At work, your work is not your work

From “The Spy Who Fired Me: The human costs of workplace monitoring”, by Esther Kaplan, in Harper’s 2105 March, pp. 31-35.

A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require companies to inform their employees that such monitoring is taking place. According to Marc Smith, a sociologist with the Social Media Research Foundation, “Anything you do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls, private photos — if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it. They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not your data.”

David Graeber, on jobs and bureaucracy

From “Idle Hands”, an essay by Jonathan Malesic in America, 2018 Fall, pp. 34f.

David […]Graeber, an anthropologist and the author of the rollicking mega-narrative Debt: The First 5,000 Years, guesses that about half the jobs in advanced economies are pointless, and the workers know it but feel they need to pretend they’re doing something useful. They’re doing “bullshit jobs.”

People with useless jobs include flunkies (who make higher-ups feel important), goons (the lawyers and P.R. flacks who battle counterparts at other companies), duct tapers (who fix systemic problems through ad hoc means), box tickers (who signal, often to regulators, that work is being done, even when it’s not) and taskmasters (who assign useless work to other people). None of these roles answers a real human need. The work is symbolic and ideological, not useful. Graeber’s point, in calling out useless jobs, isn’t to put these workers out on the street in the name of corporate efficiency, though. It’s to liberate them.

…

According to Graeber, we devalued work once we began to believe that capital, not labor, creates all wealth. We’ve built a system of “managerial feudalism” in which the worker’s time belongs to the boss, regardless of whether that time is productive.

…

The reality of most coding work, however, is that it is drudgery. “The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were Copy and Paste,” Pein writes.

A lot of what tech companies do is break up other people’s satisfying, decently paid work and offer it to the lowest bidder. Uber allows anyone to be a cabdriver; Spotify lets you be your own D.J. and record-store clerk. With Yelp, you get to be a restaurant critic. The key innovation has to do with labor, not technology. By creating ever more freelancers, these companies do, in a sense, cut out considerable useless work. But at the same time, “Most of the startups pitched as ‘Uber for X’ boiled down to ‘cheaper labor for X,’” Pein writes.

Pein thinks the whole tech industry is a scam, concentrating wealth in a few hands while destroying value nationwide. Traditional media is collapsing, for instance, yet online advertisers aren’t even getting what they pay for. The eyeballs that view web-based ads might be automated software, or else they’re humans working in “click farms” on the other side of the world, earning a penny per click.

Pein compares Silicon Valley today to the California Gold Rush of the 1840s and ’50s. In those days, most prospectors went bust. The smart investment was to capitalize on their foolish hopes: “Sell shovels to all the suckers who think they’ll get rich digging for gold.” Pein sees landlords who operate what amount to Airbnb tenements as shovel merchants. Likewise conferences where developers with half-baked ideas pay to pitch to bored venture capitalists.

If the technology sector is a grift, then it’s hardly alone. A decade ago, the “innovations” of subprime lending and collateralized debt obligations ruined our economy. Now the wellness industry hawks charcoal and coffee enemas as cures to made-up afflictions.

The contradiction in the U.S. regarding work is that the same society that believes you need to labor for wages in order to have dignity also believes in getting rich quick. The proliferation of useless jobs may signal that faith in the moral value of work is ebbing away. That’s not necessarily a problem. After all, work isn’t really what gives human beings dignity. But some people still believe in work, and they’re at risk of exploitation by those whose only creed is acquisition. The challenge of social ethics is to elevate the former and rein in the latter.

______________________________

From “In Regulation Nation”, an essay by David Graeber in Harper’s, 2015 March, pp. 11-16.  The essay is from Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules published 2015 February.

The idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the nineteenth century to justify laissez-faire economic policies, but such policies never actually have the effect of lessening the role of government. In late-nineteenth-century England, for instance, an increasingly liberal society did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy but the opposite: an endlessly mushrooming array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials — the very people who made possible the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals. It turned out that maintaining a free-market economy required considerably more paperwork than a Louis XIV–style absolutist monarchy. The same effect could be seen in America during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, or in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, where, from 1994 to 2002, the number of civil servants jumped by some quarter million.

…

Working-class Americans now generally believe government to comprise two sorts of people: “politicians,” who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and “bureaucrats,” who are condescending elitists and almost impossible to uproot. The right-wing argument tends to assume a kind of tacit alliance between a parasitic poor (in America usually pictured in overtly racist terms) and equally parasitic self-righteous officials who subsidize the poor using other people’s money. Even the mainstream left now offers little more than a watered-down version of this language. Bill Clinton, for instance, spent so much of his career bashing civil servants that after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he felt he had to remind Americans that public servants were human beings, too.

