È un anno (anno!) che cerco di finire questo libro. Complice forse la quarantena, o più semplicemente il fatto che mi mancavano davvero poche schermate, ce l’ho fatta finalmente!
Devo dire che l’emergenza Covid19 ha confermato la tesi fondamentale di Graeber, senza bisogno di commentare molto oltre: molti dei lavori indispensabili sono tra quelli ritenuti più umili e meno pagati (netturbini, colf, badanti, imprese di pulizie, braccianti agricoli, insegnanti loro malgrado costretti alla didattica a distanza…). Di tanti altri, non se ne avverte la mancanza o, perlomeno, l’impellenza.
L’unica cosa che non mi è piaciuta è che non l’ho trovato molto scorrevole e le tesi sono esposte a più riprese e ogni tanto si perde un po’ il filo logico.
Qui tutte le note ed evidenziazioni: Bullshit Jobs annotazioni complete
Prendere in giro i precari
I had groups to run like “anger management,” “coping skills” . . . They were so insulting and irrelevant! How do you cope with lack of decent food or control your rage toward the police when they abuse you?
an entirely new, unfamiliar, right—such as the right to meaningful employment
Università
If a grant agency funds only 10 percent of all applications, that means that 90 percent of the work that went into preparing applications was just as pointless. This is an extraordinary squandering of human creative energy. Just to give a sense of the scale of the problem: one recent study determined that European universities spend roughly 1.4 billion euros a year on failed grant applications33—money that, obviously, might otherwise have been available to fund research.
Banche
So in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore bullshit. But let’s leave that to the side for a minute and look at those within banking who literally do nothing. There actually are not all that many of these because banking is a weird mix. Overall we do nothing, yet within that nothing it’s efficient, meritocratic, and in general lean.
Still, the most obvious is the cheerleader Human Resources Department. At some point, banking realized that everyone hates them, and that their staff knows this, too, so they set about trying to make the staff feel better about it all. We have an intranet that HR was told to make into a kind of internal “community,” like Facebook. They set it up; nobody used it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it, which made us hate it even more. Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal blogs” that nobody cared about. Still nobody comes. Three years they’ve been at this, the internal intranet Facebook page is just full of HR people saying something cheesy about the company and then other HR people saying “Great post! I really agree with this.” How they can stand this, I have no idea. It’s a monument to the total lack of cohesiveness in banking.
