[ExI] On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Posted on August 17, 2013

Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would
keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber
explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue –
everyone who’s employed should read carefully…

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Illustration by John Riordan

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end,
technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain
or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every
reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable
of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, 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.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s –
never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the
massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more
toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a
nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be
true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs
and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the
production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment
in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one
pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century,
the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the
farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional,
managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from
one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words,
productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if
you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India
and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the
world population as they used to be).

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, up to and including the creation of whole
new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented
expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration,
human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect
on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or
security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of
ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only
exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all
the other ones.

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. Sure, in the
old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was
considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as
they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to
sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem
market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at
least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money
to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and
speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making,
moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one
can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to
expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet
workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively
working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is
spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook
profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

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 ‘60s). 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.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative
responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible
vision of hell. 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. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then
discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish.
Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very
limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so
obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might
be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the
fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of
useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that
anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics
of our own economy.

*

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections:
“who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary
anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And
indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the
very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is
obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a
meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what
about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since
I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a
poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs
on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was
obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened
and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of
unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a
newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so
many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in
a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly
meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation,
should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it
say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand
for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for
specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% 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.) But even more, it shows that most
people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve
ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same
goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class
of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit
that you do something that might be considered interesting (an
anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line
of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades
about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to
speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not
exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is
the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as
in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely
against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our
society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work
benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an
objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask:
what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say
what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious
that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate
and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in
trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would
clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer
were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries,
telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many
suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted
exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way
things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism.
You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for
paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers
can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this
seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where
Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school
teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school
administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for
their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told
“but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And
on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and
health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the
power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better
job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The
remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally
reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do
nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives
and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and
particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a
simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable
social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged
from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for
why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour
days.

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of
Economics. His most recent book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis,
a Movement, is published by Spiegel & Grau.

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