Deloitte-Access Economics has released a new report claiming that excessive ‘red tape’ and compliance is costing the economy some $250 billion in lost productivity, much of which has been brought about by companies’ own internal rules. From Peter Martin:
Deloitte Access says government regulations cost about $27 billion a year to administer and cost businesses $67 billion a year to comply with.
But it says red tape imposed by businesses themselves costs $155 billion a year – $21 billion to develop and administer and $134 billion a year to comply with…
“Businesses are wearing self-inflicted wounds,” Deloitte director Chris Richardson said.
“Our research shows that senior executives and middle managers each spend more than eight hours per week complying with internal rules. Even non-administrative staff each spend an average of more than six hours per week”…
This fits the bill of the rise of so-called “bullshit jobs” articulated by David Graeber last year:
…technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
…productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away…
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector…
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
As for the reasons behind these “bullshit jobs”, according to Graeber:
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger…
Personally, I don’t buy the argument that it is one great ruling class conspiracy, but rather a symptom of those within organisations and government either trying to make themselves relevant or increase their power base, and in the process dreaming up new pointless rules and regulations for others to follow.
