In the 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by century’s end, our workweek would be cut to just 15 hours due to technological developments. He hypothesized that people would choose to dedicate more time to leisure because technology would help satisfy our material needs.
In the ’50s and ’60s, there were similar predictions of a reduced workweek. During this time, economic growth led to a rise in income and a decline in the average number of hours worked per week. This is where it plateaued. The hours we work today have not been reduced any further and Canadians continue to toil away at an average of 36.6 hours per week.
Few would have predicted that, in the year 2013, despite having machines take over so many of our daily tasks, we would be working as hard as ever.
In the essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” published in Strike magazine, David Graeber argues that while technology has gotten rid of many jobs involving hard manual labour and mind-numbing work on assembly lines, it has replaced those positions with mountains of administrative and service sector jobs.
“The number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves…working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets,” said Graeber.
Those “salaried paper-pushers” have what Graeber refers to as “bullshit jobs.” Their proliferation has left many wondering whether this entire segment of the workforce could disappear, without much consequence to anyone.
But instead of technology assisting us by reducing our work week to a mere 15 hours as predicted by Keynes, it has done nothing more than displace jobs into other sectors of the workforce. One may ask if we could we ever use technology to our benefit to effectively reduce the workweek for all, and as a result, what would we do with all this spare time?
People would be quick to assume that we would spend all our free time doing leisurely tasks; exploring personal interests, developing hobbies and nurturing close relationships. It could be suggested that this increase in spare time would actually create an entirely new boom in the sector of the service industry. If we had more free time, we could get pedicures, take our dogs for haircuts, or go out for fancy dinners, thus pushing the bulk of the work force in a completely different direction.
In a column for the Globe and Mail called “Meet the new servant class,” Margaret Wente argued that “As manufacturing jobs shrivel away, the greatest job growth will be in services. The future belongs to highly educated people with superior cognitive skills who can work with robots, and to an expanding service class that will cater to their every whim.”
It seems every time we would try to use technology to our benefit to reduce the already stressed workload we’ve taken on, it displaces the workload into another sector, therefore creating another slew of what could still (arguably) be called “bullshit jobs.”
Ryan Avent stated in the Economist, “machines inevitably outmatch humans at handling bullshit without complaining,” – and so we continue to displace jobs through technological advancements.
Far away are the days where Star Trek-like replicators can synthesize our meals or any other material object we may need. But we need to strive for a world where technology can help to eliminate our menial tasks and bullshit jobs rather than perpetuate them – technology should be able to take care of all the “bullshit” aspects of lives. Or maybe we depend on the bullshit and hold on to it for dear life in order to feel like we are working hard and accomplishing something.
But nobody ever said on their deathbed, “I wish I had done more bullshit things,” so where are all the damn robots?