Welcome to the Kitopedia. All entries are © 2001-2007 Christopher Sunami, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. These entries are NOT publicly licensed. No entries may be reproduced without permission and attribution.

NOTE: Most essays on this site represent original theoretical work. If you find these articles interesting, inspiring or helpful, please let me know. If you refer to them, please give me and this website credit. In addition, links back to this page in blogs or from other sites are always appreciated!

Main

•Site Index
•Top 15 Entries
•Contributors
•Submissions
•Guestbook
•Trackback
•Glossary

Social Essays:

The Insidious Ubiquity of Busywork

by Chris Sunami

Most Americans are familiar with the phenomena of "busywork" --time-consuming tasks of dubious meaning and value, which much be completed according to precise but arbitrary parameters. Such tasks --generally consisting of pieces of paperwork to be laborously filled out --compose a large portion of many people's jobs (as trenchantly chronicled in the movie "Office Space" in which the main character's entire career hinges around the use of one form versus another).

Few people realize, however, the extent to which busywork has come to dominate the American workplace, or have questioned the sinister implications of such a seemingly innocuous phenomenon.

The reason for the existence of busywork is as follows: In a money-based economy, wealth is relative. My spending power increases when the spending power of those around me decreases. However, there are some absolutes, and one of the most foundational absolutes is human labor. In order for anything to actually be produced, there must be human labor involved, and the value of human labor is physically bounded by the amount of productive work a person can do in a day.

What this means is that, in order for a people to become wealthier than the limits of their own labor, they need to me able to control, directly or indirectly, the labor of a large number of people. Direct control of other people's labor, as in slavery, is ultimately inefficient, because one person can only exploit the labor of a limited number of people before facing the inevitability of a revolt. However, indirect control of labor solves this problem through the magic of hierarchy. If I control a small number of people --ten, for example --it takes relatively little force and coercion, particularly if I share the benefits of their labor with them.
A part interest in the labor of ten people is not enough to create immense wealth. If each of those ten people controls ten other people, however, and those people control ten other people, then I quickly reach a situation where I have a part interest in the labor of a thousand people (or, to extend it another level, ten-thousand). Now my wealth is greater than those of my laborers by several orders of magnitude.

This is the logic behind the perennially popular confidence scams known as "pyramid" and "Ponzi" schemes, in which the first investors become fabulously wealthy at the expense of the tens of thousands of investors at the lower levels of the pyramid. It is also the key element in more legitimate enterprises such as "Amway" and "Mary Kay", where wealth still becomes more and more concentrated on the way up the pyramid, but where the presence of an actual saleable product keeps the situation from being a complete waste for those on the bottom level.

It is rarely recognized, however, that this same underlying principle forms the structure for all large modern corporations. A single CEO at the top of a company makes millions or even billions of dollars. His or her main function is to manage a group of highly paid senior vice presidents, each of whom controls a division of the company. The web of control expands downward through a pyramid of middle management and culminates in the employment of hundreds of thousands of low-paid manual laborers, often in Third World countries.

One of the problems with this setup is that the vast majority of the actual productive labor that keeps the company running takes place at the bottom, or near the bottom of the pyramid. There are other functions that take place higher up the pyramid --skilled labor and technical work such as engineering and design for example --but the need for such labor is generally not extensive enough to fill the vast pyramids that compose mega-corporations.

This is where busywork enters the picture. The filling out of forms, shuffling of paper, and completion of meaningless tasks keeps people in the middle of the pyramid busy, and thus prevents them from causing trouble. The busywork also structures the pyramid and keeps it from collapsing, by limiting opportunities for advancement and by placing barriers to productivity.

This last point demands some explanation. Why is productivity in the middle of the pyramid a bad thing? The answer is that the function of middle management is to maintain the organization and to keep the hierarchy from collapsing. Productivity is not a function of the middle, but only of the bottom. If people in the middle of the pyramid are too productive, it calls into question the need for the vast numbers of people in the middle of the pyramid. If I, as a mid-level employee complete tasks too efficiently and effectively, then why does the company need all the other workers at my level of the pyramid? It is only a useful fiction that my emplyoment is maintained primarily for my productivity. Rather it is maintained for my utility as a channel through which wealth can flow upwards.

Thus, success in middle management is largely dependent on the ability to keep people busy, but not productive. In other words, the function of middle management is to create busywork. The more busywork that is available, the more the company can expand, and the larger the pyramid will be, thus creating a greater concentration of wealth at the top.

This explains a phenomena noticable in many offices. One or two people may be the ones doing all of the actual productive work in the office, but they are surrounded by a vast number of other employees who are essentially supernumerary and parasitic. The employee who does the actual work, however, is less likely to be promoted or recognized than a co-worker who continually creates meaningless projects, and thus increases the workload on those around them.

Why is the hardworking employee disdained and the parasitic employee celebrated? The former endangers the employment of those around him or her by demonstrating their uselessness, but the latter ensures the continued employment of his or her coworkers by disguising their needlessnesss. This has additionally created the much-noted recent phenomena of the overpaid CEO who is compensated lavishly even when he or (rarely) she seems to have done nothing positive for the company.

In this case, the simplest explanation is that such a CEO is nothing more than a parasitic employee who has inevitably worked his way to the top of the ladder. Unfortunately, this phenomena as a whole creates employment at the price of the death of creativity and human potential.

<< Previous		Next >>

Comment on this Page or Read Guestbook