Is your work about performing your job, or is half your time, maybe more, about filling out the paperwork that administrators require of you? Or dealing with the concerns of support staff, for whom you are now their support staff? Has real work become secondary?
For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.
Kinda makes me proud not to practice corporate law.
Even this estimate probably understates the extent of the problem, because it doesn’t address the creeping bullshitization of real jobs. According to a 2016 survey, American office workers reported that they spent four out of eight hours doing their actual jobs; the rest of the time was spent in email, useless meetings, and pointless administrative tasks. The trend has much less effect on obviously useful occupations, like those of tailors, steamfitters, and chefs, or obviously beneficial ones, like designers and musicians, so one might argue that most of the jobs affected are largely pointless anyway; but the phenomenon has clearly damaged a number of indisputably useful fields of endeavor. Nurses nowadays often have to spend at least half of their time on paperwork, and primary- and secondary-school teachers complain of galloping bureaucratization.
The op-ed goes on to talk about the bullshitization of academia, which may well be the mother lode of worthlessness in lieu of the “real work” of teaching, studying, thinking.
In American universities from 1985 to 2005, the number of both students and faculty members went up by about half, the number of full-fledged administrative positions by 85 percent — and the number of administrative staff by 240 percent.
The saying in law is that the tail doesn’t wag the dog, but when there are more administrators and support staff than people doing the actual work of the enterprise, who’s the tail and who’s the dog?
To get a sense of how total the shift of power has become, consider a story I heard recently, about a prominent scholar who had just been rejected for a named chair at Cambridge. The man was acknowledged to be at the top of his field, but he didn’t even make the shortlist. The kiss of death came when a high-ranking administrator glanced over his CV and remarked, “He’s obviously a very smart guy. But I have no use for him.” That judgment settled the matter. When even Cambridge dons are presumed to exist to further the purposes of managers, rather than the other way around, we know the corporate takeover of the global university system is complete.
In law, there are two overarching “real work” virtues. There are the lawyers who make rain. There are the lawyers who try cases.*** One brings in the business. The other does the “real work” of lawyering. In small and solo practices, that’s pretty much all there is, aside from some support staff who actually support the lawyers.
But has the world become captive to the dead weight of administration and support, consuming the actual performance of work to justify their own existence?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
**Don’t blame me for the word. I didn’t make it up.
***This is meant in the more expansive sense of doing the great legal work clients deserve, not merely the actual trials.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Unsurprisingly, manufacturing companies are the best at eliminating bullshit and focusing on real work. Governments are the worst. Everybody else is somewhere in between.
Yep, those redundant workers needed eliminating. Robots are way better at doing real work. Hail our overlords. I’m definitely not a robot, captcha.
Are they? Cite?
I’m not sure how one would do a study that formally quantifies “bullshit”. But manufacturing is relatively easy to measure and thus easy to make efficient, if you eliminate bullshit and your costs per widget don’t do up, you didn’t need the bullshit. Government, otoh, has very little incentive to eliminate bullshit.
So whoosh. Okay then.
Woosh indeed.
You’ve clearly never been in a Big Three auto plant and had to get a Project Manager, the Plant Safety Coordinator, the Union Steward, the Union Health & Safety Rep, and a union electrician together so that one outside contractor could tighten one screw.
True. I am viewed as a revenue and prestige generating unit by the administration. But since I am willing to do it for some reason I no right to complain.
Administration takes almost 60% off the top of my research contracts. When I ask what I get for it they point to the lights in my office and the phone on my desk. Even the mob in Canarsie took less.
You vastly underestimate the actual overhead costs. A research organization in the US that doesn’t also have students typically takes 150% – 200% in overhead (i.e., multiply the research labor and supplies costs by 2.5 to 3 to get the total cost). Professors complain endlessly about their overhead, not realizing that their research is subsidized by undergraduate tuition and donations. Do some Fermi estimation on the capital cost of the building you are in, maintenance on that building, utilities, phones, internet, custodial staff, printers, computers, journal subscriptions, library facilities, meeting rooms, landscaping, security, etc., and you will find that 60% is a bargain.
There are reasonable arguments to be made about the certain aspects of the overhead costs, like safety regulations and human resources departments, but they are not a major fraction of the total.
In my university it is against state law to use tuition money for anything except, you get it, educational support as in prof. salaries, TA stipends, and classroom equipment. Students always point to new buildings and say “there’s my tuition dollars at work”, but once gain, buildings are capitol improvements and tuition cannot be paid for them.
Your numbers are certainly correct for research organizations and possibly Stanford is inching its way up to that level. But universities are a different animal. Unlike your building example above my research dollars cannot go for capitol improvement. Universities are different because I do almost everything myself starting with background research, building the lab, training students, traveling, publishing etc.
