Building Unions in “Bullshit Jobs”

As long ago as 2018, social anthropologist and comrade David Graeber set out his “Bullshit Jobs” theory. (David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs – The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it. Penguin Books 2019)

The kind of jobs where the people doing them know that if they stopped tomorrow, nobody would notice. But they stay to pay the rent and keep food coming in.

Not all low paid and hard jobs are bullshit jobs of course. Like cleaning hospitals for example they need doing and should be better rewarded. But Graeber rightly identified a key factor for union builders to consider: how does any group of workers value what they do?

This is not a new trend but things have moved on apace even since 2018. Graeber quotes Douglas Adams for example who writing in the 1980s famously joked about Telephone Handset Sanitisers as expendable workers in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Today through the power of first generation AI, jobs in Adams time that were high status and highly paid such as Estate Agents, Travel Agents and Employment Agents have been largely converted into make work functions increasingly under threat. As Digital HR controls working hours and surge pricing leads to surge earnings, many even in the caring, care and education professions have also felt like little more than cogs in a machine for some time

The emerging late-stage/post-capitalist labour market of the previous 20 years has trapped more and more workers not just in insecure, on demand, platform, zero hours work but in make work bullshit labour. Now the impact of emerging Generative AI is being felt in work that creates content from Marketing, Publishing, Entertainment, Communications and Public Relations – creative workers are becoming “machine learning minders” simply overseeing the content Canva, Chat GPT and Notebook LM creates.

Rent-seeking, exploitative post-capitalism can no longer provide worthwhile, full time and permanent work for us all to live on, and some form of Universal Basic Income looks increasingly likely. But for now the emerging jobs market presents major challenges to union builders and working people who still need jobs to get by. Union builders must seek to organise in the world there is before campaigning for the world they want. Looking down our nose at pointless jobs is not helpful to union builders – or judging people by what they have to do to get by.

So Graeber’s work outlines what a “bullshit job” looks like. But it leaves one important question unanswered: So what does a “good job” feel like in this jobs market and what does this mean for union builders?

An unavoidable truth for union builders is that, on top of the practical problems faced by workers union organising insecure and “bullshit” jobs, most people in these jobs are unlikely to actively build unions, preferring instead to chase the dream of leaving for better work. They know the jobs they are doing have little value and so sometimes reason that it’s not worth organising a union to defend or promote them. For this reason almost every attempt to organise unions at McDonalds – probably the worlds worst employer - has failed

So what is worth defending through union building?

When people discuss their, and other people’s work, they often define it  through a combination of three broad factors:

Pay: In the end that’s why I go to work. Is it good enough to live on without relying on benefits? Is it paid at the level of pay I feel my skills and qualifications earn? How does it compare to other jobs I could get?

Control: How much autonomy and agency do I have in my work in terms of working hours, location, and seniority?

Status: How much assumed, assigned or publicly acknowledged status does the job provide me with? And do I have a voice within the organisation?

Working people will trade off these three items to conclude whether their job, on balance, is on the “good” or “bullshit” end of the spectrum. Healthcare professionals for example often see their role as high status, despite rigid shift work and low comparative pay, while lawyers score highly on all three factors.

As a rule of thumb, working people will be more likely to dig in and defend a job through union organising if it scores highly on two of these three factors. And are more likely to actively support a claim on the employer if it aims at improving one or more of these factors.

Union builders can adopt this simple analysis when speaking to working people about how best to organise a union in the workplace. The Pay Control and Status (PCS) approach helps us work with people to bridge the gap between a bullshit job and a good job. It helps develop a practical industrial agenda with workers and based on their aspirations and judgement of what is possible. And it reflects the complexities of todays workplace.

The jobs may be bullshit but the workers aren’t