Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': 'job', 'bullshit job', 'shit job'
pausing to clarify some important distinctions, before continuing with Gorz' Critique of Economic Reason in the coming weeks and months
In working through[1] Critique of Economic Reason (CER) to see how Gorz has managed to synthesise Weber, Habermas, and Arendt to think (with and beyond Marx) about the shit we’re in with our working lives and free time, it’s important consider how the terms job, work, and labour are used.
~
I was looking for a job
– and then I found a job,
and heaven knows, I’m miserable now
~
As for the job, in a previous post, I cribbed Graeber’s enticing and almost self-explanatory notion of a bullshit job as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case[2].”
Graeber makes a productive distinction between a ‘bullshit job’ and a ‘shit job’:
a shit job usually come combination of dirty, dangerous, and difficult[3] (3K), as well as poorly paid and precarious (2P).
Shit job = 3K + 2P
In contemporary English at least, I could say, quite naturally, that “I’ve had a number of jobs in my life, most of them casual, two of them full-time. Many of these were shit jobs; most of them had their bullshit aspect”. The non-binary aspect of Graeber’s phrase is usually not conveyed quite enough: there never was a job that either was/not bullshit, and there is nearly no job that doesn’t have its bullshit aspects. The key threshold is when the bullshit comes to dominate everything else, where the good bits evaporate, leaving only the bullshit aspects, or where the majority of people realise they’re doing bullshit jobs. As Nathan Heller writes of Graeber’s theory, “If you’re lucky, bullshit… consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career”[see note 2].
The intensifier here, via what I’ve already pulled from Gorz’ intro, is that there are an appreciable percentage of people who get paid incredibly well – some of whom 60-80 hours a week – doing gold-plated bullshit jobs. Alongside this group of overpaid and overworked bullshit artists, bullshit administrators and the haute servile who service them (those who conceive of Monkey Tennis for fickle clients, and the clients who agree it’s a good idea to pay to have Monkey Tennis produced), there are large and growing numbers of people whose shit jobs – or contract-based, or spot/on-demand performances –contain a growing percentage of bullshit and (Gorz’ key point) are about the servile servicing of the enfranchised minority. By the late 80s, Gorz saw how this would tend to produce a society where the huge effort is expended on procuring and delivering niche services that do not add any value, where everyone is harried and dependent, and nearly no one has any free time. Thus, at the dystopian horizon of what I tentatively called Gorzworld, a small group of people can demand to have Monkey Tennis delivered and assembled in their backyard in <2 hours, while the work of another group’s ‘jobs’ – what they spend their life doing – is to buzz around town on scooters delivering and assembling Monkey Tennis, while Pakistan floods and the Amazon burns.
Notice: we are no longer addressing our basic needs and fundamental issues here, and the more privileged we are, the more likely we will be to be having our hairless pedigree dogs helicoptered to our yachts so they can get dreadfully seasick as we sail the Mediterranean, and then totally absorbed/preoccupied with our seasick dogs.
As for the use of jobs throughout CER, in the introductory chapters Gorz quotes Lionel Stoléru[4] extensively. Stoléru writes (in ’86, when he was between senior administrative roles in the Mitterand government):
“A wave of technological advances has rendered a whole series of jobs unnecessary and reduced employment on a huge scale without creating an equivalent number of jobs elsewhere” (2, italics mine).
Shortly after this, Gorz implicitly defines what he means by job, writing of technology as labour-saving devices (which following Stoléru, renders many jobs unnecessary):
“To say that (time saving innovations) will ‘create jobs’ is a paradoxical way of denying the economic rationality which is, in other respects, their justification: the aim of fast-food chains, domestic robots, home computers, rapid hairdressing salons and the like, is not to provide work[5] but to save it. Where paid labour (that is, jobs) is really necessary in these areas, the quantity of paid labour provided is much lower than the quantity of domestic labour saved (3-4, italics mine)”.
So then: jobs are paid labour. Jobs are paid roles.
These rolls could include baking rolls. If your paid role is baking rolls, you have a job as a baker. If your bakery is using some high tech oven, it probably involves less hard, less skilled labour than it used to. When said oven breaks down, it becomes totally bullshit, but might also be more bullshit, less skilled, meaningful ‘good work’ than it used to.
