‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover’ Peter Greenaway, 1989
Bullshit jobs are like greatness.
Some bullshit jobs are born bullshit, some achieve bullshit by sheer dent of effort and applied decisionmaking, and some have bullshit thrust upon them – by managements, by customers, by ‘stakeholders’, by suppliers of products and services, and by regulation.
Almost all jobs have a touch of bullshit about them, and that bullshit is invariably a fertile site on which to grow more bullshit.
That, of course, isn’t fixed either. Jobs evolve over time. Some have an intrinsic interest which never departs, some enable an individual to leave a lasting imprimatur on the world in some way greater or lesser, and some provide a regular adrenalin rush of some sort. But even exposure to all of these states diminishes over time, and the longer in a job the more exposure to other facets of any that job start to come into play. Those other facets are highly likely to include bullshit.
What is the management like? Is everyone on the team pulling the same way or is there a collection of psychopaths and wankers sucking life out of the group dynamic? Is everyone getting a squarish deal for what they do? Do the ‘stakeholders’ include irritations? Do the systems needed work as intended or are they ill-fitting or slow? Do they help get outcomes or are they merely grandiose click heavy reporting mechanisms for someone up the chain who doesn’t report the same way to whatever is above them? Is change considered and communicated with the workforce and agreed to lead to something better, or is it simply visited upon them at the behest of someone above assuming it is? And that’s for jobs with intrinsic interest somewhere along the line.
Plenty of jobs don’t even have intrinsic interest to start with. They may do when they’re advertised with expressions like ‘fast paced’ ‘engaged’ ‘challenging’ or ‘leadership’, but successful applicants arrive in situ and discover all sorts of things which amount to………..bullshit.
If they have applied for or won a position advertised to them with lots of action words about ‘fast paced environment’ or ‘influence decisionmaking’ and discovered they are little more than administrative galley oarspersons. If their inboxes fill up with bullshit exhortations and messages from others with nothing better to do than visit bullshit on others. If they find themselves spending hours waiting for IT support, or filling in ludicrous numbers of forms for HR or Finance, or indulging as underlings or overlings in a lengthy performance management system that everyone knows is bullshit. If the room temperature drops 10 degrees whenever the resident managerial psychopath hoves into view, or they are made to feel nauseous engaging in small talk with someone of like ilk. Or if they are regular recipients of bullshit visited on them by the same affecting their working hours, leave, the processes they use to do whatever it is they do and the achievable outcomes implied therein, or their scope for remuneration increases. Or if they are at the mercy of a bullshitter in a position requiring real skill. And increasingly there is a serving of workplace surveillance to go with that. Bullshit takes many forms in every workplace. All of them bullshit, all of them core distractions from the task at hand.
The late David Graeber did the world a favour by identifying and naming the phenomena with his most famous work.
One subject we can be sure may not get much of a look in at next week’s jobs and skills summit is bullshit. It is almost certain that the entire event will be festooned and immersed in bullshit, highly likely with bullshit as the main course, and bullshit as every side, and almost certainly washed down with a schooner of bullshit too, and served up to us on a coulis of bullshit by a media which has largely lost awareness that there is anything else in this world.
But we can be sure that absolutely nobody will discuss ‘bullshit jobs’
And that is a touch unusual when you consider that it has been bipartisan economic policy for more than a generation for Australia to create a niche in bullshit jobs, and to bring bullshit to almost every part of the economy. That we are now amongst the world’s most expensive people, on the world’s most expensive land, living in the world’s most expensive houses, using the world’s most expensive electricity and internet, with the highest rates of casualization in the OECD, is a good reflection of the bullshit our political, corporate and policymaking leaders have determined we should be for a long long time. Our leaders have ensured we have a ‘bullshit economy’.
Free Trade? – that is bullshit. Energy policy? – bullshit too. Negative gearing? – more bullshit. House prices and rental costs? – Does anyone really think they aren’t bullshit? Immigration policy? – hot and steaming. Bank lending and debt? – well it smells like…. Public service outsourcing? – don’t get it on your fingers. Wages and Incomes policy? – what we have is bullshit. The NBN? – what we have here is bullshit. Australian political leadership to address any of the above – the purest ore body of bullshit known to man.
