Do You Have a Zoom Job?
“I’ve been thinking quite a bit about David Graeber’s concept of ‘bullshit jobs.’ He defines these as ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers,’ with the most glaring example being the ‘administrative sector,’ including ‘whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.’ I think in light of the epidemic we might call these, collectively, ‘Zoom jobs.’
Meanwhile, as Graeber points out, productive jobs have actually declined, as ‘layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things.’ Today we would call these essential workers.
The puzzle to me is the following.
The pandemic has highlighted with vicious clarity the distinction between essential labor (ranging from doctors and nurses to grocery store workers to sanitation workers to food preparation workers to farm laborers to the transportation workers that get these essential workers to and from their jobs, along with so many others) and non-essential (or Zoom or bullshit) labor. I think many of who have enjoyed the privilege of sheltering at home are able to see this distinction.
And many people have noted the devastating cruelty of this dynamic: that so many of these essential workers who are keeping the rest of us in the bullshit economy alive are so disproportionately black and brown, and so often get paid less than a living wage. That aspect of our economic has, I hope, become bitingly clear.
But what really puzzles me is the case of us bullshit workers. One might have thought that the pandemic would have highlighted how non-essential or at least non-urgent our labor is. Perhaps we might have taken this moment when we are faced with our own collective mortality to reassess our collective priorities. Perhaps we might have taken the time to recenter our home lives, to focus on our children's education, to develop new rhythms of family life, and perhaps even, in the most fantasied version of this tale, to discover new, non consumer-centric ways of being.
I can only conclude that it's a testament to the extraordinary reach of our post-industrial ideologies (dare I say neoliberal ideologies) that our days remain jammed packed with Zoom meetings and other forms of virtual work even as we wrestle with the challenges of staying sheltered at home with our families while juggling day care or home schooling amidst a pandemic that is overwhelming our hospitals and will soon kill millions of people around the world. At a time when the bullshit nature of our work is or should be so glaringly obvious we are nonetheless persuaded to keep doing it full time as the pandemic rages around us.
In the words of my students, all I can say to this extraordinary spectacle is: WTF?”
—François Furstenberg
