Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  Consider Chloe the nonexecutive Dean. In a way, she, too, was a flunky, since her post was created by higher-ups for largely symbolic reasons. But she was also a taskmaster to her own subordinates. Since she and her subordinates didn’t have much to do, she spent some of her time looking for problems they could duct-tape until she finally came to the realization that even if she were given some kind of power, most of what she’d be doing would just be box-ticking exercises anyway.

  I received one testimony from a man who worked for a telemarketing company with a contract with a major IT firm. (Let’s say Apple. I don’t know if it was Apple. He didn’t tell me which one it was.) His job was to call up corporations and try to convince them to book a meeting with an Apple sales representative. The problem was that all of the firms they would call already had an Apple sales rep permanently attached to them, often working out of the same office. What’s more, they were perfectly aware of this.

  Jim: I often asked my managers how they would convince prospects of the value of taking a meeting with a sales rep from our technology giant customer when they already had a sales rep from that same technology giant on their premises. Some were as hapless as I was, but the more effective managers patiently explained to me that I was missing the point: an appointment-setting call is a game of social niceties.

  Prospects don’t take a meeting because they think it might help solve a business problem; they take it because they fear it would be impolite not to.

  This is as pointless as pointless can be, but how, exactly, would one classify it? Certainly Jim, being a telemarketer, would qualify as a goon. But he was a goon whose entire purpose was to maneuver people into box ticking.

  Another ambiguous multiform category are flak catchers, who might be considered a combination of flunky and duct taper but who have certain unique characteristics of their own. Flak catchers are subordinates hired to be at the receiving end of often legitimate complaints but who are given that role precisely because they have absolutely no authority to do anything about them.

  The flak catcher is, of course, a familiar role in any bureaucracy. The man-whose-job-it-was-to-apologize-for-the-fact-that-the-carpenter-didn’t-come might be considered a flak catcher of sorts, but if so, his position was an unusually cushy one, since he only really had to talk to university professors and administrators who were unlikely to scream, pound the table, or become visibly upset. In other contexts, flak catching can be genuinely dangerous. When I first came to the United Kingdom in 2008, one of the first things that struck me was the ubiquity of the notices in public places reminding citizens not to physically attack minor government officials. (It struck me this should rather go without saying. But apparently it doesn’t.)

  Sometimes flak catchers are well aware of what they’re there for, as with Nathaniel, who signed up for a work-study program at a college in Canada, and was assigned to sit in the registrar’s office and call people to tell them that some form was filled out incorrectly and they’d have to do it all over again. (“Since all frontline workers were students, it kept the cap on how pissed off anyone could reasonably get. The first line you used when someone became agitated was, ‘Sorry, man, I know it’s BS. I am a student, too.’ ”) Other flak catchers seem touchingly innocent:

  Tim: I work in a college dormitory during the summer. I have worked at this job for three years, and at this point, it is still completely unclear to me what my actual duties are.

  Primarily, it seems that my job consists of physically occupying space at the front desk. This is what I spend approximately seventy percent of my time doing. While engaged in this, I am free to “pursue my own projects,” which I take to mean mainly screwing around and creating rubber band balls out of rubber bands I find in the cabinets. When I am not busy with this, I might be checking the office email account (I have basically no training or administrative power, of course, so all I can do is forward these emails to my boss), moving packages from the door where they get dropped off to the package room, answering phone calls (again, I know nothing and rarely answer a question to the caller’s satisfaction), finding ketchup packets from 2005 in the desk drawers, or calling maintenance to report that a resident has dropped three forks down the garbage disposal, and now the sink is spewing decayed food.

  In addition, often people will yell at me for things that are clearly not my fault, such as the fact that they dropped three forks down the garbage disposal, or the fact that there is construction happening nearby, or the fact that they have not paid their outstanding rent balance, and I am forbidden from accepting $1,400 in cash, and my boss does not work on weekends; or the fact that there is no convenient TV available on which they can watch The Bachelor. I assume it’s a kind of catharsis for them to do this yelling, since I am nineteen years old and clearly abjectly powerless.

  For these duties, I am paid fourteen dollars an hour.

