I have mostly worked in the restaurant industry, and the norm is to work 2-3 jobs filled with nonstop this and that along with constant verbal abuse from customers and managers. It's hard to maintain friendships and even relationships because you're working when they have the time to see you and you're asleep when they're working. All for a barely livable pay with no chance for health insurance or PTO.
I decided three years ago to try out an office job. I never did work at a desk and had no clue what to expect. After a couple months of getting used to things, I realized that all I had to do was three hours of work. The rest of that time could be spent however I wanted, so long as I just kept pretending to work. And everyone around me did this. One of my coworkers had boxes of shoes under her table because every week she'd shop for new pairs to try, and whatever she didn't like she'd send back.
The pandemic honestly made things even slower. When we were working from home, there was no one to really see what we were doing in our spare time. I'd literally get up at 10, do errands until 2, and then log on and work a little until 4:30. All that for a decent pay, healthcare, the works.
And yet I was miserable. I'd get paranoid that all the work that was piling up was going to get me in a shit load of trouble, and in a normal place I would be tarred and feathered for the negligence. It didn't help that it was nonprofit work, and there were actually people on the other side of my work who needed help. As many who are in nonprofit work know, your job is not to help people, but to be the ones who apologize that nothing can be done and take on their real frustrations. My bosses didn't care how well I did my job, so long as there was no lawsuit on the way.
I ended up quitting a few months ago and I'm back in food service. I feel skilled and useful where I am right now and my coworkers are wonderful people. They even offer healthcare, though not an amazing plan. But now I'm back to spending early mornings thinking how I'm going to pay rent. Did I fumble the bag with this other job? Why do bullshit jobs, even with shit NGOs, all pay so much better than fields where you are expected to grind yourself into sludge day in and day out?
I'm in the middle of Bullshit Jobs as well, and as someone whose job involves a great degree of bullshit, I have a few ideas as to why.
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Three or so hours of work, depending on the specifics, may simply be all we can handle. The rest is to fill out the clock. Cutting staff at that point and consolidating responsibility may look efficient, but after a certain amount of stress, whether compressed into three hours or spread out among eight, the brain simply shuts down. Those other five hours are to keep everyone held to the same standard, else you might start getting other ideas about what is fair and reasonable.
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Once a company reaches a certain point, it is very difficult to make it fail. "Success" becomes less about pure financial results and more about the self-gratification of the ones in power. A three hour work day? I need to be at my desk for eight hours, in case the shareholders call! So you all get to suffer with me!
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Emergencies and unforeseen situations always occur. Sometimes you will need to enter crunch time and put in extra hours, filling in the whole eight. And since you'll be here anyway, there's no need to make the extra effort of anticipating the unexpected, because it costs us the same, whether it happens or not.
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The worst jobs need to pay the least because otherwise those workers could afford to work less or look for better jobs.
Idk, you just gotta push passed the anxiety and really stop caring. I had a lot of anxiety at my first office job for the same reasons (I had previously done physically demanding equipment maintenance). If you go back to office work, avoid the nonprofit shit so you don’t feel bad about scamming hours out of your boss.
Time clock fraud is praxis. Bullshit office jobs are the easiest place to perform it.
I finally got the part of Capital where Marx talks about robbing your boss through time theft. BASED AND MARX APPROVED
I've got two theories on this one.
1: The Bourgeois and Capitalists who have carved out both their position for themselves and the idea in their head that they are good and important have decided they need more people like themselves and create an environment where their next position holder can come forward. A type of social reproduction where they either earnestly or for a facade create an illusion of merit where they believe the people in these spaces could do their self-important work one day. Paying these people more than the actual labour helps cement in the minds of the people in the office that they are more important than the labour (despite as you say doing like, 3 hours of work tops), and thus the cycle continues.
2: Fail-son resort. These jobs are meant as a reward or a place holder for whoever the Bourgeois/Capitalist and allow them to give them lots of money while only being taxed as salary and not as gifts. On the upside the bourgeois also gets some labour done and can further entrench feudal-looking bonds with other bourgeois who are also sending their fail-sons to a resort. Sometimes there aren't enough fail sons so regular people sometimes get these jobs too.
Either way, its :zizek: all the way down
Both points make total sense. The second reminds me of friends who work "consulting" jobs. We are talking 6 figure salaries just to lie to companies through spreadsheets. I know someone who went on a skiing trip while working and got promoted when he got back.
all because they had the access to generational wealth and went to private colleges :matt-jokerfied:
When I was in university I knew some business school fucks and whenever they would talk stock predictions I would give my two cents. It was funny because I would usually have a better time guessing what would do well than they did because I would never look at valuation graphs and only look at material conditions (travel restrictions for airline companies, weather patterns on agriculture, unionisation generally). Its like, shit we take for granted but they literally don't teach at their schools (I went to a university with a good business™️ program not for business).
A couple months ago they offered me a cushy job where I had to make 50 calls a day (people didn't even need to answer) for $50k and I kinda regret turning it down. It would've more than doubled my income, but then I would have to deal with more MBA types so who is to say if bad or good.
Honestly it's a crapshoot. I'm in engineering and my job varies between nothing to do all day and "oh shit, we gotta fix this". In softwarw, if you really want to do nothing all day, defense (ugh), healthcare, or anything that's either highly regulated (moves slowly) or in a "mature" industry tends to be pretty slow paced. It's always good to look for companies where a lot of people are older and/or have kids because those people usually don't put up with the long hours BS.
tbh I feel pretty stupid for giving it up. No matter how fucked up the industry is, I feel my most useful to others in restaurants. I dont have any fantasies of being some vanguard hero, but I take pride in reproductive labor, even if it's for a wage.
all that against better pay. maybe there's a way to kill the liberal in my head.
the bullshit jobs pay well because while the labor is not socially productive it is productive for the capitalist, you manage his control over the working class and uphold the facade that he is necessary for society to function.
I can relate to a lot of that. I worked in aquatics (lifeguarding, teaching lessons, pool chemical stuff ect) and had to work 50-60 hour weeks to make ends meet. Switching to this job that's probably 20 hours of actual work each week and the rest of doing whatever took pretty much the entire first year to get used to. Even though my job is boring and doesn't utilize my brain too much, I wouldn't go back. The constant stress and exhaustion wasn't worth it
