A fun one that I'm personally familiar with is the Upholder, predecessor to the modern Upholsterer. Back in medieval times, the upholder was a combination furniture and textile producer as well as interior designer and the person who did the banners in castles, bedsheets, etc. Basically anything involving textiles. Over time, padded furniture became the main focus of the trade, leading to what we think of as upholsterers.[1]
How about the knocker upper knocker upper? Although srather later in history.
The knocker-upper would rap on window panes with a long stick to wake factory workers before dawn. They were careful not to rap too hard, so as not to wake people who might want to use their service without paying.
The knocker upper knocker upper wakes a knocker upper.
Solar flare would be awesome for coders. Some huge percentage of enterprise applications no longer have source code (they're just binaries with the code lost to the ages).
All those binaries destroyed with the disks and insufficient disaster recovery would have to be rewritten!
Thanks for the link! Hadn't heard of that, although I've seen similar reasoning in other contexts. (Basically, the most reasonable estimate, absent other data, is that you are at the mean -- so, for example, one could reasonably guess that half the people to ever be born have been born at present.)
Milkmen 100% exist in the UK. Even though I don't drink actual milk they have a massive range of products they will deliver, so I get fruit juice, various foods and oat milk delivered by my milkman.
Milkmen 100% exist in the US also. Several houses close by have delivery coolers for https://www.smithbrothersfarms.com/ and their trucks appear regularly.
Milkmen, elevator operator, and switchboard operator were extremely common occupations in their heydays, all of which overlapped with my childhood.
I only stopped milkman service here in Palo Alto a couple of years ago (though the dairy downtown shut down maybe 30 years ago). It turned out to be a direct milkman->teenager pipeline which was better than walking to the grocery store twice a day.
I didn’t really go twice a day, what I meant was that a teenager can drink a gallon of milk, eat five square meals, every day and still be thin as a rail.
Given all the other food being bought we didn’t really have to have milk delivered, but milk the doorstep seemed to result in less junk food consumption.
As an empty nester I drink less than half a gallon a week.
Fairly sure elevator operators in Blackpool tower exist and ride in the car with you. Less sure about Eiffel Tower, I do remember one in the car on the Empire State Building. In india of course you can barely get in the elevator because of the operator and his stool.
Nostalgia alone would almost make me a customer. But now I'm so used to milk from their glass bottles that I really notice (and dislike) the taste of milk from plastic.
We had a milkman from a local farm until recently. Highly recommend it. Or if you’re in the Bay Area, Farmstead delivers glass bottle straus milk and picks up the empties.
A building I worked in recently finally got rid of its elevator operators (along with a set of frighteningly rickety elevators) about 4 years ago. They must still exist in some places, maybe a few grand old hotels and social clubs.
Definitely a blacksmith in almost every city, but probably fewer blacksmiths per city than the other jobs. Metal tools are built to last, and are expensive, so it was probably often a low volume high cost kind of business where production could be covered by a minimal number of smiths.
My Dad was born before WW2 in a village in Eastern Europe, which was probably closer to a medieval village than to a 21st century one. He told me that a blacksmith would ask for 3 plum trees to do a certain job, presumably in order to make charcoal. I don't think there was anything special about plum trees, other than the local availability: people were (and still are) growing plum trees in order to make spirits. Giving up 3 plum trees meant giving up the spirits you could get from them for six years until the new trees would grow to maturity. So, yes, you wouldn't go to the blacksmith very often, if you could help it.
"During the Middle Ages, charcoal burners were ostracised. Their profession was considered dishonourable and they were frequently accused of evil practices. Even today there is a certain denigration of this former occupation."
> True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically a very specialized profession.
This thread reminds me of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a computer RPG which has done in incredible job recreating aspects of life in medieval Bohemia. It has a fantastic level of historical accuracy and things like charcoal trading as a dependency to a forge are integral to one of the DLCs of the game.
