do you know the song Useful by Julien Clerc? It is without a doubt one of the finest in his repertoire.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
“I want to be useful / To live and dream”
This text by Étienne Roda Gil talks about the resistance of the Chileans under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. But every time I hear it, it sends me back to one of the greatest existential questions: what am I useful for?
This question, everyone asks it one day or another. At any age, in all social classes, in all spheres of life, especially work.
American anthropologist David Graeber exploded this question in the early 2010s by putting forward the theory of bullshit joban expression that could be translated as “useless job” or “dumb job”.
The bullshit jobs, these are useless jobs, which, for various reasons, are considered useful by their performers. When they finally understand the insignificance of their role, they become, as you can imagine, deeply unhappy.
This idea, already conveyed in the 80s, has become a point of interest for academics with the technological advances that have shaken up the world of work, the redefinition of the tasks of many positions and the deletion of certain others.
For Graeber, who was a professor at the London School of Economics (he died in 2020), the invasion of technology has destabilized the ecosystem of the world of work. To maintain the balance, we have created jobs that are by definition non-essential.
Some people tend to confuse the bullshit job with the shit job. It’s not the same thing. The second category encompasses jobs that are difficult to perform from a physical or psychological point of view and which are often accompanied by derisory remuneration.
The puncher of the Lilacs by Serge Gainsbourg, this “guy we meet and don’t look at” who makes “holes, little holes, more little holes” in the metro tickets of Parisians is an eloquent example of this.
In short, we can make shit job and be useful.
The concept of unnecessary jobs is often questioned. In June 2021, three British sociologists published a scientific article to say that the theory that Graeber advocates (based on a single poll) does not exist. According to them, on the contrary, the majority of employees find their work useful.
But according to Graeber, 40% of employees surveyed in England and the Netherlands were convinced that their work did not contribute much to the world. The recent study by the three researchers rather indicates that this phenomenon would affect (in 2015) less than 5% of European workers.
Who is telling the truth?
The Franco-German journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril was also interested in this vast subject. In a book published earlier this year, Full-time fraud, why bullshit jobs are taking over the world, he goes further and puts forward the idea that several companies in difficulty were saved thanks to the intervention of the State. The money came, but we forgot to review the structure. This ensures that certain positions, which are not very useful, remain in place.
Unlike David Graeber, Nicolas Kayser-Bril brings a few additional nuances: the bullshit jobs are often nebulous and opaque. It is sometimes difficult to identify the link they have with the rest of the production chain or to know what certain functions are used for.
But beware, there is a category that should not be ignored, and it is the one that brings together employees who believe they have a bullshit job, but which, in fact, play a very useful role.
Some observers think that if these people sometimes have the impression of doing a useless job, it is because they do not understand the ins and outs of the tasks they perform, because they are too complex.
A company that cannot explain to its employees what they spend a third of their lives doing has a damn problem. This is a great challenge for the human resources department.
If I’m talking to you about this feeling of uselessness at work, it’s because I was reading the report by my colleague Silvia Galipeau, published last Sunday, and I understood how much the return to face-to-face work divides workers enormously.
Excitement, anxiety, indifference, disappointment… It’s all there. One can easily imagine that for those who have always considered that their job is “non-essential”, the spirit is not there.
For others, on the other hand, there will be a form of valuation, because according to a study by the Center for Employment and Labor Studies (CEET) in France, published a few months ago, one employee in ten thinks that his work has lost meaning with the pandemic.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has widened the gap between so-called essential jobs and those that are less so.
The term “essential workers” has been heard a lot.
In this context, it is normal for many people to question professional decisions made several years ago and are currently retraining.
We must draw something positive from the pandemic experience. The reflection it forces us to have on the world of work and the importance of feeling happy in it is surely one of the very good things to draw from the last two years.
Félix Leclerc said that the best way to kill someone is to pay them to do nothing. I would add that giving him a feeling of uselessness gives the same result.