Alienated Labor – this gruntled worker

The studio manager issues a gentle reminder that the doors will be open in exactly twenty minutes. I wistfully eye the other holiday market vendors with their neatly-arranged tabes. While they’re chatting away with each other, my husband and I are muttering under our respective breaths while struggling to assemble and reinforce our table with industrial-sized clamps and dollar store zip ties. Our inventory of cat toys, hats, note cards and leather bags is scattered on the floor well beyond the confines of our assigned space. Though this is our sixth year participating, we feel like rookies each time. What is wrong with us? I wondered.

One problem is that we are constantly changing our offerings, which means reinventing our booth display each year to accommodate new items. The other participants, who have a more consistent inventory, literally roll up with single suitcases on wheels and create simple, elegant, and seemingly effortless tablescapes. We, on the other hand, make our way up Broadway with our stuff precariously balanced on a U-Line industrial plastic cart (the kind that caterers use to deliver lunches to office buildings), a metal table that doesn’t fold (though we have a total of THREE folding tables at home) and three new metal grid-wall panels, held in place with a haphazard web of bungee cords. The grid, our latest acquisition, was supposed to add height to our 4-foot table to fit even more of our stuff. And this year, we have lots of stuff.

Let me back up here. Since 2012, my boyfriend-turned-husband and I have participated in this amazing fair, which is organized by our neighborhood yoga studio-slash-community-center. Over the years, we have had our same corner booth location, in the main room near the shelves of yoga blankets and cork blocks. We are always flanked by a jewelry maker and her husband and the (very popular) ladies who have a waiting list for free chair massages. Over the years, we have formed a little family of sorts with the other sellers, and we have repeat customers who tell us that our catnip fish and origami mobiles now grace the homes of friends and family on other continents. This is not bad for a nights-and-weekends husband and wife side-hustle that basically pays for our crafting habit and gives us an excuse to binge-watch entire seasons of shows like A Million Little Things (which, by the way, I highly recommend).

But I digress.

Why were we so stressed out this year? It’s partly because we didn’t do the market last year (AKA The Year of Endless Physical and Occupational Therapy), when my hands and neck were in constant pain. Sewing and crochet, which, along with writing and drawing, were my only stress-relieving outlets, were out of the question. Two months ago, after a year of weekly OT, I regained my strength and stability enough to begin cautious crocheting while wearing a black plastic custom thumb splint I designed with my therapist. I was determined to make as many hats and cowls and cards and cat toys as possible in the limited time I had. Never one to under-do things, I approached my side-hustle, stress-relieving hobby with the ambition and joylessness of a first-year investment banker (I can’t vouch for the amount of joy felt by any investment banker, at any point in her career, but I would have NONE. Ever). This felt like work, not fun.

We eventually did get our table assembled, we sold a bunch of stuff, and we also managed to pack up and get home without losing anything, including our minds, on the streets of Manhattan. As I counted our earnings, I promised my husband that the 2019 market would be different. All we needed was a different table setup and a few small changes to our product line, right?

Exhausted from the day and from pushing our awkward caravan of stuff down eight blocks of Broadway, he offered a weary smile in response.

Next year will be different. I promise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “busy work” lately…

I just watched Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru. Kanji Wantanabe, the film’s protagonist and a Japanese public affairs section chief whose main responsibility seems to be (literally) rubber-stamping proposals, learns that he is dying of stomach cancer. The man, who had never taken a vacation or a sick day in his 25 years of service, does not know how much longer he has, and overhears his son and daughter–in-law planning to spend his retirement money and pension on a new house. Kenji leaves his home and his job, withdraws his retirement bonus, and befriends a novelist who takes him on an improvised tour of the city’s pachinko parlors and speakeasies. Later, he encounters Toyo, a vibrant and spirited young former employee who leaves her paper-pushing desk job to take a job assembling animated stuffed toy bunnies. She may be a lowly factory worker, but she can at least see the value in her work: bringing happiness to kids.

Ikiru, which translates into English as “to live,” is less about a man dying than about a man’s desire for a sense of purpose in his remaining days. He becomes a champion of a group of local mothers who have been petitioning, to no avail, to turn a hazardous liquid waste site into a park for their kids. Until Kenji gets involved, this gaggle of mild-mannered women (who serve as the embodiment of failed not-my-job bureaucracy), dutifully go from office to office to plead their case until they reach a breaking point, unleashing a tirade on the clerk who had taken their initial complaint and sent them in circles.

Without giving any further spoilers, the film’s work-worn archetypal hero’s plight can be seen in fiction: Bartleby the Scrivener and The Death of Ivan Illych, and in modern films: Office Space, Up in the Air, and Zootopia (Remember that DMV sloth?). TV is riddled with them: The Office (obviously), Workaholics, The IT Crowd, and Silicon Valley.

Why are these sad working stiffs so relatable? They seem to have what David Graeber, anthropologist from the London School of Economics, would call “bullshit” jobs. Graeber received such an overwhelming response to his essay on this topic that he wrote an entire book about it. Just what constitutes a bullshit job? On the September 3 podcast of The Hidden Brain, Graeber tells host Shankar Vadantham that “between 37 and 40% of all people who had jobs were convinced that if their job didn’t exist, it would make no difference at all.” These jobs are not usually menial, as you might expect—they’re “clerical, managerial, administrative sort of positions… or marketing [or] human resources…[workers who would] really rather be doing something useful with their lives.”

bullshit job.jpg — from Simon & Schuster

Graeber explained how he was first introduced to “bullshit” at work: as a teenager, he was a dishwasher. Eager to get the dishes done so he could relax, he and his friend worked quickly and efficiently and then took a break. The boss, finding the two boys loafing, protested, yelling, “You’re on MY time, and you can’t loaf around!” This idea, of someone purchasing or renting our time, is one that didn’t always exist until the Industrial Era. Heidegger and Marx saw it coming. When we’re so removed from actually making decorative or utilitarian objects, as artisans and craftsmen once did, it becomes harder to see the value in the work we are doing.

Graeber divides classifies bullshit jobs as follows:

Flunkies who make their boss feel important
Goons who act aggressively on behalf of their bosses or clients (this includes lawyers)
Duct tapers hide a problem rather than fixing it (he gives the example of an administrator who takes messages for a single repair person who is overburdened. This guy’s whole job is to apologize for his boss. Wouldn’t it be more efficient, Graeber asks, to just hire another technician?
Box-Tickers create paperwork rather than take action
Taskmasters create meaningless work for their subordinates in order to have a mechanism to evaluate them:
1. Supervisors of people who don’t need supervision
2. People who create paperwork and other unnecessary tasks (he sees this as a huge problem in universities, where administrative staff outnumber faculty, and where high-level administrators are assigned multiple assistants).

Are there any jobs that are bullshit-proof? I think I’m creating one —I’ll keep you posted.

Category: Alienated Labor

Hobby Jobby?

Ikiru, Busy Work and Bullshit Jobs