While barbecuing last summer one afternoon I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and for a few days afterwards I was an expert on the chemistry, physics, history and economics of charcoal.
Sadly now all I've retained are a few dirty smudges.
I'm not sure if the blacksmith was making his own charcoal, or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that. My Dad's village was about 250 km from this village [1] where people make charcoal even these days (one of the last remaining charcoal burning sites in the world). It's possible back in the day there were much more numerous such sites, so one would not have to travel far.
But even if they had, trade over large distances was surprisingly common. When I was a kid and spending summer vacations on the countryside, my grandparents were involved in a business of selling timber that was felled in some forests about 500 km away. The lumberjacks would bring the logs during the summer months, lots of it (maybe hundreds of cubic meters), and my grandparents would sell it to whoever needed it throughout the year. This was happening during Communism, so I guess it was some form of under-the-tables Capitalism at work. I imagine similar arrangements existed throughout the Middle Ages.
> or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that
This is actually an interesting example of a market state that's sort of intermediate between barter and full monetization. Not everyone is going to want wood, making it a bad currency. Except that The Charcoal Guy always does want wood, so transactions that somehow involve him suddenly can use wood as currency.
Last I heard, fully half the air pollution in the Los Angeles basin was blamed on barbeque restaurants. It may be a higher proportion, now, as the cars have got cleaner, but the leaf blowers may have taken up the difference.
What was the purpose in making the customers give up the opportunity to make spirits, if the charcoal wasn't any more special? Was demand high and the blacksmiths wanted to reduce the volume of low-priority requests?
I think the blacksmith simply needed that charcoal in order to do the job. Since people didn't have charcoal themselves, the blacksmith would take wood instead. "Three plum trees" was probably one option, the most relevant for the local population. I guess the blacksmith would have been happy with "one large oak tree", but that could be used for timber, while plum trees not so much.
Note that when surnames came into existence, they were intended to distinguish their bearers from other people in the local area with the same first name. There's no point being called John English if you live in England and everyone else in your village whose name is John is also English, which is why the surnames English and England (and variants like Inglis) are more common in Scotland than in England.
Similarly, Smith is a common surname because smiths, while relatively common, were rare enough that a given community was unlikely to have two with the same first name. There were almost certainly more shepherds than smiths in England when surnames started becoming heritable, but the surname Shepherd is less common.
Ive heard the possibly apocryphal reason for this is that invading armies would kill or appropriate workers in other professions but keep around the trained blacksmiths working the forge and producing weapons and tools for war. Smiths survived the waves of conquerors.
There were technically invasion attempts up until the 18th century, but even discarding most of those as insignificant, we can hardly neglect the War of the Roses and Henry Tudor's (successful) invasion in 1485...
I have that surname but not for the reason that a blacksmith was in my family. My great grandparents took the name Smith at Ellis Island to Americanize themselves. I suspect this backstory is probably quite common in the US, especially amongst Irish and Italian immigrants in the late 18 to early 1900's.
Probably not; the odds are very high that the name "Smith" (or any analogue like "Kuznets") originally refers to a blacksmith. Most metalwork is ironwork.
My grandfather was a doctor in WWII and at one point traveled up through China and other places that had been heavily decimated / damaged / looted.
I remember him talking about how access to a ship (even if over long distance) with a good machine shop was critical to just get locals up and running with basic metal tools for everyday use and medical uses.
It reminded me of the importance of a local blacksmith and such.
I learned a lot about the production and manufacturing of metal (iron) items. If I recall correctly, for iron production, a lot of people are involved in obtaining the fuel (wood, ash, charcoal) and not so many blacksmiths are necessary
Maybe paying someone else to make your bread is even more luxurious. I wonder if people who ran communal ovens, where you bring your own dough ready-to-bake and then take it out after it cooks, were counted as "bakers".
Blacksmith wasn't a major job until the 1800s when industrial revolution made the job possible. In the 1800s a blacksmith should made nothing: everything was made in a factory and the blacksmith just did the final fitting or repair work. Sure they could and did do some custom decorative stuff, but only the rich could afford that.
