[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.

[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.