There’s an amazing scene in Sennett’s Corrosion of Character where he discusses how automation in a bakery produced a situation that gets at exactly what Gorz is intimating: hard graft and craft, which was physically intense and required hands and muscles all day (a job that needed kneading), was replaced by a general employment situation where the role, the ‘work of the job’ consisted in a smaller number of workers monitoring a new, huge, electronically controlled oven manufactured by a large, specialist corporation. We can also see this in Alec MacGillis’ great work on the transformation of the Bethlehem Steel Works at Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore to an Amazon fulfilment centre (here).
The new oven tracked the ‘economic reason’ whose societal effects Gorz is critiquing. Installing the oven is about seeking efficiency and advantage in a capitalist marketplace marked by many competitors seeking to ‘deliver’ bread in an urban environment: the new oven makes sense because it bakes more loaves faster, more consistently. More bread sooner; less wastage; scalability, more market share, more profit: win.
In the version of the job reformed by the labour-saving efficiency-enhancing oven (in the new roll role once the new oven had ben rolled out), there was less hard labour in/on the job. However, the work itself was also deskilled, with the consequence that intergenerational know how and craft was lost, eroding the dignity and meaning of baking at that bakery (and the group identity of this artisanal working class). Not only that, but with the pattern of labour generated by the new oven, employees became interchangeable (and staff turnover was high), and all the ‘bakers’ became totally dependent on the small number of skilled contractors who would have to be called in to fix the oven when it broke down[6]. And when it broke down, which it did, all the workers would have nothing to do but stand around – which was bullshit.
(As a sidebar effect with huge societal consequences: we also probably ended up with more heavily processed bread with more additives, less fibre, and types of flour the consumption of which is more likely to induce gluten intolerances and Coeliac, over time… )
Thus the new oven, a win for economic reason – cheaper, samier bread sooner for everyone, and more market share for that bakery vis its competitors – was also a huge loss for workers, destroyed the working class (and its identity and ability to organise), produced fewer (and more bullshit) jobs, and gave many of us inflamed guts.
To close this section by pinpointing the ‘job’ factor in the above (which also contains a lot about work and labour you’ve no doubt noticed) let’s just say for all following posts on CER:
a job is (some kind of contractual formalisation of)
paid labour (that contains varying kinds of work and labour).
To me this aligns neatly enough with what common usage ordinarily means, and resonates with what I’ve taken from Graeber:
a job becomes bullshit to the extent that not even the person doing it can justify its existence (or even really understand and explain it if asked);
and it’s shit to the degree it’s 3K+3P.
Sidebars/thought bubbles:
Interestingly, shit jobs are seldom totally bullshit jobs, and many remain in fact because they are shit but necessary, integral, crucial; many cushy jobs are also very bullshit.
Also, notice: in a world that runs on exploitation there is a fuckton of ‘(un)free labour’ and ‘unpaid work’; but definitionally there are no ‘unpaid jobs’[7].
Next post tomorrow: labour.
[1] But not labouring through, nor jobbing through
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom
[3] From Japanese 3K ‘sankei’: 汚い kitanai (dirty, unclean), 危険 kiken (dangerous, perilous, hazardous), きつい kitsui (intense, severe, hard, demanding).
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Stoléru
[5] I feel like this should say ‘labour’ to keep it consistent and avoid confusion (in a text [and a blog post] where these are precisely the important distinction-droids we’re looking for).
[6] John Deere notoriously does this with its large harvesters, as does the US military with all its tech… but less conspicuously, this is now the pattern with all the ICT-based devices we use, and increasingly with cars, as they shift from being essentially mechanical assemblages to being controlled by proprietary soft and hardware.
[7] Internships! The scourge. However, definitionally, they are not jobs. Yes, they are jobs in all but name. However, in removing the ‘pay’ from ‘paid labour’, it is rendered unjob: one does one’s ‘internship’ until the entity one is doing unpaid work for deigns to give one a ‘job’ (at which point, the labour is paid).