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Bullshit jobs are costing the economy; Businesses bury themselves in billions of dollars in red tape
Topic Started: 29 Oct 2014, 03:47 PM (635 Views)
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http://www.canberratimes.com.au/business/businesses-burying-themselves-in-billions-of-dollars-in-red-tape-20141028-11d17q.html

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Australian companies are drowning in their own red tape, wasting valuable hours of employee time and costing the economy billions of dollars.

In what it believes is the first assessment of red tape in both Australia's public and private sectors Deloitte Access says government regulations cost about $27 billion a year to administer and cost businesses $67 billion a year to comply with.

But it says red tape imposed by businesses themselves costs $155 billion a year - $21 billion to develop and administer and $134 billion a year to comply with.

"Businesses are wearing self-inflicted wounds," Deloitte director Chris Richardson said.

"Our research shows that senior executives and middle managers each spend more than eight hours per week complying with internal rules. Even non-administrative staff each spend an average of more than six hours per week."

Deloitte says so big has the growth of Australia's compliance workforce become that it has roughly offset the decline in Australia's back-office workforce.

The report to be launched by Treasurer Joe Hockey on Wednesday says Australia's "non-productive" workforce is scarcely any smaller than it was two decades ago.

"For every back-office job that has vanished, a new compliance job has been created, wiping out the productivity benefit," Mr Richardson said. "For the most part, these are not jobs necessitated by government regulation, but jobs dreamed up by the companies themselves."

The mining sector has seen the fastest growth of compliance workers as a proportion of the workforce, followed by construction.

"However, a decade of prosperity has seen us reach for rules often without weighing up their costs and benefits."

Deloitte has taken a dose of its own medicine, asking its employees to identify "dumb rules" that get in the way of innovation, collaboration and creativity.

"Every few years we ask our people: what are the dumb things we do? What is stopping you doing your job?" Mr Richardson said.

"We get lots of suggestions, we stop infuriating staff and we save money. But the process also does something else. It says to our staff: hang on, these guys are serious about doing things better.
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http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away.

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
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Barista
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People are going to need to reskill. But reskilling is going to cost people lots of money and a balance needs to be struck between reskilling and getting new skills and reskilling and simply having a ticket slapped on skills people already have. Too much reskilling is the latter.

I must confess to wondering about all this this very morning after had a brief yack with the kid who comes around and cleans bins in the office where I work during the day. She is obviously fairly smart, pierced nose and all that with a few tatts. I often have a brief chat with her. Today she tells me she has an accounting degree. I ask her what she is doing cleaning offices and she tells me that that is about all she will score around the Bellarine (she wants to be close to her family and travelling an hour in or out of Melbourne each day doesnt appeal). I cant help but think that we as a society, are wasting talent.

There are a lot of kids out there as far as I can make out who have the grey matter, but we slip them into a culture where they are never going to get a shot at making that work for them, and where they eventually take some sort of second rate mediocrity and pay off a mortgage in suburbia – I read a book about Bernard Madoff which suggested this was behind his burning desire to get out of his banal upbringing.

The real thing lacking is a national economic narrative saying ‘these skills will be in demand and they will drive a more productive Australia’ with us having a sort of narrative which revolves around ‘take this gig and you will be a safer borrowing proposition to get that mortgage’ – and the only people left to take on risk are those who dont have to worry about paying bills at a day to day level (the rich).

The other thing to think about – and one I think about a lot, admittedly because I get gigs floated past me from OS – is rather than reskill, why not relocate? Sometimes it makes sense. But once again it is easier to relocate when having the dough (and probably not needing to). To my mind we are consigning a lot of people, in particular kids with ability but from less well off backgrounds – to a sort of neo serfdom.
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doubleview
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Barista
29 Oct 2014, 03:51 PM
People are going to need to reskill. But reskilling is going to cost people lots of money and a balance needs to be struck between reskilling and getting new skills and reskilling and simply having a ticket slapped on skills people already have. Too much reskilling is the latter.

I must confess to wondering about all this this very morning after had a brief yack with the kid who comes around and cleans bins in the office where I work during the day. She is obviously fairly smart, pierced nose and all that with a few tatts. I often have a brief chat with her. Today she tells me she has an accounting degree. I ask her what she is doing cleaning offices and she tells me that that is about all she will score around the Bellarine (she wants to be close to her family and travelling an hour in or out of Melbourne each day doesnt appeal). I cant help but think that we as a society, are wasting talent.

There are a lot of kids out there as far as I can make out who have the grey matter, but we slip them into a culture where they are never going to get a shot at making that work for them, and where they eventually take some sort of second rate mediocrity and pay off a mortgage in suburbia – I read a book about Bernard Madoff which suggested this was behind his burning desire to get out of his banal upbringing.

The real thing lacking is a national economic narrative saying ‘these skills will be in demand and they will drive a more productive Australia’ with us having a sort of narrative which revolves around ‘take this gig and you will be a safer borrowing proposition to get that mortgage’ – and the only people left to take on risk are those who dont have to worry about paying bills at a day to day level (the rich).

The other thing to think about – and one I think about a lot, admittedly because I get gigs floated past me from OS – is rather than reskill, why not relocate? Sometimes it makes sense. But once again it is easier to relocate when having the dough (and probably not needing to). To my mind we are consigning a lot of people, in particular kids with ability but from less well off backgrounds – to a sort of neo serfdom.
Its a rough and tumble forum, I prefer to call it what it is (which is allowed here) "mortgage servitude for many of our young is not productive".

Additionally you have (Skamy type mrons)shit like this going on, it aint good long term for our society:

http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/one-in-three-parents-give-children-home-deposit/story-fncq3era-1227033513993
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