Privatisation of Public Housing

From my interview with the ABC

In this audio, I talk about the privatisation of public housing, and how I think it is unreasonable to under-fund a government department and then turn around and say it yields poor outcomes compared to what the private sector would provide.

Check it out here:

https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/georgeorwellprivatepublichousing

This brought to mind one of the opening chapters of David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About it’. I’ve included the relevant paragraphs here.

“On the common misconception that bullshit jobs are confined largely to the public sector”.

“If you toss out the notion of bullshit jobs to someone who hasn’t heard the term before...he may assume you’re talking about government bureaucrats.”

“Let me deal with the bureaucrats first, since it’s the easiest to address. I doubt anyone would deny that there are plenty of useless bureaucrats in the world. What’s significant to me, though, is that nowadays, useless bureaucrats seem just as rife in the private sector as in the public sector. You are as likely to encounter an exasperating little man in a suit reading out incomprehensible rules and regulations in a bank or mobile phone outlet than in the passport office or zoning board. Even more, public and private bureaucracies have become so increasingly entangled that it’s often very difficult to tell them apart. That’s one reason I started this chapter the way I did with the story of a man working for a private firm contracting with the German military [See this example below*]. Not only did it highlight how wrong it is to assume that bullshit jobs exist largely in government bureaucracies, but also it Illustrates how “market reforms” almost invariably create more bureaucracy, not less.”

“As I pointed out in an earlier book, The Utopia of Rules, if you complain about getting some bureaucratic run-around from your bank, bank officials are likely to tell you it’s all the fault of government regulations; but if you research where those regulations actually come from, you’ll likely discover that most of them were written by the bank.”

“Nonetheless, the assumption that government is necessarily top-heavy with featherbedding and unnecessary levels of administrative hierarchy, while the private sector is lean and mean, is by now so firmly lodged in peoples heads that it seems no amount of evidence will dislodge it.”

“No doubt some of this misconception is due to memories of countries such as the Soviet Union, which had a policy of full employment and was therefore obliged to make up jobs for everyone whether a need existed or not. This is how the USSR ended up with shops where customers had to go through three different clerks to buy a loaf of bread, or road crews where, at any given moment, two-thirds of the workers were drinking, playing cards, or dozing off. This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient, with private workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and surveillance.”

“Obviously, I’m not going to deny that the latter is often the case. In fact, the pressure on corporations to downsize and increase efficiency has redoubled since the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1980s. But this pressure has been directed almost exclusively at the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the ones who are actually making, maintaining, fixing, or transporting things. Anyone forced to wear a uniform in the exercise of his daily labors, for instance, is likely to be hard-pressed.”

“FedEx and UPS delivery workers have backbreaking schedules designed with “scientific” efficiency. In the upper echelons of those same companies, things are not the same. We can, if we like, trace this back to the key weakness in the managerial cult of efficiency—its Achilles’ heel, if you will. When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves—or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended. As a result,the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed—ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large, firms. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs. (As we’ll see, in some companies, this was literally the case.) The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.”

“We’ll examine how this happened in detail later in the book, For now,let me just emphasize that almost all the dynamics we will be describing happen equally in the public and private sectors, and that this is hardly surprising, considering that today, the two sectors are almost impossible to tell apart.”

*German Military Example:

“Kurt works for a subcontractor for the German military. Or...actually, he is employed by a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor for the German military. Here is how he describes his work:

The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work.

The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics.

The logistics firm has a subcontractor that does their personnel

management, and I work for that company.

Let’s say soldier A moves to an office two rooms farther down the hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.

The IT subcontractor will get the form, people will read it and approve it, and forward it to the logistics firm.

The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down the

hall and will request personnel from us.

The office people in my company will then do whatever they do, and now I come in.

I get an email; “Be at barracks B at time C.” Usually these barracks are one hundred to five hundred kilometers [62—310 miles] away from my home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch know that I arrived, fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box, seal the box, have a guy from the logistics firm carry the box to the next room, where I unseal the box, fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long I took, get a couple of signatures, take my rental car back home, send dispatch a letter with all of the paperwork and then get paid.

So instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.

This might sound like a classic example of ridiculous military red tape of the sort Joseph Heller made famous in his 1961 novel Catch-22, except for one key element: almost nobody in this story actually works for the military. Technically, they’re all part of the private sector. There was a time, of course, when any national army also had its own communications, logistics, and personnel departments, but nowadays it all has to be done

through multiple layers of private outsourcing.”

Now there's efficiency for you!