Now recently some of our commentariat have twigged to a meme which has done the rounds on Tik Tok revolving around the concept of ‘quiet quitting’. The idea as we understand it is that people go to work and don’t bust a gut to outwork, backstab, or otherwise outperform those in their work environments to aspire to more leadership within the organisations within which they work. Instead they seemingly go to work, identify the minimum which needs to be done for them to think they will continue to get their remuneration, do it, and then go home. Much of the commentary seems suggestive of there being a major problem with ‘quiet quitting’ and that those indulging in such behaviour should be shaken out of it. Business identities sanctimoniously warning about the effects on the lives of the individuals behaving thus, and the implications for the national economy if it were to metastasise, are likely to include bullshit too.
For some reason there seems to be a touch of finger pointing at younger employees as indulgers in ‘quiet quitting’ but a look around the demographics of many State and Federal public services would for sure find plenty there too – with additional impetus in the form of defined benefit super schemes and pensions mounting by the year.
But let us get this right.
……..In a world where employees are getting less of the capital labour divide up than they have had in 90 years, in more precarious employment bases, in profoundly uncompetitive sectors serving amongst the world’s most (privately) indebted people, where those employees are consumers of the worlds most expensive housing (which is so expensive many of them will never own it and are already locked into lifetime renting status), energy, educations, and internet, and are now wearing the fastest rising prices in a generation, in an economy almost designed to be uncompetitive, and with a new government wanting to swamp their bullshit employment world with a turbocharged population Ponzi, on the bullshit du jour of a ‘skills shortage’, where almost everyone is getting a good ladle full of bullshit in their workplaces anyway…….
…… there is concern about the motivation of peoples in the workplace?
Well bugger me. The only real surprise is that it has taken this long.
We have Covid to thank for this. That too may have been bullshit (did someone kiss a pangolin, or was it weapons grade?) and the handling of it (particularly in a nation with only 6 real entrance points) was 24 carat bullshit, to go with bullshit vaccines, bullshit stranded Australians, and bullshit powers assumed by our PM of the day. But there was a nugget of gold in the merde for many people.
Those weeks locked down or working from home – they enabled the punterariat to have a little bullshit for themselves. They could get out of bed at 0858 and be on time to start work – in their underpants. They could do the essentials of their job unmolested by psychopaths except via zoom, slack or teams. They could knock over their work while having the odd hitout of Duke Nukem or World of Warcraft. They could, if conditions were right, step away from the workplace for a quickie with the spouse, or significant other, or go disco dancing in the lounge with kids. They could drink whatever they felt like, or puff away on the finest toasting rollies. All spared the indignity of being creamed for crowded transport, having to dress up to interact with people they often despised, or making bullshit small talk with people they thought could be psychopaths.
Covid may not have made much more affordable, or helped them self-actualise in a workplace any more – but if they could live off the fumes they earned, or knew in their hearts they would never be able to pay off the abode, or had come to terms with the possibility their career aspirations were bullshit anyway, then Covid gave them a little piece of themselves back. Something they could share with friends or family, or something they could have fund with. Sort of like a weird working life bullshit sabbatical.
And that time at home sheeted home some of the thoughts they’d suppressed previously. Thoughts about the bullshit of their workplaces, or about how much of their work was actually bullshit, or about the bullshit personalities of those shaping their working lives. How many of them found themselves wondering if the bullshit was worth it? How many of them chewed over with friends their previously heretical thinking? And how contagious was that thinking? And of those who got a taste of that thinking how many thought ‘what have I got to lose?’
So when you sit down to read the pronouncements filtered by our bullshit media about the machinations of our bullshit policymakers at this week’s jobs and skills summit, ask yourself if the net effect of the decisions reached mean that for ordinary Australians there is nothing there they haven’t experienced for a decade or more. Ask yourself if it has been bullshit or if others you know might be inclined to see it as bullshit. And ask yourself, if it is bullshit, then for those that actually can get into a bullshit job in the coming years, to enjoy the bullshit remuneration increases and the bullshit management, to pay off the bullshit mortgages or the bullshit energy bills, if a bit of quiet quitting isn’t perfectly normal behaviour.
And then ask yourself again if the summit is setting us on the course for more bullshit.
Bullshit begets more bullshit, and we are nostril deep in the stuff.
Enjoy the quietude.