  On the surface, it may seem as if Tim is just a flunky, like the unnecessary receptionist in the Dutch publishing house: it just wouldn’t look good to have no one sitting there at all. But, in fact, it seems likely that insofar as Tim provides a real service to his employers, it’s precisely by giving angry students someone they can vent at. Why else, after three years, would they still be keeping him so completely in the dark? The main reason I hesitate to make flak catcher a category of bullshit job is because this is a real service. Tim is not making up for a structural flaw like the man whose job it was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter didn’t come. He’s there because if you gather together a large number of teenagers, a few will invariably throw temper tantrums about stupid things, and Tim’s employer would prefer they direct their outrage at someone other than himself. In other words, Tim’s is a shit job, but it’s not entirely clear that it’s a bullshit one.

  a word on second-order bullshit jobs

  A final ambiguous category consists of jobs which are in no sense pointless in and of themselves, but which are ultimately pointless because they are performed in support of a pointless enterprise. An obvious example would be the cleaners, security, maintenance, and other support staff for a bullshit company. Take Kurt’s office that provides the paperwork required to move German soldiers’ computers down the hall. Or Nouri’s firm that promoted an algorithm that didn’t work. Or any of a hundred fake telemarketing or compliance firms. In every one of those offices, someone has to water the plants. Someone has to clean the toilets. Someone has to handle pest control. And while it’s true that most of the companies in question operate in large office buildings hosting any number of different sorts of enterprise—which usually makes it unlikely that any one cleaner or electrician or bug sprayer is providing services exclusively for those who believe themselves to be engaged in useless occupations—if one were to measure the total proportion of cleaning or electrical work that is ultimately performed in support of bullshit, that number would be very high. (One would have to assume 37 percent, in fact, if the YouGov survey is accurate.27)

  If 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labor falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term.28 If you combine this with the bullshitization of useful occupations (at least 50 percent in office work; presumably less in other sorts), and the various professions that basically exist only because everyone is working too hard (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen, to name a few), we could probably get the real workweek down to fifteen hours—or even twelve—without anyone noticing much.

  a final note, with a brief return to the question: is it possible to have a bullshit job and not know it?

  The idea of second-order bullshit jobs once again raises the issue of the degree to which bullshit jobs are just a matter of subjective judgment and the degree to which they have objective reality. I believe bullshit jobs to be very real—when I say we can only rely on the judgment of the worker, I’m simply talking about what we can, as observers, know about the
m. I would also remind the reader that I while I believe it is right to defer to the particular worker about the factual question of whether their work actually does anything at all, when it comes to the rather more subtle issue of whether the work in question does anything of value, I will think it’s the best thing to defer to the overall opinion of those who work in the industry. Otherwise we could end up in the rather silly position of saying that of thirty legal aides working in the same office and performing the same tasks, twenty-nine have bullshit jobs because they think they do, but the one true believer who disagrees does not.

  Unless one takes the position that there is absolutely no reality at all except for individual perception, which is philosophically problematic, it is hard to deny the possibility that people can be wrong about what they do. For the purposes of this book, this is not that much of a problem, because what I am mainly interested in is, as I say, the subjective element; my primary aim is not so much to lay out a theory of social utility or social value as to understand the psychological, social, and political effects of the fact that so many of us labor under the secret belief that our jobs lack social utility or social value.

  I am also assuming that people are not usually wrong, so if one really did want to map out, say, which sectors of the economy are real and which are bullshit, the best way to do so would be to examine in which sectors the preponderance of workers feel their jobs are pointless and in which sectors the preponderance do not. Even more, one would try to tease out the tacit theory of social value that led them to this conclusion: if someone says, “My job is completely pointless,” what are the unspoken criteria being applied? Some, like Tom the special effects artist, have thought these things through and can simply tell you. In other cases, workers are not able to articulate a theory, but you can tell that one must be there, if only on a not completely conscious level—so you have to tease out the theory by examining the language people use and observing their gut reactions to the work they do.

  For me, this isn’t really a problem. I’m an anthropologist: teasing out the implicit theory that lies behind people’s everyday actions and reactions is what anthropologists are trained to do. But then there’s the problem that people’s theories are not all the same. For instance, it has come to my attention, while conducting this research, that many of those employed in the banking industry are privately convinced that 99 percent of what banks do is bullshit that does not benefit humanity in any way. I can only assume that others working in the industry disagree with this assessment. Is there any pattern here? Does it vary with seniority? Are higher-ups more likely to believe in the social benefits of banking? Or do many of them secretly agree that their work has no social value but just don’t care? Maybe they even take delight in the knowledge that their work does not benefit the public, thinking of themselves as pirates, or scam artists, in some romantic sense? It’s impossible to say (though Jeffrey Sachs’s testimony in the last chapter at least suggests that many at the very top simply feel they have a right to whatever they can get).