…

Americans often seem embarrassed by the fact that, on the whole, we’re really quite good at bureaucracy. It doesn’t fit our American self-image. We’re supposed to be self-reliant individualists. But it’s impossible to deny that for well over a century the United States has been a profoundly bureaucratic society. When taking over the reins of the global economic and political order from Great Britain after World War II, for instance, the United States was particularly concerned with creating structures of international administration. Right away it set up the world’s first thoroughly planetary bureaucratic institutions: the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). The British Empire had never attempted anything like this. Even when Britain created large corporations like the East India Company, its goal was either to facilitate trade with other nations or to conquer them. The Americans attempted to administer everything and everyone.

 

The French work?

From The Economist, 19 Nov 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21538733:

[…]

Many outsiders conclude that French workers are simply lazy. “Absolument Dé-bor-dée!” (“Absolutely Snowed Under”), a book which came out last year, described how state employees compete to do nothing at work. Another title in this bestselling genre on avoiding toil, “Bonjour Paresse” (“Hello Laziness”) by Corinne Maier, an economist, explained how she got away with doing nothing at EDF, another utility.

In fact studies suggest that the problem with French employees is less that they are work-shy, than that they are poorly managed. According to a report on national competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, the French rank and file has a much stronger work ethic than American, British or Dutch employees. They find great satisfaction in their work, but register profound discontent with the way their firms are run.

Two-fifths of employees, according to a 2010 study by BVA, a polling firm, actively dislike their firm’s top managers. France ranks last out of ten countries for workers’ opinion of company management, according to a report from 2007. Whereas two-thirds of American, British and German employees say they have friendly relations with their line manager, fewer than a third of French workers say the same. Many employees, in short, agree with Ms Maier, who recommends that chief executives be guillotined to the tune of “La Carmagnole”, a revolutionary song.

If French work attitudes are out of the ordinary, French management methods are also unusual. The vast majority of chief executives of big firms hail from one of a handful of grandes écoles, such as École Polytechnique, an elite science school. Through what is known as parachutage, they can arrive suddenly from the top ranks of the civil service. Air France KLM, for example, announced unexpectedly last month that its new chief executive would be Alexandre de Juniac, formerly chief of staff to Christine Lagarde when she was France’s finance minister.

Although the grandes écoles are superbly meritocratic—candidates compete against each other in a series of gruelling exams—their dominance of corporate hierarchies makes workplaces much less so. At a big French bank recently, a manager promoted an executive, only to be reproached by a furious rival who said he should have been given the job because he had done better in the final exams at the same grande école.

As Thomas Philippon, a French economist, pointed out in “Le Capitalisme d’Héritiers”, a 2007 book, too many big French companies rely on educational and governmental elites rather than promoting internally according to performance on the job. In the country’s many family firms, too, opportunity for promotion is limited for non-family members. This overall lack of upward mobility, argues Mr Philippon, contributes largely to ordinary French cadres’ dissatisfaction with corporate life. A study of seven leading economies by TNS Sofres in 2007 showed that France is unique in that middle management as well as the lower-level workforce is largely disengaged from their companies.

For those farther down the ladder, French companies are hierarchical, holding no truck with Anglo-Saxon notions of “empowerment”. And bosses are more distant than ever. A big change in French management, says Jean-Pierre Basilien of Entreprise & Personnel, a Paris research centre, is that industrial managers now seldom rise through the ranks. Fifteen years ago a leading graduate would have worked in factories before moving to headquarters. Now many come up via finance or strategy. […]

On the “Wage Scar”

From The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21528614):

Research from the United States and Britain has found that youth unemployment leaves a “wage scar” that can persist into middle age. The longer the period of unemployment, the bigger the effect. Take two men with the same education, literacy and numeracy scores, places of residence, parents’ education and IQ. If one of them spends a year unemployed before the age of 23, ten years later he can expect to earn 23% less than the other. For women the gap is 16%. The penalty persists, though it shrinks; at 42 it is 12% for women and 15% for men. So far, the current crisis has not led to these long-term periods of youth unemployment rising very much; almost 80% of young people in the OECD who become unemployed are back in work within a year. But that could well change.

The scarring effects are not necessarily restricted to the people who are actually unemployed. An American study shows that young people graduating from college and entering the labour market during the deep recessions of the early 1980s suffered long-term wage scarring. Graduates in unlucky cohorts suffer a wage decline of 6-7% for each percentage-point increase in the overall unemployment rate. The effect diminishes over time, but is still statistically significant 15 years later.

After a period of unemployment, the temptation to take any work at all can be strong. Wage scarring is one of the reasons to think this has lasting effects, and policies designed to minimise youth unemployment may sometimes exacerbate them. Spain, which has developed a scheme for rolling over temporary contracts to provide at least some chances of employment to the young, should pay heed to the experience of Japan in the early 2000s. Young people unemployed for a long time were channelled into “non-regular” jobs where pay was low and opportunities for training and career progression few. Employers seeking new recruits for quality jobs generally preferred fresh graduates (of school or university) over the unemployed or underemployed, leaving a cohort of people with declining long-term job and wage prospects: “youth left behind”, in the words of a recent OECD report. Japan’s “lost decade” workers make up a disproportionate share of depression and stress cases reported by employers.