What is your source for your numbers?
Money is fungible. They can swear up and down that these particular dollars are not used for something, but that just means some other discretionary dollars that the university gets were. Look at the total spending and total costs.
At a state university, your federally-funded research is subsidized by tuition and state funding (the existence of the state funding is why in-state tuition is lower for state universities than for comparable private ones). At some private universities, the federally-funded research is subsidized by endowment income as well as tuition.
None of this changes my point.
“Bullshit” in quotes and with my greatest respect.
Once again tuition pays zero of my salary. My 60 percent overhead pays over 3 times my salary and benefits. How is tuition subsidizing me? You repeated that tuition is funding me but haven’t added anything?
You now add that state funding and endowment income support me. Good, but your statement was that tuition is supporting me. What gives?
If you wanted to make a better point you could have said why are so many unqualified students going to college? Or that universities are just another special interest group like everyone else getting funding from the government and I would have agreed with you! But why the fixation on tuition?
Eighty percent of my funding is from industry. You are encouraging me to jump ship.
I apologize if my first post wasn’t clear. My thesis in this discussion is that 60% is a low overhead rate. In other words, it dramatically underestimates the actual total costs of supporting your research endeavors. I have no fixation on tuition, I just mean that your research is significantly supported by sources of revenue for your organization other than the grants you are awarded.
At most universities, those other sources of revenue are dominated by tuition, direct state funding (for state-supported institutions), and endowment income (for private institutions). Charitable giving can be a non-negligible fraction at some institutions.
I have no insight into your personal employment contract. I don’t understand what you mean when you say that your 60% overhead rate (i.e., a multiplier of 1.6) pays over 3 times your salary and benefits. I do think statements like “tuition pays zero of my salary” show a misunderstanding of the funding of large institutions (i.e. that money is fungible).
Source for my numbers:
I work at a university-affiliated research center. In order to set our salaries and set targets for overhead rates and other costs, we routinely conduct surveys of a wide range of institutions including other UARCs, FFRDCs, government laboratories (DOE, DoD), industrial laboratories, private research organizations, and universities. Many of these organizations willingly share such internal cost information with each other, in an effort to maximize productivity. These surveys show that 60% is a low overhead rate, as does the Fermi estimation I suggested you try.
You are stubborn guy.
I hope you two left some kind of trail so you can find your way back.
Truths of a post-industrial service economy, I’m afraid. At least some workers realize that many are pointless. It’s the first step in developing some nice class consciousness. They’d be on the road to liberation if it weren’t for all the beer and circuses, god bless them. Buy, buy, buy and keep this sad ship afloat.
Yes, it was presaged in the 1960s when the discussion was how we would spend out free time when no-one worked more than 20hours a week & machines did the rest.. The post-post industrial age!
However once unemployment in the manufacturing sector started to climb, Govts stepped in to take up the slack, and all we have seen is a vast expansion in bureaucracy and drones to serve it.
The next step is way way beyond Govt comprehension, the wholesale takeover of our work by robots who are produced in a robot-run factory supplied by robot miners and robot-run industries…. No need for 90% of the jobs we have now!
Kinda makes sense of a basic wage for everyone and only those who want to work need to…
This is all far more complicated than we can reasonably talk about here, but the writing is on the wall. God help us when self-driving cars get up to snuff. How many people are employed just driving vehicles around? Are all of them going to become insurance brokers? The horror.
Newsflash: Nihilism and pessimism are on the rise. Just because people think their work is pointless doesn’t make it true.
Nor does it make it false, and they may be a better judge of the value of their work than Jake, hard as that is to believe.
1. I didn’t suggest I know the value of their work any better than the people who took this survey do.
2. It’s a good thing for the people who took this survey that they don’t determine the value of their work, as it’s a metric which is directly proportionate to wages/salary.
Ah. You thought I wanted to make this all about Jake. Sorry for giving you that mis-impression. That’s it for you today.
Ah, I see. So the Tuesday talk rules are now: You may share your perspective so long as you slavishly accept the premise of the original post without question.
Forgive me for not being surprised that you’ve resorted to silencing those who are disinclined to play along. You’ve been cranky and the smug has been a little thick among the adulators lately anyhow.
You hijacked a post the other day to spew your nonsense, and I warned you. You told me that you do it all for you, which would be fine if this was your blog. It’s not. Cut the bullshit about adulators and trying to make this all about you. The only person fascinated with Jake is Jake. So if all you’ve got is your need to pound away at all about you, over and over, stupid and stupider, then you can’t play here.
