On performative work

Cleaning up the BS

Turbulence, alcohol, motion sickness, and nerves make airplanes a place with higher-than-normal frequency of vomiting. My husband, a 10+ year flight attendant, deals with this challenge often.

He says he works with two categories of people:

1. Those who put on gloves and clean up the vomit

2. Those who put on gloves, stand close enough to be seen holding a trash bag, yet far enough away to let those in category 1 do all the dirty work

The first category is actual work, and the second is what I like to call “performative work”.

Most professions have some version of performative work:

• Swooping in at the end of a project and volunteering to present in front of the bigwigs

• Attending meetings all day armed with Teflon, allowing action items to stick only to other people

• Talking to people about TPS reports

Since reading this interview with late author David Graeber in 2018, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this quote:

“There is an almost perfect inverse relation between how much your work directly benefits others, and remuneration. The result is a toxic political culture of resentment.”

In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber asserts that around 40% of workers feel their jobs or even industries provide no benefit to other people. He categorizes them into “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters”. They believe that the world would be unaffected or even improve if their jobs were to vanish. On the other hand, working-class people who do mostly useful things tend to have lower compensation. Only a few coveted jobs pay well and have clear purpose.

This became even more apparent to me during the pandemic’s early months. “Essential” workers risked their lives to ensure all of us had food, utilities, healthcare, and transportation. For the most part, except for doctors and pilots, these were not high-paying jobs. It’s no wonder we have seen shortages and unionization pushes in many of these roles.

What would happen in our society if we reward work by the true value it provides to the general public? How do you think can we eliminate performative work?