[why5s]

Some thoughts (from a very biased fan of the original article and book):

> If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others.

Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job.

> public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself

Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.

> In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff.

I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.

[vundercind]

I don’t get what’s hard to believe about this. Principal-agent problems are everywhere, we’re terrible at measuring effectiveness for tons of things including and especially management (the TL;DR of the research is that we damn near don’t know how to do it at all), zero-sum games abound (a great deal of advertising and marketing, to take one of Graeber’s examples), and there are tons of ways to throw money around in ways that are personally beneficial but net-harmful without falling afoul of the law.

Of course a bunch of jobs are bullshit.

[pdonis]

> Unions are intended to protect workers.

But they actually don't.

> If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy.

Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, unions do not help to do this. In fact they hinder it. In one strike I personally observed (not of public sector employees but I think the case is fairly typical), the union and the company agreed on a deal on Day 92 of the strike that was identical to the deal the company proposed on Day 2 of the strike and the union indignantly rejected. Who suffered the most from all this? The very workers the union was supposed to be protecting, who got no pay during those 92 days and had trouble paying their bills and could not even seek alternate jobs temporarily because the union prohibited it. And in fact many of those jobs now are automated away, because it was easier for the company to do that than to keep dealing with the union.

> This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.

Not necessarily "corporate" greed; in the public transportation case it's a government employing the workers.

That said, unions themselves share many of the dysfunctional charateristics of large corporations, and for much the same reasons.

[Suppafly]

> In one strike I personally observed (not of public sector employees but I think the case is fairly typical), the union and the company agreed on a deal on Day 92 of the strike that was identical to the deal the company proposed on Day 2 of the strike and the union indignantly rejected.

Sure sometimes unions get it wrong, but that's not the vast majority of cases, and in fact that union that got it wrong likely got it right more often than not and those employees were better paid, even with the strike, than they would have been otherwise, when you consider a larger time scale.

[pdonis]

> that's not the vast majority of cases

I'm not sure that's true. As I said, I think the case I witnessed was fairly typical.

> that union that got it wrong likely got it right more often than not and those employees were better paid, even with the strike, than they would have been otherwise, when you consider a larger time scale

That I know is not true for the case I described: non-union employees in the same industry, working for other companies, were better paid.

[Suppafly]

You think it's fairly typical basic upon no real knowledge or facts.

>That I know is not true for the case I described: non-union employees in the same industry, working for other companies, were better paid.

Better paid or better compensated overall? Often the benefits of being in a union are access to healthcare, retirement, vacation time, and other benefits that aren't reflected in hourly pay. Often it's just the piece of mind that you aren't going to be randomly laid off in the middle of the week for bullshit reasons or the adequate PPE is going to be provided. If it were strictly money, no one would work at the lower paid company.

[pdonis]

> You think it's fairly typical basic upon no real knowledge or facts.

You don't know what knowledge or facts I have. So it's you who are making assertions based upon no real knowledge or facts.

> Better paid or better compensated overall?

Both.

> Often the benefits of being in a union are access to healthcare, retirement, vacation time, and other benefits that aren't reflected in hourly pay.

The union I was referring to did not offer any of these things. The company employing the union workers did. The union did not do anything that I saw to increase the level of those benefits that the company was providing.

Also, one of the primary rationales for unions in the first place was that they could do a better job of managing the skills of the work force than faceless corporations. The union I was referring to did not even have an apprenticeship program--much to the chagrin of many workers who had children they wanted to bring into their trade but got no support from their union for doing so. Many workers in fact protested, and it ended up being one of the issues that caused a change in the union leadership--but even that didn't make things any better.

[sshine]

>> Unions are intended to protect workers.

> But they actually don't.

Unions protect workers as an abstract group, but consequently not all individual workers.

Lobbying for a minimum wage will induce structural unemployment: the union would rather keep some people unemployed, to maximise the combined income of the group.

In an international labour market, unions are just protectionist for some local population.

I’m sure some international socialists will disagree.