Before then a city might have a couple in employee of the noble to make armor or swords, but the common person did without, or handed down tools until they couldn't be used at all. In a village a blacksmith was a side job of a talented farmer, but it couldn't pay the bills as nobody could afford to buy much custom made metal.
In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is a smith in the Miller's Tale, who worked on farming equipment: plow harness, shares, and coulters. (Unless my Middle English is more forgotten than I thought.)
Sure there were self-learners that expanded their trade to supply others for coin. However blacksmithing was certainly a skilled artisan / tradesperson role from antiquity to medieval times that operated on an apprenticeship scheme. One often had to dedicate themselves to it exclusively.
Farming tools? Wood working rools? Tools for builders? All made a blacksmith of sorts. Those making arms and armor where a highly specialized bunch.
That being said, arms manufacturing was a very well developed industry during tue middle ages. Including general contractors, cuttlers, in case of weapons that coordinated the work of the people making the blades, the handles, the scarbords and dis the heat treatment.
If anything, the classic blacksmith went into decline during yhe industrial revolution. With tools, weapons and everyday stuff being mass produced in a factory somewhere.
Weren't bladesmiths a separate profession? I was under the impression that blacksmiths were your run of the mill iron workers, especially considering that a good blade could take far longer to produce than a blacksmith might be able to devote time to.
Slapping a wedge of metal on a pole and calling it a pike could be done by anyone though, I suppose.
I suspect that the ranking is somewhat distorted by the data source: every person working in the general field of notary would be represented in those lists of taxed household heads, whereas in e.g. the field of stonemasonry this would only be true only for a few masters I think, but not for their apprentices or various other forms of low-level support. And I suspect that the wandering stonemasons traveling from project to project wouldn't appear there either. In short: I suspect that interpreting the source like that might be a tiny little bit like trying to derive the percentage of Americans working as plumbers by looking at what is listed at the NYSE.
I've seen arguments that most people were literate. Learning to read and write is not hard, and it is a useful skill.
Of course literate was relative: before the printing press there wasn't much to read (book took months to copy by hand). You were reading and writing short notes. Spelling wasn't standardized so you phonetically spelled things and had to figure out what the other person meant. Good enough for letters, but nobody was writing books on anything since teaching in person was (or seemed to be) more efficient.
I'm not a historian, but the above seems like a good argument. Does anyone have a real reference as to the truth?
On notaries (and related officials) in the middle ages, see this[1] painting by Pieter Bruegel from around 1615. Here Bruegel mocks the tax collectors that are bamboozling the farmers with paperwork. "The work was boldly socio-critical in its time."[2]
For those who don't know: barbers were also surgeons and dentists until around the middle of the 18th century. Not only did they cut your hair they also pulled out your teeth and performed surgery on you.
And where generally closer to our modern day MDs then real mediaval MDs. As those where theologists coming from christian universities where they received basically zero true medical training.
Secular doctors were also terrible: before the late-19th century, seeing a doctor was more likely to shorten your lifespan than lengthen it. Unless you needed surgery, which meant that you were in serious trouble anyway, so even with the extreme likelihood of infection your odds were a bit better than just leaving it alone.
As far as I can tell, before like 1880 they prescribed mercury for everything.
Even though they were universally terrible, when you read their writings they're no less confident in what they were doing than modern doctors are.
My favorite historical doctor was Benjamin Rush, a "founding father," who was hilariously bad at his job even for the time.
Medival doctors seemd to be fairly good, for their time, when it came to broken bones and such. Basically battlefield injuries that didn't damage inner organs. I remeber when they discovered the bones of an English archer. That guy in hos forties had all kinds of broken bones, healed cuts to his bones and head... That and the Egyptian medics, and before, that drilled holes in heads to relieve pressure. Why know those surgeries where successfup because the bone healed on the skeletons we found. Also back the day people seemed to be not too bad when it came to healing properties of herbs.
