we passed the point of no return a long long time ago and a lot of people can't imagine living any other way.

I was working prior to the expansion of computing. We did our work forms went to the data prep and run in batch. Next day a report would come of relevant information.

When PCs started appearing with excel it was mainly the accountants wanted them. The more the PCs improved the more they were used. I don't think we ever lost staff due to IT just moved them around. Basically they simply made more jobs to do. Businesses worked prior to all the analysis, makes me wonder sometimes if its just a case of making work for works sake.

I am a police officer and I work fucking hard for not that much money.

My husband works in IT and is paid over 120k. He often gets up late, misses meetings, has naps when WFH, takes 2 hr lunch breaks etc (although frequently works late to make it up) and he moans about not getting a big enough annual bonus.

The disparity in value of work, effort put in, and compensation does annoy me, but I have to acknowledge that he worked harder than me at uni and went into a canny line of work when I went in for public sector work.

I am just glad I'm married to him and not another police officer!!

DH is a civil servant, always has been. A lot of his job sounds pointless to me to be honest.. all meetings and endless back and forth on stuff that sounds like a load of bunkum to me. However I can tell you he works very hard and is most certainly not sitting idle. It doesn't seem like his job has a lot of meaning or that anyone is any better off for all his drive in meeting his targets, motivating his team, travelling the country to all these meetings.. the whole system seems full of BS.

If the "product" of your work does nothing to benefit society or improve loving standards, then yes, you could argue that your job is pointless. I say this in the sense that ultimately you produce nothing of any real worth.

For example, a paramedic is paid a fraction of the amount that a footballer makes. But when someone you love needs urgent medical care, who is more valuable?

Who deserves the higher salary?

The footballer is absolutely replaceable, if they walked off the pitch in the middle of a match, regardless of how "important" the match was, nothing bad would happen, nobody would die. The Paramedic on the other hand could literally have someone's life in their hands.

So who is worth more?

Ultimately, what is the function of work?

To make money in order to keep the economy functioning?

To create jobs so people have a means of paying tax, regardless of the value of those jobs?

Unfortunately, we don't pay people based on the value of their job to society, if we did, then refuse collectors and sewerage workers would be the most highly paid. Instead,we pay people based on arbitrary measures. So a footballer earns more than someone who literally saves other peoples lives.

You'd notice pretty quickly when your access to online resources at work broke down, retail prices increased from food wastage, or MOD spending went through the roof, or HR issues went unresolved, or you couldn't buy or sell property using a solicitor, or couldn't book a medical appointment because its being triaged by an AI system which is either manipulated to get results by service users overwhelming demand or can't understand your issue.
This is equivalent to when some men completely ignore the admin of running a home for example, things seem fine and unnecessary until they're not being done.

It’s not that I think compliance is entirely pointless - some regulations are essential, like H&S or safeguarding. But there’s also a lot of bureaucracy that seems to exist just to justify itself rather than add real value. Ever worked somewhere where paperwork and red tape slow everything down without making anything safer or more efficient?*

So what compliance is pointless then? I think the key here is in 'seems to' in that it suggests a lack of understanding, you're viewing it from an outside perspective. I understand that some roles may seem this way on the surface, however the more you look at them the clearer it becomes why they exist. Yes in large public sector organisations some roles can seem futile but that's the challenge of doing anything on such a big scale, it takes more people to manage the bits that, in a smaller private company, would fall under one person & not take much time.

In my experience, the “lowly” jobs are the most important. Admins and techs running around like blue arse flies. And then the management positions where I’ve seen a whole of uselessness.

The difference there is that whilst the outcome is obviously more important from the paramedics work, you could train a large % of people to do it if needed. The vast majority of people couldn't play at a level which is interesting to watch. Therefore the societal value placed on football players is high because people are willing to pay a lot for entertainment.
It's equivalent to saying all restaurants are pointless as you can buy a £4 chicken so they're not needed. But people will pay more for entertainment/experiences.

Reminds of the tv series 2012 followed by W1A , or going further back, ‘ Yes, Minister’ (and Yes, Prime minister)

My friend armed with a 1st class degree and masters in History got a job straight out of uni for a clinical commissioning group for NHS... she tells me she doesn't really know what she's doing and she just attends power point meetings and occasionally makes power points herself. She earns the same as my husband who is a registrar doctor working in theatre and ICU.

This makes no sense.
Society shut down so of course there were jobs that were unnecessary at the time. That isn't a true representation of society and the labour market.
Plus, I bet you'd be surprised at how many jobs were needed and how many people kept on working.

I hated my job, it absolutely felt pointless. I agree that a lot of jobs are.

I also agree that it's sad that pay and respect for a job isn't proportional to its value to society. Not sure how you'd achieve that though.

They pay professional footballers so much because football matches generate massive ad revenue - viewers are absolutely bombarded with ads and sponsorships. It has nothing to do with the players' skill or the entertainment value. Everything in our society is driven by corporate profits.

It generates that revenue because of the skill. There wouldn't be any money in watching a bunch of town football club level players competing.

The money in football is about spectacle. Plenty of incredibly skilled athletes in less commercialised sports barely make a living. Football has global marketing, aggressive branding, and an industry built around squeezing every bit of money possible from fans and advertisers. If pure skill dictated earnings, Olympic gold medalists in niche sports wouldn’t be working day jobs to survive. This also explains why female pro footballers are paid pennies compared to the men - the advertising beast isn't behind them.

Football is such a bad example to choose to illustrate "bullshit jobs". Elite footballers have a very very rare talent and so can command a very high wage for that. It is also time limited, most elite level footballers are retired at 35/40.

She agrees! - but the money is good - and the pension - and the health cover ...... ......

Fair enough. In addition to my role (account manager in advertising) I'd suggest most recruitment roles are bullshit jobs - middlemen that aren't necessary for the process.

If you have created a system where people need to do paid work to survive, then your best bet is to look at the size of your workforce and find a use for everyone, even if some people are doing "nice to have" jobs rather than essential ones. But what would be even better is if you could create a better system, which I think is partly David Graeber's point.

But another complicating factor is that the profit motive means it's better for companies to make more money from a shit service rather than less money from a good service. Maybe there's a lot of rubbish in the hedge that needs picking up, which could be a job, but no financial incentive for anyone to hire people to do it, because the person who owns the hedge would rather not dent their profits. (Amusingly you could enforce this through regulation and create two jobs here, a litter-picker and a litter-picking-regulator.)

AI should not be used to scan applicants' CVs for buzzwords etc. To me people who add a lot of buzzwords are doing this for filler and probably don't last 5 weeks in the jobs.

It's not that only a tiny few people are so special and intelligent they are the only people who understand the woes of capitalism, it is that you cannot change a system within a short time or even in a few generations.

The industrial revolution shows us just how much upheaval there was over a long period of time from the change from agrarian living to "working for the man".

Truth is we always did "work for the man". Those fields always belonged to someone even when it was common land. Dues and tithes had to be paid to the community, church, and to the lord in the feudal system

Anything that suggests it was soooo much nicer way back when we were grubbing about in the mud trying to grow a turnip for tea is ignoring history and complete hippy bollocks.

I say this as an ex-farm worker who really did grub about in the mud growing a turnip for tea. I also know most people wouldn't touch that life with a treble length bargepole.