Why our jobs are getting worse
September 1, 2010 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Admit it: you’ve got a bad case of post-holiday stress disorder. I could offer up pop-psychology tips for smoothing the transition from beach to workstation – but most of them are crap. My favourite bit of heal-yerself glibness is the advice to have a meal from the country of your holidays, as if a trudge down to the local Thai will transport a wage slave in Kensal Rise back to Koh Samui faster than he can say “green chicken curry”.
The truth is that you’re probably right to hate being back in harness. It’s not just that, from here, the days get wetter and shorter, that there are no more bank holidays till Christmas or that sacrificing the surplus value of your labour to The Man is really no fun (although that last point alone surely justifies more than one sharp kick to the office LaserJet). Those are all-important, but something more specific is going on. Our jobs are getting worse.
It used to be easy to divvy up the labour market: there were the McJobs, and the rest. The task of politicians was to keep the number of tedious, routine occupations down, and to enable as many good jobs to be created as possible. Except that the reverse appears to be happening. More and more prized careers are becoming McDonaldised – more routine, less skilled, and with the workers subject to greater control from above…
Read the original news at guardian