But you are right, generally speaking you had the choice between really bad, utterly had, extremely bad and outright killing theit patients bad doctors for the most part of history.
An unknown, but large fraction of all three trace, lately, to sugar, among British subjects and its former colonies. It is probable that declining US life expectancy traces to sugar exposure.
The BBC did a short series called "Victorian Pharmacy" where they attempted to use Victorian-era cures on modern people. Except they couldn't even try most of them because they were too dangerous - opium, arsenic, mercury, cocaine, etc. And the things they could try (excepting Lea & Perrins sauce) were basically torture devices like the Malvern Water Cure[2].
Yep. Apothecaries were the main source of routine medical care for the masses. To the extent that "an apothecaries wages" was an idiom to refer to their high incomes, somewhat pejoratively.
This is still the case in many communities worldwide, a good pharmacist is a real anchor for providing care for day-to-day health care. It's a great filtering mechanism too, the pharmacist as a buffer for frivolous doctor's visits.
Contrast that to here in the US. When's the last time somebody sought out direct medical care from a pharmacist? Pretty much the kneejerk always is go straight to a doctor, no matter how small the discomfort.
You've got to take into account that this is 15th C, after the first big wave of bubonic plague, which sent labor prices from "basically free" to "greater than the GDP of the entire continent". Whole new worlds of financial innovation were needed in this period, and not everyone was buying it. I suspect that this tax record itself was a relatively new project at the time, undertaken in part to control spiraling costs in a world without labor.
I guess people from villages/provinces would maybe travel quite far to the city to notarize something? But barbers would only cut the hair of the city population.
It's much easier to make clothes at home than shoes. I could probably cobble together an odd looking shirt given some time and instructions without needing to buy special tools, but leather shoes are an entirely different thing.
On a related note, this article reminded me of something one of my professors had to say about William Shakespeare.
There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays, that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually start from his background: how could the son of a common glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to write like this?
The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession. Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-middle class.
This gets particularly amusing when the conspiracy theorists start saying that Shakespeare's plays must have been written by Marlowe.
They were born only a couple of months apart and had the same sort of background- the sons of skilled craftsmen working with leather (Marlowe's father was a shoemaker) who attended their local grammar school.
Both schools still exist- King's School Canterbury is a much more prestigious institution than King Edward VI School Stratford these days, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is then.
The course of their lives diverged in their late teens- while Marlowe obtained a scholarship to study at Cambridge, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in some haste as she was pregnant with his daughter...
Why I missed that is not the meaning of the phrase "to cobble something together", but its root in "cobbler", which is - at least for me - something I rarely use.
Also Cockneys in old London would say cobblers if you were talking out of your hat. Also balls to refer to the pawnbrokers on account of their three ball shop signs.
Exactly. The article nods to this in a few places, but it's important to recognize that this is an accounting of "recognized" professions, something that left some kind of written account (most of the article is based on tax records it seems like). Which means at the end of the day this is mostly a list of what the men were doing.
Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded. Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that jam from last summer").
In tracing my family tree, I found a branch that went back to a small town in Scotland, and at least 3-4 generations back were shoemakers. When did my forefather leave the family trade? Circa 1850, when the Industrial Revolution apparently hit shoemaking hard.
He ended up keeper of a coffee shop in Glasgow, and his daughter was on a ship to Australia in 1891.
This statistic might also be a specialization for just this case/city. The author noted that Montpelier was known for shoes, which might mean people traveled there for shoes, or they were exported/bought by traveling merchants and sold elsewhere.
4% of the workforce being shoemakers seems enormous. One person working full time making shoes for every fifty-ish adults?
I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP. Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?
I assume 1) people walked a lot more, 2) shoes took longer to make, and 3) didn't last as long which means more people necessary to handle demand. I could be completely off, though.
Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point 1.
Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.
