Bullshit Jobs and the New Feudalists

BULLSHIT JOBS AND THE NEW FEUDALISTS

Bullshit jobs are proliferating throughout the economy, and the reason why is partly due to something called ‘managerial feudalism’. In order to understand the role this plays in the creation of bullshit jobs, we need to look at the various positions people occupied in feudal societies. If you have ever watched a drama set in such times, you will no doubt have noticed how there is always an elite class of people who employ the services of a great many others. In some cases, their servants perform tasks that would be considered useful in today’s society, attending to such things as gardening, food preparation and household duties. But the nobility also seem to be surrounded by individuals who (despite the importance of their appearance, what with all the flashy uniforms they wear) don’t seem to be doing much of anything.

What are all these people for? Mostly, they are just there to make their superiors look, well, ‘superior’ . By being able to walk into a room surrounded by men in smart uniforms, nobles give off an air of gravitas. And the greater your entourage is, the more important you must be. At least, that’s the impression you hope to convey when you employ people to stand around making you look impressive.

The desire to place oneself above subordinates and to increase the numbers of those subordinates, thereby gaining a show of prestige, happens whenever society structures itself into a definite hierarchy with a minority that hold a ‘noble’ position within that structure. This is exactly what we find in large businesses, where the executive classes assume the role of the nobility. In order to understand why bullshit jobs exist, we need to look at how the condition of managerial feudalism came about.

Rise of the corporate nobility

Once upon a time, from around the mid-40s to the mid-70s, businesses ran what might be called ‘paternalistic’ models that worked in the interests of all stakeholders. The need to rebuild infrastructure following the war, a desire to provide security to those who had fought in it, the strength of unions, and governments following Keynesian economics, all worked to ensure that increases in productivity would bring about increases to worker compensation.

But, during the 80s and onwards, attitudes towards worker collectives and Keynesian economics changed and were instead seen as stifling entrepreneurs. This gave rise to more lean-and-mean economic practices. What really helped the rise of the lean-and-mean model in the 80s and 90s was certain federal and state regulatory changes, coupled with innovations from Wall Street. The federal and state regulatory changes brought about an environment in which corporate mergers and takeovers could flourish.

Meanwhile, Michael Milken, of investment house Drexel Burnham, created high-yield debt instruments known as ‘junk bonds’, which allowed for much riskier and aggressive corporate raids. This triggered an era of hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts and corporate bustups.

(Milken. Image from Adam Curtis)

The people who most benefited from all this deregulation and financialisation were those at the executive level. Once upon a time, the CEO of a large corporation would have been the epitome of the cool, rational planner. He or she would have been trained in 'management science' and probably worked his or her way up within the ranks of the organisation so that, by the time they reached the top, the CEO had mastered every aspect of the business. Once there at the apex of the corporate pyramid this highly trained, rational specialist would have carried out the central belief of the college-educated middle-class, with its mandate of progress for all and not just the few.

But as the corporate world became more volatile toward the end of the 20th century, questions began to arise over whether such rationality and level-headedness was best for delivering the new goal of short-term boosts to shareholders' profits. With the business world now seen as so tumultuous and complex as to "defy predictability and even rationality" (as an article in Fast Company put it) a new kind of CEO emerged, one driven more by intuition and gut-feeling. The new CEO was less of a manager with great experience obtained from working his way up the company hierarchy, and more of a flamboyant leader who had achieved celebrity status in the business world, and was hired on the basis of his showmanship, whether his prior role had anything to do with the new position or not. And they certainly prospered in their position, because the focus on improving the bottom line and rewarding celebrity CEOs saw executive pay soar to over three hundred times that of the typical worker.

It’s hard to exaggerate the difference between the old-style corporate boss and the new breed that arose around the late 20th century. As David Graeber pointed out, the old-fashioned leaders of industry identified much more with the workers in their own firms and it was not until the era of mergers, acquisitions and bustups that we get this fusion between the financial sector and the executive classes.

This marked change in attitudes was reflected in comments made by the Business Roundtable in the 1990s. At the start of the decade, Business Roundtable said of corporate responsibility that they "are chartered to serve both their shareholders and society as a whole". But, seven years later, the message had changed to "the notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors". In other words, a corporation looks after its shareholders and the interests of other stakeholders-employees, customers, and society in general-are of far less importance.

Pointless White-Collar Jobs

Now, the term ‘lean and mean’ implies that capitalism had become more, well, ‘capitalist’, taking the axe to any unnecessary expenditure and therefore bringing about more streamlined operations run by more efficient employees. In other words, the exact opposite of conditions favourable to the growth of bullshit jobs. But, actually, the pressure to downsize was directed mostly at those near the bottom doing the blue-collar work of moving, fixing and maintaining things. They were subjected to ‘scientific management’ theories designed to dehumanise work and bring about robotic levels of efficiency, or were replaced by automation or lost their jobs when the firm took advantage of globalisation and moved abroad where more exploitable workers were available. This freed up lots of capital, and it is how that capital was used that is key to understanding how this so-called ‘lean-and-mean’ period brought about bullshit jobs. As Graeber said, “the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs...The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead”.

REFERENCES

“White Collar Sweatshop” by Jill Andresky Frazier

“Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” by David Graeber

“Smile Or Die” By Barbara Ehrenreich