michaelboy

I have a variety of rugs in the basement, awaiting deployment in future house probably some time after July. Today, I wanted to go find a spring rug from my front hall to replace the fall rug in my front hall (both Ruggables). When R. combined some of the rugs onto one shelf, he buried the spring rug behind and between and under other rugs. This took a while to find. Not overjoyed about that, however, quite proud of myself for tracking it down. Also, there were a couple tapestries in there.

Meanwhile, I’m listening to the Bullshit Jobs episode of If Books Could Kill, which has been interesting. The taxonomy of bullshit jobs was particularly interesting, and I may come back and write a bit more about that, because the takeaway there is that the author has zero respect for on call jobs (where the person with relevant expertise needs to be available on workdays for more or less the whole workday, whether or not there is much for them to do), jobs that involve connecting two automated things together, security jobs in general, and any job that involves collecting and/or analyzing data to support potential future decision making.

That last one is really easy to not understand the importance of, especially when collecting but NOT analyzing the data. It feels pointless. But sometimes — and I have been in this situation — someone comes along years later to take another swing at a problem, and can just haul all those boxes / files / whatever full of data out, and point to them and say, “this has been going on for N years. Nothing has changed. We can prove that nothing has changed. We’ve known how to fix this problem. Now let’s just fucking do it”. And without the data, you gotta go collect the data. But with the data, it can be a quick trip to solution. That doesn’t mean that collecting data magically fixes things. However, a gap in time between data collection and someone picking it up and acting on it does not mean the data is worthless.

I liked that they looked at Juliet Schor’s analysis in The Overworked American — I read that years ago and have been inclined to believe it ever since. But they — like so many people — just assume that jobs cannot be made to go part time. Unions can make work hour reduction happen, but they are by no means the only solution. Usually people say they would be happy to work fewer hours rather than get paid more, but at one end of the scale, people are looking for more hours to get more pay, and at the other end of the scale, there have never BEEN unions for the kind of people who are afraid to go part time (or they could go part time, have assessed the tradeoffs in terms of impact on overall compensation including benefits package and concluded Not For Me). But it was nice to see them deploy the actual average job hours per year data, which clearly shows reduction over the long time scale. The nineteenth century was an absolute shit show for labor hours.

One thing they did not do at all was engage with how leisure has crept into more and more jobs. I don’t just mean employee funded retreats and pizza parties and whatever. I mean the number of people who routinely accomplish significant household related tasks on company time, in an era of Online Everything. Obviously, there was always a certain amount of do-my-own-work-while-working in every era — the farmboy with his book balanced on the plow is a banger from days of yore, and the inverse (standing desk with a walking treadmill) is just a superficial adjustment today. The scale of unrelated-to-work-work done while working now, however, is absolutely jawdropping. Maybe I’ll see if anyone has been tracking it in time-use diaries. I’m in favor of it, because a lot of work is being there in case some question or issue arises that only so-and-so can deal with, and it genuinely matters that it be addressed quickly or everyone else has to wait. In the meantime, so-and-so ought to be able to do whatever they want to as long as they remain available to answer the question. They should be compensated for their on-call time, whether it is formal, as with a firefighter or doctor, or informal, as with so very many other jobs.