Exactly, walking! Something few of us do these days even at short distances. I prefer shoes that can recobbled but I know from the dwindling numbers of cobblers that I'm a shrinking demographic.
That's an argument for needing fewer people, not more - since it happens in situations where it's less labour-intensive to repair shoes than to make them from scratch.
Not necessarily. If the materials are expensive, paying somebody to repair a shoe can be the cheaper option.
I think people still repaired socks after knitting them was automated for that reason.
The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent “because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))
Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721 learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren’t used (much) yet by then?
It does seem a bit strange, you're right. When you read into it though, this city seemed to have a higher cobbler population than most, as alluded to by the author.
> They were organized in different guilds, based on the street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine cobblers’ guilds were attested in documents, all situated within the city’s walls
I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?
There's always an overlap of skills. Cobblers may have been tailoring on the side but wouldn't be counted as such. I've been to many dry cleaners that will do alterations or repairs on clothes but also will do some light shoe repair as well. They won't make you a shoe but can fix a broken heel just like I'm sure there are cobblers out there who are capable of clothing repairs.
When I was a kid there were vastly more shoe repair places than there are now. I guess if we plotted the graph backwards there would be way more several hundreds years ago.
As the article mentions, a lot of the "most popular jobs" is determined not by the popularity of the industries but by the fragmentation of jobs. If you have 20 people working on shoes and 40 people working on clothing, then if shoemakers are a single profession/guild but clothing has 10 people each working on a different stage of the product (which actually is the case, with the most labor-intensive tasks of medieval clothing production being in the multiple stages of making the actual cloth, not tailoring it) then shoemakers become a more common job.
I would expect that. Clothes last significantly longer than shoes (you can wear a cheap T-Shirt for way over 5 years, but even good midrange shoes start to fall apart after 2 years). It is also fairly easy to repair or even make clothes at home. But shoes?
My first reaction at seeing the headline was - I wonder if I could guess these jobs by people's family names, IE: Blacksmith, Cooper, Chandler, Brewer, Baker, etc.
"Town Crier" suggests by name that a town needed only one. And, maybe, tolerated only one.
I guess "gossip" was everybody's job, like textile production, so nobody's. According to ACOUP, all female members ("the distaff side") of almost all households spent any time not devoted to other tasks on spinning thread or yarn, albeit less so after the spinning jenny spread after 1200.
It's interesting to think about what my life might have been like if I had been born 500 years earlier. I think carpenter or stonemason are what I would have been most interested in. But I really love books, so maybe I would have ended up in the clergy. Thank goodness I was born now.
Probably not. Of course, it's highly dependent on how you group related professions, but according to [0], which has a granularity similar to our medieval source, the three most common occupations in New York in 2020 were retail salespeople, nurses and labourers. You need to get to 4 and 5 before the office and management jobs usually associated with the "bullshit jobs" epithet start to appear.
bullshit in whose opinion? As someone who does not believe in god, are all of the church related jobs bullshit? Or are they not, since a lot of people want churches and their services? If a job exists, there's apparently at least one person who wants it done.
I figured as much. But I don't agree with the premise of the book. Sure, we all "know" the jobs are bullshit, and yet they aren't. Let's go over the wikipedia summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
>flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;
They serve, hence, not a bullshit job. We might look down on it, but they are providing value to their employer. Sadly perhaps, humans are just deeply subjective. See again my religion example. Also, this seems really dismissive of receptionists/PAs. These people do a lot of real work.
>goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;
Not very nice no, but again they provide value to their bosses. Probably to themselves too.
>duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
This just seems to be naïve idealism.
>box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
Here it gets interesting. These people may actually be the first that don't provide value, but trick others into thinking they do.
>taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.
This is a mix of dumb (mis)managers, and malicious time wasters. I think it's obvious that a lot of resources of all kinds are wasted by inefficiencies caused by stupidity. That's a human (as in, we as a species) problem. Then there's malice, which fits into the "tricks others into believing they provide value" category.
