Nope not that old and I’m pretty sure that was a fairy tale even then and they definitely dropped wages hard. Speaking to older people it wasn’t even that easy to find jobs in the 60s and 70s, at least not if you were empoc.
I work as a janitor for min wage, one of my sites is cleaning up after a cube farm, those poor fucks are wretched and only make 2 dollars more than me minus the suits. Someone in there is obviously on chemo puking their souls out having to go in and stare at mt. paperwork for hours on end, and I’m sure if the boss or whoever knew they’d be fired. Downside for me I get no downtime, I’m sweating to death all shift minus my 10min break and like the cube workers I could be replaced tomorrow easily should management not like something.
I remember so many movies and TV shows where this was portrayed as the ultimate dead end
And goddamn, I would kill for a job where I could just play Minesweeper all day and make enough money to afford a house
imagine sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office and maybe filling in some excels and answering some emails, and once a week going to a bullshit meeting, and getting paid enough to save money
maybe you’d get home before sunset and wouldn’t even be that tired
what a concept haha
This is a leftist fantasy and not at all what actual white collar jobs are like.
The concept of bullshit jobs, which was already tenuous and debunked when that book released, is more than ever nonexistent. Companies know how much revenue an employee generates.
Every corporate office has been squeezing and tightening since 2008. Entire departments reduced to one person wearing 15 hats while generating more profit than ever. Constantly overloaded with too much work by design so you’re always doing the most critical tasks and have no downtime.
Try the “work 15min a day” act as an engineering project manager and it’s not going to go well.
Western leftists love to denounce anything that is not Mcdonalds as ”not labor”.
This is reactionary and childish and reveals a fundamental failure to materially understand how labor accomplishes things. Imagine if the USSR or China had this attitude towards labor. Yeah look at those useless admin staffers building high speed rail, infrastructure, and space programs. Researching vaccines and novel treatments. What a bunch of lazy entitled posers.
I wasn’t thinking about actual white collar jobs in [current year] but the gen-x 90s - early 2000s pop culture trope of someone working in the corporate middle strata and getting an existential breakdown from it
Companies know how much revenue an employee generates.
i don’t know, not always
Yeah for me I work in a team with 10 other devs, corporate knows how much revenue we as a department make, but breaking it down accurately per individual would be pretty much impossible, quantity metrics like tickets closed, commits or lines of code written are useless because some tickets are more important than others, some code is better quality which its not something you can really objectively measure accurately, and I’m sure similar applies to many other jobs
I don’t know, I’m a maintenance man, and while I do have busy periods when things go wrong in the building I do just sit on my ass doing my own life stuff most of the time.
And even then, I want to leave. The reality is the pay isn’t all that great (good enough, but I want more!), and I feel like I’m just wasting my life away. At work I used to work on my hobbies, now I mostly just scroll bullshit. It’s gotten stale and depressing.
That said, I’m certainly not on 80k. That’s insane numbers. Nothing pays like that anymore unless you’re bringing serious money into the company.
My mum used to write for property and interior design magazines/websites. For the same job title she had about 20-30 years ago at the same company, they’ve added more responsibility and the wages are the exact same - as in the purchasing power has been halved. I will never have it as good as my parents had it.
Western leftists love to denounce anything that is not Mcdonalds as ”not labor”.
Well they love to denounce service jobs a not labor too. Remember the discourse during the Starbucks union formation? Labor is only when you hit something with a hammer.
That was like 10 weird losers on Twitter
The whole productive labor v unproductive as the sole defining trait of one being proletarian confusion. All those who labor under capital and have it stolen.
Try the “work 15min a day” act as an engineering project manager and it’s not going to go well.
When the project deadline keeps changing because all the other companies involved have different billing cycles and want to save a buck, then the end client changes their mind about some critical design choice repeatedly, that specific job can become a living hell. Doubly so when the CEO/owner of the company doesn’t know what you do and keeps trying to use AI to update the tracking sheets only to break them for a day.
What have I been up to? Oh you know. Spreadsheets. Running the numbers, ya know, heh heh. You seen that reflecting pool? Putting up a fence now, can you believe it? Hahaha. <---- hasn’t done a single second of work in over 10 years
I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Ideal human life right here. Just get a hobby that you can do from your desk damn.
Graeber writes about these in Bullshit Jobs and I’ve lived it. These jobs suck ass. It’s not enough to do your work, it’s that you need to do the performance of work. These jobs often exist at the pleasure of some middle manager’s little fiefdom, and so while on paper it’s a trivial desk job, in reality it’s an unending, highly stressful process of being court jester to some asshole. You have to constantly tab back into work in case the manager is nearby and patrolling. You can’t let anyone know how idle you are for fear of losing your job, and at the same time you can’t do anything interesting because your job is a very specific performance. They’re exhausting on a psychic level. At least when I was working at a garage and getting oil burns I was doing something. The human animal needs enrichment in a way where bullshit jobs become a slow and subtle torture.
Confirm, I have one of these jobs and I’m just doing it so I can save some money and fuck off out of here.
I had a job kind of like this. I spent my time training myself in my hobby, so that I could get a job that I liked if I got fired.
Now I’m privileged enough to have a job that I enjoy.
“Wanna know how I got this depression?”
God, I want to imagine the Joker putting on a customer service voice, then going back to regular Joker voice when on his 30 min lunch break lmao
Or putting someone on hold to say “ahhhhhhahahahahaaHahahahahah hahahahahahahaha this fucking guy” briefly
Just watched that Cumtown clip huh
I want a marble pool with my initials in it.
GCH, you got it
Wha… but my name is Concrete Halloween?
Listen we already paid the butler in advance and he’s union
Can we get him to hand out a sign that says it doesn’t stand for gay?