  The real problem for my approach comes when one has to deal with those in professions that everyone else regularly invokes as prime examples of bullshit jobs who don’t seem to think of their jobs that way themselves. Again, no one has done detailed comparative survey work in this regard, but I did notice certain interesting patterns in my own data. I heard from only a smattering of lawyers (though from a large number of legal aides), only two PR flacks, and not a single lobbyist. Does this mean we have to conclude these are largely nonbullshit occupations? Not necessarily. There are any number of other possible explanations for their silence. For instance, perhaps fewer of them hang around on Twitter, or maybe the ones that do are more inclined to lie.

  I should add as a final note there was really only one class of people that not only denied their jobs were pointless but expressed outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These were—predictably enough—business owners, and anyone else in charge of hiring and firing. (Tania appears to be something of an exception in this regard.) In fact, for many years, I have been receiving periodic unsolicited communications from indignant entrepreneurs and executives telling me my entire premise is wrong. No one, they insist, would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn’t needed. Such communications rarely offer particularly sophisticated arguments. Most just employ the usual circular argument that since, in a market economy, none of the things described in this chapter could have actually occurred, that therefore they didn’t, so all the people who are convinced their jobs are worthless must be deluded, or self-important, or simply don’t understand their real function, which is fully visible only to those above.

  One might be tempted to conclude from these responses that there is at least one class of people who genuinely don’t realize their jobs are bullshit. Except, of course, what CEOs do isn’t really bullshit. For better or for worse, their actions do make a difference in the world. They’re just blind to all the bullshit they create.

  Chapter 3

  Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?

  (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1)

  Workplaces are fascist. They’re cults designed to eat your life; bosses hoard your minutes jealously like dragons hoard gold.

  —Nouri

  In this chapter, I’d like to start exploring some of the moral and psychological effects of being trapped inside a bullshit job.

  In particular, I want to ask the obvious question: Why is this even a problem? Or to phrase it more precisely: Why does having a pointless job so regularly cause people to be miserable? On the face of it, it’s not obvious that it should. After all, we’re talking about people who are effectively being paid—often very good money—to do nothing. One might imagine that those being paid to do nothing would consider themselves fortunate, especially when they are more or less left to themselves. But while every now and then I did hear testimonies from those who said they couldn’t believe their luck in landing such a position, the remarkable thing is how very few of them there were.1 Many, in fact, seemed perplexed by their own reaction, unable to understand why their situation left them feeling so worthless or depressed. Indeed, the fact that there was no clear explanation for their feelings—no story they could tell themselves about the nature of their situation and what was wrong about it—often contributed to their misery. At least a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused.

  In an earlier book about debt, I wrote about the phenomenon of “moral confusion.” I took as my example the fact that throughout human history, most people seem to have agreed both that paying back one’s debts was the essence of morality and that moneylenders were evil. While the rise of bullshit jobs is a comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar moral embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract. (“We can’t just give poor people handouts! Then they won’t have any incentive to look for work!”) On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends to contradict these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and react to situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would predict. The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials, these theories about human nature are wrong.

  In this chapter, I don’t just want to ask why people are so unhappy doing what seems to them meaningless make-work, but to think more deeply about what that unhappiness can tell us about what people are and wha
t they are basically about.

  about one young man apparently handed a sinecure who nonetheless found himself unable to handle the situation

  I will begin with a story. The following is the tale of a young man named Eric, whose first experience of the world of work was of a job that proved absolutely, even comically, pointless.

  Eric: I’ve had many, many awful jobs, but the one that was undoubtedly pure, liquid bullshit was my first “professional job” postgraduation, a dozen years ago. I was the first in my family to attend university, and due to a profound naïveté about the purpose of higher education, I somehow expected that it would open up vistas of hitherto-unforeseen opportunity.

  Instead, it offered graduate training schemes at PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, etc. I preferred to sit on the dole for six months using my graduate library privileges to read French and Russian novels before the dole forced me to attend an interview which, sadly, led to a job.

  That job involved working for a large design firm as its “Interface Administrator.” The Interface was a content management system—an intranet with a graphical user interface, basically—designed to enable this company’s work to be shared across its seven offices around the UK.

  Eric soon discovered that he was hired only because of a communication problem in the organization. In other words, he was a duct taper: the entire computer system was necessary only because the partners were unable to pick up the phone and coordinate with one another:

  Eric: The firm was a partnership, with each office managed by one partner. All of them seem to have attended one of three private schools and the same design school (the Royal College of Art). Being unbelievably competitive fortysomething public schoolboys, they often tried to outcompete one another to win bids, and on more than one occasion, two different offices had found themselves arriving at the same client’s office to pitch work and having to hastily combine their bids in the parking lot of some dismal business park. The Interface was designed to make the company supercollaborative, across all of its offices, to ensure that this (and other myriad fuckups) didn’t happen again, and my job was to help develop it, run it, and sell it to the staff.