> box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;
IDK, I think these sort of workers provide value too. Some industries need QA (quality service manager), or else we'd see a lot more shoddy production across the board. Compliance officers provide a defense against fees/fines incurred by violations of law/policy. Survey administrators ensure the quality of survey collection via planning/organizing/QAing. In-house magazine journalists... well it depends on the company, but some company blogs are actually entertaining/useful. I always kind of hated the Graeber book because it's ultimately just a value judgement that people could be doing something better with their time... which is probably true... in a perfect world? But until then, the occasional corp blog post keeps me from bashing my head in on Monday morning :)
> flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;
Imo, receptionists, administrative assistant and "makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks" are all actually useful. Their function is not just to make someone feel superior. Instead, I would argue that whoever wrote that was caught in own feeling of superiority over service staff.
Exactly. I can't imagine running a doctors office without a reception. Or really any public facing company/office without a reception. Would anyone like to have the dentist use his time to answer the phone rather than fix teeth? Seems like that would under utilize the dentist's degree.
Reception at my doctor's in Norway are all qualified nurses. My sister on the other hand goes to a surgery in the UK has a dedicated receptionist. My sister's experience of visiting the surgery is considerably worse than mine. At the dental practice that I use the hygienists take turns to run the reception desk.
> Would anyone like to have the dentist use his time to answer the phone rather than fix teeth?
I don't care who answers the telephone as long as they are competent to answer questions and have authority to solve problems.
I don't know how things have changed over the past 25 years, but I used to work as a defense contractor and would frequently have to visit the Navy Annex in Virginia which was also HQ US Marine Corps.
It always struck me as weird that the guardhouse gate to enter was manned by a $12 hour off-brand security guard. I mentioned it to someone at one point, and I was told "Do you know how much it costs to train a Marine? It would be an outrageous waste of resources to staff that guardhouse with a Marine."
A relative who put in over 20 years in the army told me that a lot of their post gate guards were contractors these days. Considering that when he told me this it was the height of the occupation of Iraq ('05, maybe?), and that lots of the soldiers on these posts would soon be guarding gates and checkpoints in Iraq, it struck me as super fucking weird that they didn't use that as a training opportunity to get them experience doing that stateside—very different, sure, but any experience beats none, surely, and training's a ton of what they do when not deployed anyway, so seems like a win-win, but I guess either that's not true or whoever landed those contracts had some really good lobbyists.
In Germany, the "nurse" (it's a separate profession from nursing) performs a variety of medical tasks (like vaccinations, blood tests, allergy tests) and does prioritization of incoming patients based on initial assessments. I've also had the "nurse" complete initial medical history with me.
This model is strongly influenced by the size of the clinic: we usually have small clinics owned and run by the only doctor in the clinic (though they sometimes team up). As the amount of patients per day is hard-limited by the doctors time, such small clinics have no need for a full-time receptionists.
That's the crux, isn't it? What kind of "value" are we talking about? The argument doesn't hold unless we start defining this in concrete terms. That's where you'll find that there are many different ways to attribute value. Inevitably, value attributing is inherently human and therefor subjective. "value", such as it is, is a social construct.
Sure, many of the "bullshit jobs" "provide value to employers", but that doesn't invalidate the argument to grant them the moniker "bullshit job".
So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of their employer. They don't generate any value as far as the stakeholders of an employer is concerned: clients, customers, members, patrons, patients, visitors, other employees, etc.
Dedicating staff to calm passengers whose bags do not arrive is a clear cost/benefit trade-off as far as the airline is concerned. Clearly, it's cheaper / easier to have staff comfort passengers, then fix the issue in a structural fashion. The example of a "bullshit job" is apt, because the customers of the airline can clearly push through the illusion that the airline would actually care about their luggage.
Context matters as far as public perception is concerned, though. Things are not always that clear cut.
