I a long-winded way of saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
This irks me chat. This is an elephant in the room that should be causing mass chaos
As someone who’s both ND and with a diminished social circle from an isolating family, I hate that people still talk about getting a job as just a matter of applying like there isn’t preferential treatment for connected people.
And framing education as the ‘great equalizer’ hasn’t done anything to dispel the myth of meritocracy.
I hate that people still talk about getting a job as just a matter of applying like there isn’t preferential treatment for connected people.
And framing education as the ‘great equalizer’ hasn’t done anything to dispel the myth of meritocrcy
100% this
Similar to the stock market itself, salaries are just a numeric expression of rich people feelings about you in particular.
so true
there are some exceptions, like a lot of extremely dangerous professions like crab fishing and underwater welding being paid disproportionately for their typical social clout (obviously not true of all dangerous positions, counter-example is sanitation workers), but yeah
The key is that those dangerous professions make a lot of money, Janitors not so much, the social clout comes from the money, not the job. Especially thinking of Oil workers here.
Also, extreme hours can be a thing. I know a place where the blue-color workers make 250K+ while the engineers might not make 6-figures. But the engineers are M-F 9-5 (most of the time) while the workers were rotating shifts and often had months where they averaged 90+ hrs/week.
Yes, if anything the more work you do the less you get paid.
My jobs have consistently gotten easier and less demanding as I’ve been promoted and made more money. I don’t think this is true across the board, but it’s common enough that the opposite should not be as prevalent of a “common sense” opinion as it is.
The only major exceptions are for doctors and certain highly technical, dangerous manual labor jobs.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber(pdf) has a lot to say on the subject of pointless, low effort jobs that pay well.
In my experience the more I’ve gotten paid the less stressful my job has been.
My pay was worst when my job was taking emotional abuse from the consumer public while working in a hot kitchen where I got burned a lot.
It improved when my job became taking emotional abuse from the consumer public in an air-conditioned setting.
It improved a lot more when I lucked into a promotion where I touch spreadsheets and send out emails about the spreadsheets and nobody screams at me anymore.
Mine is slightly based on merit but only because the people who I assist are there because of hierarchy. My position exists due to their incompetence.
Salaries are one part a maintenance fee to keep the worker able to work and one part based in supply and demand. It’s not “how much rich people like you”, rather it is “how can you be kept working for us” (the requirement of which depends on industry and how much training is required. For example, logistics and food have a very high churn whereas white collar jobs can take longer to get a worker generating surplus value so they are paid more), and “how difficult is it to hire someone here” (which is why lawyers and doctors are highly paid as there is a high supply and a low demand). How wages are determined is discussed in depth by Marx, among other scholars.
no, this is backwards. salaries are based on the amount of surplus labor that capitalists are able to extract from labor power in that type of job. the superstructure of a “social hierarchy” flows from these divisions and from previous incarnations (like when there was a big difference between educated intelligentsia and near-illiterate proles. now all work requires formal education). You can see this in the changing cultural views of jobs that have changed in pay.
This does not explain why people whose jobs are solely to send emails are so highly paid.
The Bullshit Jobs explanation is that the bullshit jobs are those which are most valuable to Capital, not the jobs that are socially valuable.
but what actually makes the email jobs valuable to capital when they’re essentially bullshit?
A group of coddled faux-elites with so little exposure to serious work that they could never sympathize with union organizers? They are the grease between the vampires and the zeks, keeping a solid buffer between those with power by fiat and those with power in fact.
Yeah it does. Which specific jobs are you talking about? I think Graeber is good, but “email jobs” is no more descriptive than “counter jobs” or something. Lots of different counters you can sit behind, lots of different emails you can send. We do ourselves a disservice by trying to analyze “the laptop class” or whatever without examples.
I was going to spell this out in initial comment but decided in favor of brevity. By “the amount of surplus labor capitalists are able to extract from labor power in that type of job”, I mean that efficient extraction of labor power in some roles can force capitalists to steal less surplus in other roles. For instance, if programmers are paid $200k to save finance firms $1m a year in operational improvements, nonprofits may have to pay their programmers $90k even if they’re getting nowhere near $500k of surplus labor out of the deal, because otherwise the programmers can go work for finance firms and make $200k. Lawyer jobs that close billion-dollar mergers or wiggle out of EPA fines make it more expensive to hire a criminal defense attorney. When labor is commoditized, you get something similar to the minimal socially necessary amount of labor that values commodities. So I expect that many high-paid “bullshit jobs” are staffed by labor that could be extracted more efficiently in other roles.
e: on second thought, second paragraph may be bourgeois labor market theory rephrased into LTV. But I think it’s obvious that salaries are part of economic base, and social hierarchy is superstructure, not the other way around.
Responding late but by “email jobs” I’m talking about all the MBA jobs that corporations are stuffed with. These people mostly send out emails about if a project is done yet and hold meetings about how done projects are (usually color-coded to green, yellow, and red). They don’t create surplus value so capitalists can’t skim the surplus value off of them.
Do you mean consultants? Project managers? I think an actual job title would help me understand what you’re talking about.
The specific ones I’m thinking of are called Business Analysts.
these seem like they do grunt analysis to inform management decisions. i.e. help to more efficiently extract from other workers
Sounds like I’m batting out of my league because this is the first time I’ve heard of the word “superstructure”
I’ve also noticed how I get more opportunities for movement up the hierarchy whenever I mask well. But that could also be overanalyzing so who knows
it’s helpful concept. dialectical materialism aims to do analysis by looking at how the real world affects our ideas and how our ideas affect the real world (the dialogue or dialectic between the two). On a society-wide level, Marxists identify a “base” (material conditions - how production is organized, who lives where, etc) and a “superstructure” (corollary ideas). We think that the base primarily influences the superstructure, not the other way around (“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”). For instance, in capitalism we have ideas like “meritocracy”, and these take hold as popular ways to understand the material conditions of economic disparity. Often the superstructure lingers after the material conditions have changed. For instance racism originally came into prominence to justify the chattel slave trade of Africans. Now chattel slavery is gone, but those racist ideas persist and affect the base, which changes the ideas, etc. Another example is how religion changed as capitalism developed: as the church lost power over society, Christianity developed the idea of a personal relationship with God instead of one mediated through the church. (And then there’s the Anglican split which is more explicit.)
so discrimination against ND people like you’ve experienced is real, and it’s easier for an individual to get ahead if they look NT/white/male/etc, BUT the structural existence of that discrimination is a result of economic conditions. it’s not that someone sat down and said let’s organize society so the jobs have payscales according to the identities of the workers. It’s that society is laid out in a way that works for capitalists, and the ideology of what’s “normal” springs up to defend/explain/enforce the existing order. The many changes in American non-black racism to fit changing economic conditions provide great examples, e.g. How the Irish Became White.
More or less. I did eventually land a job with my degree and it’s the easiest work I’ve ever had at $19 an hour. I feel sorry for my co-workers who work just as hard as me, but sometimes earn less.
Unfortunately comrade, the real existential consequences of materialism (and the reality that it isn’t meritocratic but simply the web of networks and connections you are born in and must exercise agency in) is something ppl can’t generally cope with.
So they believe they’ve earned their position even though the deciding factor is often who they know.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they are unqualified (though sometimes it is) but that they did not truly ever ‘earn’ it.
If only
had leaned even harder into “you didn’t build that”, it would have been better.