I warned you last time. From now on, if you can’t contribute anything thoughtful to my blog, and do so within the limits that non-pathological narcissists function, then you can’t comment at my blog. If it had been anyone else, I would have banned you long ago. I hope this time you’ll get the message.
One person’s “galloping bureaucratization” and “pointless administrative tasks” are the next person’s critical records and necessary accountability.
An assistant who doesn’t understand the practice of law might well view things like proof of service as “pointless” yet the attorneys know otherwise. But the survey only asked the assistant.
This might be a bigger issue than an assistant’s lack of appreciation of “proof of service.” Bureaucrats think all their records are critical. In triplicate.
Generally speaking, I feel like my work is useful (software development) however, the admin overheads have gotten huge. My team, which does support as well as development, only completes about 30% of our tasks for any one work unit (about 2 weeks). We had a new boss come in and tell us how terrible that was and how we were going to start having meetings to “Really drill down” into the cause of the 70% of ‘missed’ development work. All without seeing the irony there. Last I checked we are now 25% of work completed…
You misspelled Agile.
I cannot say that I know anything about “real work” in the halls of academia, or the courthouse. Down here in the dark, however, where the boilers run, I am deeply familiar with the unchanging refrain of the men with the wrenches and the torches, an it is always “Dear God, what’s with all this new bullshit?”.
Industry is addicted to buzzwords and snappy sounding programs that promise the newest latest greatest efficiency. Otherwise intelligent men are completely credulous, jumping at the idea that the new program will result in gold stars all around and ecstatic shareholders, without pausing a moment to remember that many if not all of these innovations come from people who are in the unenviable position of coming up with new bullshit annually to justify their very existence.
A business that’s full of seventy year old heavy machinery doesn’t need new and exciting systems to track the vagaries of axle grease, or a four tier vendor program to acquire DC stepper motors, or yoga on tuesdays. We don’t need legions of bright eyed grads eager to pad their CV’s by creating reams of new bullshit about bullshit they don’t know any shit about in the first place.
Twenty years ago, it took about an hour of my day to let the people with the clean shirts know what I was up to for the day. Today that number is about three hours, out of a ten hour day, and climbing every year. Literally 30% of my time, negotiating non-negotiable shit, finding socially acceptable ways to tell people they fucked everything up (why did this job use 113% of the parts on the task sheet? I don’t know but it’s sure not because you dipshits gave a sweetheart vendor deal to somebody you’re related to so that we’re paying twice as much for shit with an unacceptable failure rate, asshole), and generally gladhanding an entire tier of employees who make a lot of noise but ultimately do nothing but kill trees.
If I live to retirement age, my work day will consist of wiring up one peckerhead, and then writing a goddam novel about it. Nerve wracking sons of bitches.
I’m kind of enjoying the people who don’t do shit telling the people who do do shit that there is no bullshitization, because bullshitters gonna bullshit about their bullshit. But let’s keep this between us.
Taking the 60,000 ft view:
If on average our lives are improving (they are), then it must be because there is growth in aggregate human productivity. It certainly could be the case that we could grow aggregate human productivity even more if we spent less “work time” on bullshit, but on the other hand “work time” is part of our lives. Maybe on average we like it better if it is less intense, so we trade some of our potential work productivity gains for leisure at work.
The oxygen is thin up that high.
And it is hard to see the ground.
I used to have thick three ring binder labeled “Epistles fro tree killers” that contained BS from the administration I was afraid to throw out. The salesmen would spot that and what to know what it was no else noticed it.
Keynsian theory. If you hire fifty people to bury money in jars and another fifty to dig them up, a greater purpose is served (even though the activity itself lacks direct purpose).
It’s certainly not confined to academia or the practice of law, almost every field has seen an increase of BS administrative tasks. The medical field has become bureaucracy-laden and has seen practices pop up that exclusively reject insurance, keep their practices small and administrative tasks to a minimum and done by the practitioners themselves, so as to keep costs affordable to their non-insurance using customers.
Human resources is basically a field, a profession, an entire department at some organizations dedicated solely to BS administrative tasks, often mandated by the state to perform. It’s pure overhead.
Four hours out of eight sounds like a good day sometimes. Do we really need mandatory annual sexual harassment training? I mean, if you don’t know how to do it by now…
Yesterday, I was informed by woke criminal defense lawyer that a witness who used the word “female” during his testimony rather than “woman” was a misogynist, as was the judge and I for not recognizing how misogynistic it was. Without mandatory training, how would people know such a thing?
This is why all those extraneous jobs are valuable. They provide jobs to people who do not have any skills that anyone wants to buy.
I work for a Genomics testing lab that was bought out 18 months ago by a larger company. It is a two story building, with the wetlab and its operators in the first floor, and everyone else (sales, administration , billing, software engineering, R&D).