For instance, corporations aren't necessarily "evil" or "good" in binary terms. Their impact on the world tends to be judged in a morally ambivalent fashion. A corporate lawyer may defend not just their employer, but also squarely aligns their convictions / principles with the ambiguous impact their employer may or may not have on the world, for better or worse. Arguably, the tobacco industry has enabled the social mobility of millions of people, and at the same time, their product has caused the death of millions as well. Depending on what moral stance you'd take, it's valid to perceive a corporate lawyer both as a "goon" defending a reprehensible view on the world, as well as a honest employee defending the livelihoods of many. (note: I'm not taking sides here, it's just an example!)
In a complex and ambiguous world, "bullshit jobs" are labelled as such because they are perceived as such through the lens of current morals, values, socio-economic, political, cultural zeitgeist. A corporate lawyer is seen as a "bullshit job" because society accepts the ambivalence in what they do, and why their role is a thing, even though it's role most people feel the world wouldn't have to need in the first place.
> So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of their employer.
That makes the definition pretty useless though.
To use an example from the comments, the charcoal maker takes wood and turns it to charcoal, and a blacksmith takes charcoal and turns it into iron.
Okay so two friends organize a charcoal making scheme both doing the same thing making charcoal. They sell to blacksmiths so they are providing them with value so their jobs are not bullshit.
One day a blacksmith asks if one of the friends would make charcoal for him, and he'll pay for what they work, and that friend agrees. The other continues on her own. So now one friend suddenly has a bullshit job despite not doing anything much different, and the other friend's job is not bullshit despite doing almost exactly the same thing as the bullshit job.
I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, but if that really is his definition then it sounds like it's just some unhinged anti-employer rant that fails to understand what value is or how organizations work.
> So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of their employer. They don't generate any value as far as the stakeholders of an employer is concerned: clients, customers, members, patrons, patients, visitors, other employees, etc.
Lets not forget the most significant stakeholder from many business's perspectives, investors.
Many of these "bullshit jobs" enable businesses to operate at the scale required for continual economic growth.
Except for very tiny businesses, execs are generally going to be too busy to answer the company phone line or greet guests.
Graeber sees these as inefficiencies, leaning on his experience as an academic lifer, but academia is a very different, if adjacent, market to the capital-driven industrial world.
He seems to miss his own point that so many of these jobs are in the service of ever-increasing economic expectations.
That they are two massively different occupations, with different goals, different processes and different regulations they fall under. Just about the only thing they have the same is low salary.
The point is that there's more overlap than how it looks like on the surface level. E.g. part of what a A.D. 1500 village pastor does is what's done nowadays by psychotherapists and marriage counselors; the role in filling the people's needs is similar even if the processes and regulations are wildly different, just as the processes and regulations of A.D. 1500 shoemaker or surgeon are wildly different than the modern shoe factory worker or surgeon.
That's ignoring a lot of structure induced jobs. Often nobody wants it done but you can't fire a person so you invent a role. Or sometimes the need is mostly a factor of higher rank carelessness or incompetence.. fix the tooling and there's no need to hire 5 more guys to grind through endless papers or mails.
It all boils down to what a good job means for a human. I may be special but I find a few axis that I need:
- skillful
- useful
- well organized enough
Today people don't do much, they don't master much, most of it is done far away in large shops or plants. It's rarely that useful (we're overwhelmingly comfy) and recent management practices are surreal most of the time.
I talked to a few people that prefered low wage in exchange for more skills or usefulness, even if the job might look less impressive in the first place.
I guess a recent pandemic would have shown which jobs were important these days:
Farmers
Truck Drivers
Shop Staff
Medical Specialists
Teachers
Infrastructure specialists (power,fuel,extending into IT work)
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Purveyors of leisure activities, bars/brewing, restaurants/takeaways, online gaming, gambling
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Venture capitalists and financial experts
Consultants specializing in skimming and offshoring
Sales, marketing and influencers
[1] https://spruceaustin.com/uncategorized/history-of-the-uphold...