Work - the activity is the product

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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I was reading about the increasing working hours in the US, mostly office - service jobs. The products of most of this work is vague, or “information”, and even some aspects of research are not really clear (just generate papers ?), or finance etc. So what really seems to be happening is that the real product of all this extra work is “the activity” of work itself. So this activity generates other activity in a positive feedback loop and what counts is not the “contents” of this activity, but just that there is more activity. Meetings, IT systems, financial transactions etc. are really not producing anything really measurable. It is a kind of self sustaining activity with no real contents. I am not thinking however of the Health Care sector which is increasing because there are more people reaching old age.

The primary sectors of economy, agriculture and manufacturing do produce goods that in a sense can be measured, but services are hardly measurable. But the means of production of the primary sectors are well known and can be perfected, standardized etc. Whereas most of this service work just generates activity, the contents is irrelevant. Or maybe the contents is cultural. So be prepared for millions of new Information Systems that mostly don’t do anything, programming languages that don’t really improve anything etc. What they really do is create pure activity. Changes for changes sake, so this creates more work, more information etc.

And even in consumer goods you can notice a pattern. The product is the forms factor, the “means of delivery” of the product but not the product itself. There are very few new products, what changes is the means of delivery. So we once had Hi Fi Stereo systems with vinyl records that sounded beautiful, but then the means of delivery changed, a CD, then an mp3 player etc. There are few really new products, we just change how to deliver them. The same with video, from Cinema to VHS tapes to DVD to downloads from the internet etc.

New products are simply new “means of delivery” and most new “work” is simply activity for activity’s sake.

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Interesting. I would say that companies have to make some kind of profit and if an activity doesn’t generate or isn’t related to a profit then it goes away. Then again profit itself is often a cultural choice, it is kind of abstract. Some kinds of companies become fashionable.

In Japan this “activity is the product” is probably more true than ever, the salaryman has to wait until midnight for his boss to leave before he can leave, and similar things. Even the idea of making believe you are always busy, or the idea that you must commute to an office everyday so they see you etc. These are all cultural items.

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Other interesting feedback loops: companies can’t find workers in a given area (like programming) so those few they do find get overworked. This in turn makes these activities less attractive so less workers are available and willing to work in these fields. This in turn makes it even harder for companies to find these workers and those fewer are worked even harder once they are found etc.

Another fact is pure money, it costs less to overwork a person than to hire 2. And also it is a good way to weed out those who are not competitive. It ends up being either all work or no work.