It’s possible to hate your job but love your job – 03/03/2023 – Market

Don’t you hate it when a good theory falls apart? The late anthropologist David Graeber’s book, “Bullshit Jobs” [Empregos de merda]had a great premise: that the modern economy has spawned a huge number of useless jobs and “the people who do these jobs are completely unhappy because they know their job sucks”.

Corporate lawyers, lobbyists, middle managers – they are all useless and they know it.

It’s been five years since the book was published, but people are still talking about it, especially in the context of the current puzzle about why some people have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic. Did workers just get tired of pretending that what they did all day was really important?

The problem is that the data doesn’t support the “shit jobs” theory.

A few years ago, researchers Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell analyzed a series of large European Union surveys on working conditions to see whether it was true that increasing numbers of people thought their work was pointless.

In fact, only about 5% of workers in 2015 responded “rarely” or “never” to the statement “I feel like I’m doing useful work.” This proportion had been approximately 8% in 2005.

Contrary to the idea that bad jobs are more common in high-paying white-collar sectors, the survey found that garbage collectors and janitors were more likely to say they didn’t do useful work than legal and administrative professionals.

It is possible that people are lying to themselves or to those taking the survey. It is also possible that they see their work as “useful” in a narrow sense, but still find it meaningless in a deeper way that is not included in this question. Or maybe the theory is wrong.

Even if he is, I think Graeber pointed out an important distinction that is often missed: there is a difference between how a person might feel about their job and how they might feel about their actual job.

He was interested in the idea that someone could have a good job, in the sense of being well paid and respected by society, but still hate their job. I’m interested in the reverse. More and more I meet people who say they love their work, but who hate their job.

Look at social workers who care for people at home or in residential institutions. In many countries there are high vacancy rates in these jobs, and high staff turnover. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the work is dismal.

UK carer focus groups run by Resolution Foundation researchers found the opposite: professionals talked about how much they valued responsibility, autonomy and the difference they made in people’s lives.

A recent analysis of UK well-being data shows that people in ‘caregiver’ occupations have the highest levels of feeling that the things they do in life are worthwhile. The problem is that low wages and understaffing leave workers too tired and overworked to provide the quality of care they desire.

A senior caregiver told me about a junior colleague who had to make 28 home visits in one shift and didn’t return to her family until midnight. “She called me and said, ‘I love my job, but I feel compelled to do something else.’

The phenomenon is not unique to low-wage jobs. A psychologist from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) emailed me recently explaining that a lack of resources made it impossible for her to do a good job.

“I’m wise enough to know that working harder to fill these widening gaps is unsustainable,” she wrote. “So even me, a truly committed NHS employee who loves her job, is good at it and has the best colleagues […] I’m planning my exit.”

She said this is a “common issue” in her profession. “We absolutely love what we do, but we’ve been broken by a lack of infrastructure, investment and decades of ‘doing more with less’.”

Low wages and scarce resources are not the only culprits. A bad manager can ruin a good job overnight.

Corporate bureaucracy can do this more slowly, entangling people in tasks that take them away from the work they want to do, like to do, and were hired to do.

I’m sure some people are paid well for jobs they don’t like and don’t think are important. But there are more reasons to be concerned about people in the opposite situation. The good news is that this is a simpler problem to fix.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves