Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  The ultimate goal of such brokers being to sufficiently impress their boss that they would be moved from the lowly “trading pit” to an office of their own upstairs. Jack’s conclusion: “My position at this company was wholly unnecessary and served no purpose whatsoever other than to make my immediate superior look and feel like a big shot.”

  This is the very definition of a flunky job.

  The pettiness of the game here—even in the 1990s, $200 was not a lot of money—helps lay bare dynamics that might express themselves in more opaque ways in larger and more complex corporate environments. There we often find cases where no one is entirely sure how or why certain positions were invented and maintained. Here is Ophelia, who works for an organization that runs social marketing campaigns:

  Ophelia: My current job title is Portfolio Coordinator, and everyone always asks what that means, or what it is I actually do? I have no idea. I’m still trying to figure it out. My job description says all sorts of stuff about facilitating relationships between partners, etc., which as far as I’m concerned, just means answering occasional queries.

  It has occurred to me that my actual title refers to a bullshit job. However, the reality of my working life is functioning as a Personal Assistant to the Director. And in that role, I do have actual work tasks that need doing, simply because the people I assist are either too “busy” or too important to do this stuff themselves. In fact, most of the time, I seem to be the only one at my workplace who has something to do. Some days I run around frantically, whilst most of the midlevel managers sit around and stare at a wall, seemingly bored to death and just trying to kill time doing pointless things (like that one guy who rearranges his backpack for a half hour every day).

  Obviously, there isn’t enough work to keep most of us occupied, but—in a weird logic that probably just makes them all feel more important about their own jobs—we are now recruiting another manager. Maybe this is to keep up the illusion that there’s so much to do?

  Ophelia suspects her job was originally just an empty place filler, created so that someone could boast about the number of employees he had working under him. But once it was created, a perverse dynamic began to set in, whereby managers off-loaded more and more of their responsibilities onto the lowest-ranking female subordinate (her) to give the impression that they were too busy to do such things themselves, leading, of course, to their having even less to do than previously—a spiral culminating in the apparently bizarre decision to hire another manager to stare at the wall or play Pokémon all day, just because hiring him would make it look like that was not what everyone else was doing. Ophelia ends up sometimes working frenetically; in part because the few necessary tasks (handed off to her) are augmented with completely made-up responsibilities designed to keep low-level staff bustling:

  Ophelia: We are divided between two organizations and two buildings. If my boss (the boss of the whole place, in fact) goes to the other building, I have to fill in a form to book a room for her. Every time. It is absolute insanity, but it certainly keeps the receptionist over there very busy and therefore, indispensable. It also makes her appear very organized, juggling and filing all this paperwork. It occurs to me that this is what they really mean in job ads when they say that they expect you to make office procedures more efficient: that you create more bureaucracy to fill the time.

  Ophelia’s example highlights a common ambiguity: Whose job is really bullshit, that of the flunky? Or the boss? Sometimes, as we’ve seen with Jack, it’s clearly the former—the flunky really does only exist to make his or her immediate superior look or feel important. In cases like that, no one minds if the flunky does absolutely nothing:

  Steve: I just graduated, and my new “job” basically consists of my boss forwarding emails to me with the message “Steve refer to the below,” and I reply that the email is inconsequential or straight-up spam.

  In other cases, as with Ophelia, the flunkies end up effectively doing the bosses’ jobs for them. This, of course, was the traditional role of female secretaries (now relabeled “administrative assistants”) working for male executives during most of the twentieth century: while in theory secretaries were there just to answer the phone, take dictation, and do some light filing, in fact, they often ended up doing 80 percent to 90 percent of their bosses’ jobs, and sometimes, 100 percent of its nonbullshit aspects. It would be fascinating—though probably impossible—to write a history of books, designs, plans, and documents attributed to famous men that were actually written by their secretaries.11

  So, in such cases, who has the bullshit job?

  Here again, I think we are forced to fall back on the subjective element. The middle manager in Ophelia’s office reorganizing his backpack for a half hour every day may or may not have been willing to admit his job was pointless, but those hired just to make someone like him seem important almost invariably know it and resent it—even when it doesn’t involve making up unnecessary busywork:

  Judy: The only full-time job I ever had—in Human Resources in a private sector engineering firm—was wholly not necessary. It was there only because the HR Specialist was lazy and didn’t want to leave his desk. I was an HR Assistant. My job took, I shit you not, one hour a day—an hour and a half max. The other seven or so hours were spent playing 2048 or watching YouTube. Phone never rang, Data were entered in five minutes or less. I got paid to be bored. My boss could have easily done my job yet again—fucking lazy turd.

  • • •

  When I was doing anthropological fieldwork in highland Madagascar, I noticed that wherever one found the tomb of a famous nobleman, one also invariably found two or three modest graves directly at its foot. When I asked what these modest graves were, I would always be told these were his “soldiers”—really a euphemism for “slaves.” The meaning was clear: to be an aristocrat meant to have the power to order others around. Even in death, if you didn’t have underlings, you couldn’t really claim to be a noble.

  An analogous logic seems to be at work in corporate environments. Why did the Dutch publishing outfit need a receptionist? Because a company has to have three levels of command in order to be considered a “real” company. At the very least, there must be a boss, and editors, and those editors have to have some sort of underlings or assistants—at the very minimum, the one receptionist who is a kind of collective underling to all of them. Otherwise you wouldn’t be a corporation but just some kind of hippie collective. Once the unnecessary flunky is hired, whether or not that flunky ends up being given anything to do is an entirely secondary consideration—that depends on a whole list of extraneous factors: for instance, whether or not there is any work to do, the needs and attitudes of the superiors, gender dynamics, and institutional constraints. If the organization grows in size, higher-ups’ importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant. As we’ll see, 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. Kings of the air. For without flunkies, to whom, exactly, would they be “superior”?

  2. what goons do

  The use of this term is, of course, metaphorical: I’m not using it to mean actual gangsters or other forms of hired muscle. Rather, 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. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable.

  The obvious question is: Are these really bullshit jobs at all? Would these not be more like the Mafia hit men of the last chapter? After all, in most cases, goons are clearly doing something to further the interests of those who employ them, even if the overall effect of their profession’s existence might be considered detrimental to humanity as a whole.

  Here again we must appeal to the subjective element. Sometimes the ultimate pointlessness of a line of work is so obvious that few involved make much effort to deny it. Most universities in the United Kingdom now have public relations offices with staffs several times larger than would be typical for, say, a bank or an auto manufacturer of roughly the same size. Does Oxford really need to employ a dozen-plus PR specialists to convince the public it’s a top-notch university? I’d imagine it would take at least that many PR agents quite a number of years to convince the public Oxford was not a top-notch university, and even then, I suspect the task would prove impossible. Obviously, I am being slightly facetious here: this is not the only thing a PR department does. I’m sure in the case of Oxford much of its day-to-day concerns involve more practical matters such as attracting to the university the children of oil magnates or corrupt politicians from foreign lands who might otherwise have gone to Cambridge. But still, those in charge of public relations, “strategic communications,” and the like at many elite universities in the UK have sent me testimonies making it clear that they do indeed feel their jobs are largely pointless.

  I have included goons as a category of bullshit job largely for this reason: because so many of those who hold them feel their jobs have no social value and ought not to exist. Recall the words of the tax litigator from the preface: “I am a corporate lawyer . . . I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all of the time.” Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to ascertain how many corporate lawyers secretly share this feeling. The YouGov survey did not break down its results by profession, and while my own research confirms such feelings are by no means unique, none of those who reported such attitudes were particularly high-level. The same is true of those who work in marketing or PR.

  The reason I thought the word “goon” appropriate is because in almost all cases, goons find their jobs objectionable not just because they feel they lack positive value but also because they see them as essentially manipulative and aggressive:

  Tom: I work for a very large American-owned postproduction company based in London. There are parts of my job that have always been very enjoyable and fulfilling: I get to make cars fly, buildings explode, and dinosaurs attack alien spaceships for movie studios, providing entertainment for audiences worldwide.

  More recently, however, a growing percentage of our customers are advertising agencies. They bring us adverts for well-known branded products: shampoos, toothpastes, moisturizing creams, washing powders, etc., and we use visual effects trickery to make it seem like these products actually work.

  We also work on TV shows and music videos. We reduce bags under the eyes of women, make hair shinier, teeth whiter, make pop stars and film stars look thinner, etc. We airbrush skin to remove spots, isolate the teeth and color correct them to make them whiter (also done on the clothes in washing powder ads), paint out split ends and add shiny highlights to hair in shampoo commercials, and there are special deforming tools to make people thinner. These techniques are literally used in every commercial on TV, plus most TV drama shows, and lots of movies. Particularly on female actors but also on men. We essentially make viewers feel inadequate whilst they’re watching the main programs and then exaggerate the effectiveness of the “solutions” provided in the commercial breaks.

  I get paid £100,000 a year to do this.

  When I asked why he considered his job to be bullshit (as opposed to merely, say, evil), Tom replied:

  Tom: I consider a worthwhile job to be one that fulfills a preexisting need, or creates a product or service that people hadn’t thought of, that somehow enhances and improves their lives. I believe we passed the point where most jobs were these type of jobs a long time ago. Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured. My job is a combination of manufacturing demand and then exaggerating the usefulness of the products sold to fix it. In fact, you could argue that that is the job of every single person that works in or for the entire advertising industry. If we’re at the point where in order to sell products, you have to first of all trick people into thinking they need them, then I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that these jobs aren’t bullshit.13

  In advertising, marketing, and publicity, discontent of this sort runs so high that there is even a magazine, Adbusters, produced entirely by workers in the industry who resent what they are made to do for a living and wish to use the powers they’ve acquired in advertising for good instead of evil—for instance, by designing flashy “subvertising” that attacks consumer culture as a whole.

  Tom, for his part, didn’t consider his job bullshit because he objected to consumer culture in itself. He objected because he saw his “beauty work,” as he called it, as inherently coercive and manipulative. He was drawing a distinction between what might be called honest illusions and dishonest ones. When you make dinosaurs attack spaceships, no one actually thinks that’s real. Much as with a stage magician, half the fun is that everyone knows a trick is being played—they just don’t know exactly how it’s done. When you subtly enhance the appearance of celebrities, in contrast, you are trying to change viewers’ unconscious assumptions about what everyday reality—in this case, of men’s and women’s bodies—ought to be like, so as to create an uncomfortable feeling that their lived reality is itself an inadequate substitute for the real thing. Where honest illusions add joy into the world, dishonest ones are intentionally aimed toward convincing people their worlds are a tawdry and miserable sort of place.

  Similarly, I received a very large number of testimonies from call center employees. None considered his or her job bullshit because of conditions of employment—actually, these appear to vary enormously, from nightmarish levels of surveillance to surprisingly relaxed—but because the work involved tricking or pressuring people into doing things that weren’t really in their best interest. Here’s a sampling:

  • “I had a bunch of bullshit call center jobs selling things that people didn’t really want/need, taking insurance claims, conducting pointless market research.”

  • “It’s a bait and switch, offering a ‘free’ service first, and then asking you for $1.95 for a two-week trial subscription in order for you to finish the process and get you what you went on the website to acquire, and then signing you up for an auto-renewal for a monthly service that’s more than ten times that amount.”

  • “It’s not just a lack of positive contribution, but you’re making an active negative contribution to people’s day. I called people up to hock them useless shit they didn’t need: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering (with some mindless add-ons) for £6.99 a month.”

  • “Most of the support covered basic computer operations the customer could easily google. They were geared toward old people or those that didn’t know better, I think.”

  • “Our call center’s resources are almost wholly devoted to coaching agents on how to talk people into things they don’t need as opposed to solving the real problems they are calling about.”

  So once again, what really irks is (1) the aggression and (2
) the deception. Here I can speak from personal experience, having done such jobs, albeit usually very, very briefly: 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.

  3. what duct tapers do

  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. I am adopting the term from the software industry, but I think it has more general applicability. One testimony from a software developer describes the industry like this:

  Pablo: Basically, we have two kinds of jobs. One kind involves working on core technologies, solving hard and challenging problems, etc.

  The other one is taking a bunch of core technologies and applying some duct tape to make them work together.

  The former is generally seen as useful. The latter is often seen as less useful or even useless, but, in any case, much less gratifying than the first kind. The feeling is probably based on the observation that if core technologies were done properly, there would be little or no need for duct tape.

  Pablo’s main point is that with the growing reliance on free software (freeware), paid employment is increasingly reduced to duct taping. Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible, that means the same coders are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together. This is a very important insight, and I’ll be discussing some of its implications at length later; but for now, let’s just consider the notion of duct taping itself.