Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

by David Graeber

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.

If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)

For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

whenever you find someone doing something in the name of economic efficiency that seems completely economically irrational (like, say, paying people good money to do nothing all day), one had best start by asking, as the ancient Romans did, “Qui bono?”—“Who benefits?”—and how.

We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

A Finnish tax auditor working in a closed office sat dead at his desk for more than forty-eight hours while thirty colleagues carried on around him. “People thought he wanted to work in peace, and no one disturbed him,”

pernicious.

As Socrates teaches us, when this happens—when our own definitions produce results that seem intuitively wrong to us—it’s because we’re not aware of what we really think. (Hence, he suggests that the true role of philosophers is to tell people what they already know but don’t realize that they know.

Mafiosi families are unusual perhaps because they make few such pretensions—but in the end, they are just miniature, illicit versions of the same feudal tradition, being originally enforcers for local landlords in Sicily who have over time come to operate on their own hook.

Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is.

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. Another term for this category might be “feudal retainers.” Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.

that assigning people minor tasks as an excuse to have them hang around making you look impressive has a long and honorable history.

testimonies from consultants hired to introduce efficiencies in a large corporation (say, a bank, or a medical supply corporation) attest to the awkward silences and outright hostility that ensue when executives realize those efficiencies will have the effect of automating away a significant portion of their subordinates. By doing so, they would effectively reduce managers to nothing.

I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies.12 If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society.

there are few things less pleasant than being forced against your better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense. I will be discussing this issue in greater depth in the next chapter, on spiritual violence, but for now, let us merely note that this is at the very heart of what it is to be a goon.

Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist.

the moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organize one’s working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) precisely because more important people could not care less. The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.

Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct—tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has gotten around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible, or because of some structural confusion, or because of some combination of the three.

I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.

A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not.

apocryphal

Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others.

Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.

the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.

sinecure

Your job is more like a boss’s unzippered fly that everyone can see but also knows better than to mention.

It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid of—accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.

The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it. In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case. Human beings certainly tend to rankle over what they consider excessive or degrading work; few may be inclined to work at the pace or intensity that “scientific managers” have, since the 1920s, decided they should; people also have a particular aversion to being humiliated. But leave them to their own devices, and they almost invariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do.

working-class people who win the lottery and find themselves multimillionaires rarely quit their jobs (and if they do, usually they soon say they regret it).5 Even in those prisons where inmates are provided free food and shelter and are not actually required to work, denying them the right to press shirts in the prison laundry, clean latrines in the prison gym, or package computers for Microsoft in the prison workshop is used as a form of punishment—and this is true even where the work doesn’t pay or where prisoners have access to other income.

we now know that placing prisoners in solitary confinement for more than six months at a stretch inevitably results in physically observable forms of brain damage. Human beings are not just social animals; they are so intrinsically social that if they are cut off from relations with other humans, they begin to decay physically.

Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that “they” are the thing which just caused something to happen—the proof of which is the fact that they can make it happen again.

experiments have also shown that if one first allows a child to discover and experience the delight in being able to cause a certain effect, and then suddenly denies it to them, the results are dramatic: first rage, refusal to engage, and then a kind of catatonic folding in on oneself and withdrawing from the world entirely. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek called this the “trauma of failed influence”

A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.

In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

Time is not a grid against which work can be measured, because the work is the measure itself.

By the fourteenth century, most European towns had created clock towers—usually funded and encouraged by the local merchant guild. It was these same merchants who developed the habit of placing human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves that they should make good use of their time because each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death.

if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgment (which is all we were really expecting). Instead, you’ll be punished with meaningless busywork.

the religious element: the idea that dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another’s authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person. This, of course, is a modern variant of Puritanism.

rights-scolding (though it increasingly infects the rest of Europe): older people who grew up with cradle-to-grave welfare state protections mocking young people for thinking they might be entitled to the same thing.

When economists speak of a fourth, or quaternary, sector (coming after farming, manufacturing, and service provision), they usually define it as the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate).

there is every reason to believe that most policy makers don’t actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much “upward pressure on wages.” Marx appears to have been right when he argued that a “reserve army of the unemployed” has to exist in order for capitalism to work the way it’s supposed to.

duct-taper positions are created because sometimes organizations find it more difficult to fix a problem than to deal with its consequences; box-ticker positions exist because, within large organizations, paperwork attesting to the fact that certain actions have been taken often comes to be seen as more important than the actions themselves;

“We make money from dealing with a leaky pipe—do you fix the pipe, or do you let the pipe keep leaking?”

As long ago as 1852, Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, was already making fun of the legal profession with the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—in which two teams of barristers keep the battle over a huge estate alive for more than a lifetime, until they’ve devoured the whole thing, whereupon they simply declare the matter moot and move on. The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.

there were the cruel, patronizing “flexibility” and “mindfulness” seminars. No, you can’t work fewer hours. No you can’t get paid more. No, you can’t choose which bullshit projects to decline. But you can sit through this seminar, where the bank tells you how much it values flexibility.

panoptic

I found many similar problems and came up with solutions. But in all my time, not one of my recommendations was ever actioned. Because in every case, fixing these problems would have resulted in people losing their jobs, as those jobs served no purpose other than giving the executive they reported to a sense of power.