Certainly not a REAL business that MAKES things.
Come on, neither msmith537 nor anybody else has claimed that ALL jobs in law, finance, real estate, etc., “get compensated far in excess of any value they create”.
But I don’t think it’s controversial to state that in white-collar fields there are indeed numerous sinecures and “bullshit jobs” whose high compensation is based more on high entry barriers and other market distortions than on actual value their work adds.
Tell me who those people are in Apple, Google, GM, Boeing, etc. I won’t say they don’t exist, but they are more the exception than the norm. What you and @mssmith537 describe is a meme commonly believed by direct labor at a manufacturing company that can’t possibly believe that the desk jockey’s add any value. 
Like Kimstu said, not everyone, but have you ever tried to compute the value of a white collar job? When I worked at Bell Labs we had to justify funding by computing the benefit, and we were doing things to help manufacturing so we had it relatively easy. Our computations ranged from good try bullshit to utter bullshit.
At Intel one group in charge of designing a section of the chip screwed up royally, got way behind schedule, then finally fixed it - and were rewarded with a trip to Disneyland.
When I moved into a new group at Sun I found a guy whose full time job was to maintain a code chunk 50 lines long, which I promptly rewrote into one 20 lines long. His manager knew nothing about programming and wasn’t aware how incompetent he was.
I’ve worked for top tier tech companies my entire career, and there are plenty of losers making good money. And plenty of really good people also.
In fact there is a book on the topic, specifically with the title “Bullshit Jobs”.
Not to mention entire fields that add no value. American Health Insurance companies, for example, do a job that’s handled by the government cheaper and better in other countries, but instead of one entity handling it it’s dozens of competing entities who all want to make a profit.
The job they supposedly do (handle the logistics of processing payment for health services) could be done for a fraction of the effort if there weren’t dozens of megacorporations needing to make profits off of every step in the process.
In tech it is called “rest-and-vest”. See: The Secret Lives of Millionaire Tech Engineers Who 'Rest and Vest' . I think it largely has to do with the fact that hiring in tech is hard, so it’s easier to move someone into another role hoping to find a use for them than it is to fire them and re-hire to backfill.
That being said, at well-run companies it is, as you note, the minority. But I have personal experience at other companies where they get a good product going, and the success of that product allows them to pile on a bunch of sales guys and business analysts who never bear fruit, until the company’s revenue stream is 95% from that one product, but only 15% of the employees work on it.
Back when I first started working for the Canadian government, there was a years-long effort to redefine the government job and pay classifications, with the intent that every job would be compensated “fairly” on the basis of allegedly “objective” standards about what each job actually entailed doing. This was part of the “equal pay for equal work” push at the time.
The whole house of cards eventually collapsed under its own weight, as even the proponents of the system finally realized it was fundamentally impossible to make actual “fair, objective” comparisons of so many vastly different sorts of jobs.
So yeah, at some point, there’s at least some degree of “bullshit” that goes into figuring out how much any one person gets paid.
Who said that “numerous” should be taken as equivalent to “the norm”? And who said that a few top companies such as Apple, Google, Boeing etc. are reliably representative of entire fields of “law, finance, real estate, consulting, marketing, general corporate management” and so forth? (Nobody, that’s who.)
ISTM that you are taking a pretty reasonable and uncontroversial statement and arbitrarily qualifying it in rather drastic ways in order to render it less plausible.
Never heard that one, but in the Bell System they had the concept of people who were retired in place. Still employed, but doing nothing.
I think the term was coined on Silicon Valley (the HBO TV show). At least that’s where I first heard it.
I’ve heard such things said about IBM in the not-too-recent past as well.
I heard the term long before HBO existed when I was in the navy, generally applied to someone who’s a year or so from retirement and just not churning and burning any more because there won’t be any more promotions from now until then.
It’s based on “survey in place,” survey being navalese for write off the books and the whole phrase meaning abandon and leave it there.
I wonder how much of the “antiwork” / “great resignation” movement is centered around “high tech”? Are companies having difficulty hiring and retaining lawyers, accountants or HR people?
I don’t know how hard they’re finding it to hire in these cases, but I suspect they are also having problems, because I’ve seen at least a few of these “antiwork” posts from people in such jobs, who tell tales of employer abuse just as bad as any minimum wage job, or factory job. There’s a whole lot of bosses out there who just don’t care about treating their employees decently, and it’s starting to bite them all in the ass.
Yes. We (Finance department in big global firm) have had six people quit this year (30% of our department) most of them pissed off at our antiquated approach to employee relations.
The last guy literally walked out of a meeting and to his car when our “big boss” walked into the meeting room and took off her mask (she wears it where her boss and/or HR can see her) and proceeded to mock those of us wearing masks.
We also have a parking garage that is 75% empty because most employees are still in varying degrees of remote work, but lower level employees must find municipal or other private parking, because you know the last two years haven’t been enough to rethink our entitlement mentality.
Prior to 2020 our turnover rate was something like 20 percent a year and most of that was movement between departments.
Since Jan 2021 we have turned over over 100%.
I’m in HR, and the great resignation hit our HR department hard in 2022. We lost our some senior employees in benefits and almost our entire recruiting team. For some of them, the attraction was higher pay and the promise of working from home. But for others, part of their motivation was frustration at management’s failure to solve some problems that have been endemic for a number of years now. We’ve hired new recruiters, but our benefits team is still short and we’re having a hard time finding someone.
“antiwork” is different from “great resignation” (maybe with some overlap).
The “great resignation” happened because COVID forced some people out of work, and they realized they didn’t need it as much as they thought. Specifically, many people at or near retirement just realized they didn’t need it anymore, so the labor pool shrunk.
“antiwork” is just a healthy antidote to the prevailing mindless position that we call the “work ethic.” Why do we assume everyone should work unless they have a need to be idle? Maybe everyone should remain idle unless they need to work.
“antiwork” as you describe it is just “people being lazy”. The reason we assume “everyone [who is able” should work" is because the house you live in, the food you eat, the clothes you wear, pretty much everything you use or consume or own, is created at the expense of someone else’s labor.
The “great resignation” isn’t just people close to retirement. It’s people at all ages coming to the conclusion that they want to be treated a certain way at work and if they aren’t, they are going to go somewhere else. Most aren’t dropping out of the workforce. They are just leaving to work for a competitor or changing industries.
Of course that begs the question of where are these magical companies people are moving to.
Apparently right next door to the shitty ones that can’t keep employees.
It has already been explored abundantly in this thread that this concept of work doesn’t apply to everyone. People who inherit large sums of money aren’t expected to work, even though someone has to work to put bread on their table. Are people excused from the moral judgment of “laziness” just because they happen to be born into a frozen-food empire? Think about it.
You cannot describe a “great resignation” by saying “most aren’t dropping out of the workforce.” There very plainly is a labor shortage; many positions are simply going unfilled. It’s not because young people left the workforce. It’s because people closer to retirement just decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. Everyone else moved up to fill those vacancies, and there aren’t enough people to fill the bottom tier of vacancies. Hence, “boo hoo young people don’t want to work anymore.” Incorrect: young people are in fact working. There just aren’t enough to backfill the vacancies in the senior tiers of the workforce.
The reason people have now leverage to leave their garbage jobs is because the labor pool has shrunk even as labor demand has surged. That shrinkage came from older workers retiring (or in many cases being killed or disabled by COVID).