I a long-winded way of saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
This irks me chat. This is an elephant in the room that should be causing mass chaos
I a long-winded way of saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
This irks me chat. This is an elephant in the room that should be causing mass chaos
This does not explain why people whose jobs are solely to send emails are so highly paid.
The Bullshit Jobs explanation is that the bullshit jobs are those which are most valuable to Capital, not the jobs that are socially valuable.
but what actually makes the email jobs valuable to capital when they're essentially bullshit?
A group of coddled faux-elites with so little exposure to serious work that they could never sympathize with union organizers? They are the grease between the vampires and the zeks, keeping a solid buffer between those with power by fiat and those with power in fact.
Yeah it does. Which specific jobs are you talking about? I think Graeber is good, but "email jobs" is no more descriptive than "counter jobs" or something. Lots of different counters you can sit behind, lots of different emails you can send. We do ourselves a disservice by trying to analyze "the laptop class" or whatever without examples.
I was going to spell this out in initial comment but decided in favor of brevity. By "the amount of surplus labor capitalists are able to extract from labor power in that type of job", I mean that efficient extraction of labor power in some roles can force capitalists to steal less surplus in other roles. For instance, if programmers are paid $200k to save finance firms $1m a year in operational improvements, nonprofits may have to pay their programmers $90k even if they're getting nowhere near $500k of surplus labor out of the deal, because otherwise the programmers can go work for finance firms and make $200k. Lawyer jobs that close billion-dollar mergers or wiggle out of EPA fines make it more expensive to hire a criminal defense attorney. When labor is commoditized, you get something similar to the minimal socially necessary amount of labor that values commodities. So I expect that many high-paid "bullshit jobs" are staffed by labor that could be extracted more efficiently in other roles.
e: on second thought, second paragraph may be bourgeois labor market theory rephrased into LTV. But I think it's obvious that salaries are part of economic base, and social hierarchy is superstructure, not the other way around.
Responding late but by "email jobs" I'm talking about all the MBA jobs that corporations are stuffed with. These people mostly send out emails about if a project is done yet and hold meetings about how done projects are (usually color-coded to green, yellow, and red). They don't create surplus value so capitalists can't skim the surplus value off of them.
Do you mean consultants? Project managers? I think an actual job title would help me understand what you're talking about.
The specific ones I'm thinking of are called Business Analysts.
these seem like they do grunt analysis to inform management decisions. i.e. help to more efficiently extract from other workers