In that time, 3/4ths of the second floor staff have resigned or been laid off without replacement. The first floor staff has been reduced by about 1/4th,. Very few significant tasks or “synergies” were taken up by parent company staff. There were no major changes to the testing protocol until one month ago.
Yet test volume has gone up by a 3rd in that time without a hitch. And even with the reduced staff, work is still largely devoted to useless meetings and administrative nonsense. Regarding the recent test protocol change, even that was implemented with the drastically reduced staff.
Paraphrase on UW Medicine and its enabler, the Washington State Attorney General: “To get a sense of how total the shift of power has become, consider a story I heard recently, about a prominent scholar who had just been rejected for a named chair at Cambridge. The man, a surgeon, was acknowledged to be at the top of his field (15 years more experience than the next most experienced surgeon in his specialty) but he made the shortlist, the list of 60 personnel to be arbitrarily reduced . The kiss of death came when an SVP, high-ranking administrator masters degree in social work, glanced over his CV and top-of-the-line clinical and surgical performance then remarked, “He’s obviously a very smart guy and our most productive specialist by all measures, but I have no use for him.” That judgment settled the matter. After all, Washington is an At Will work state. When even the surgical specialists are presumed to exist to further the purposes of hospital managers and administrators, rather than the other way around, we know the corporate takeover of UW Medicine is complete. Replaced by an optometrist.
The bullshit work creeps in because people are afraid of the mob/ are risk adverse. Your example of using female instead of women is something I can see as a mandatory class that serves no purpose but would be done because of one complaint.
The military realized a decade ago this was overwhelming the force (in the military training, deploying and planning are the “real work”). A report came out called “lying to ourselves” that highlighted how all units were forced to lie about mandatory “bullshit” training because otherwise that is all they would do.
Its turning around now but that has required several crisis, the relization they may be seriously called to fight a peer threat, and the correct political climate.
I’m courious what crisis could fix this in other fields or if’s it is even advisable to fix it or better to keep the population employed.
In the old country, I had an old fashioned boss* and an old fashioned work environment, where the level of bullshit was low. The government sometimes pressured us to establish cross-industry working groups and we would respond by establishing them as thoroughly anarcho-syndicalist entities, rendering them useless for the bureaucrats’ purposes. This suited my old fashioned approach to matters and life was good.
Sadly, bosses retire and we got a new boss – a contemporary of mine who favored a “modern” approach. Bullshit increased exponentially. A “Director of Operations” appeared, who inserted himself into everything and could not be ignored. Productivity plummeted to the extent that, one Sunday evening I replied (from home) to a just received email from him, with words to the effect of “It’s 7PM on a Sunday and I’m working on this because you won’t let me do my fucking job in office hours.”
Shortly after that I had my “You may all go to hell and I shall go to Texas” moment. Shortly after that, the troublesome CEO resigned and took a junior position elsewhere. I don’t know whether there’s less bullshit at the old firm as a result of all of that, but I like to hope that at least one place successfully repudiated it.
* For British Raj, retired spook, etc. values of “old fashioned”. When “literally” did not mean “figuratively”.
Where is Tyler Durden when we need him?
David Graeber is, frankly, a douchebag. The last thing the world needs is an academic talking about how the rest of us don’t have “real work.”
You have some really weird eyes for that to be your takeaway.
Somewhat naively, I thought surgery, particularly orthopaedics, would be the last to go, given the majority of surgery is results driven ie that guy missed half the cancer, my knee replacement is infected; and orthopaedics tends to attract sporting types who like to pretend they are Thor . . .
Sadly, our local “trade association” now has a “gender and diversity” committee, which is advocating its cute little butt off for affirmative action quotas. We have training to complete to own our shitlord status, under threat of losing our registration.
The end is nigh. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed. Andre Rieu is touring again.
Nailed the orthopods, “Thor-like sporting types”. Ha ha ha!. May I borrow that way too descriptive analogy for the next Surgical Services meeting? There, those Thor-like orthopedist and general surgeons fellate the charge nurse of the OR in the only servile and yet dignified manner befitting his, hers, their station in the hospital pecking order. Although, Throw instruments and holler at the staff with impunity. Unwittingly Injure the tender sensibilities of one of the nurses or techs and find yourself assigned the new scarlet letter A, ‘disruptive physician’ with poor communication skills detrimental to the smooth functioning of the entire hospital, notwithstanding instant, summary suspension of your medical license. Due process rights be damned in the bizarre invocation of “patient safety” amidst the toxic brew characterized by a Kafka-esque, kangaroo court, Star Chamber pseudo legal disposition of your case.