Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  It seems to me that those creating, playing around with, and destroying large amounts of money in the FIRE sector provide the perfect place to begin to ask this question—in part because many who work in this sector are convinced that almost everything done in it is basically a scam.22

  Elliot: So I did a job for a little while working for one of the “big four” accountancy firms. They had been contracted by a bank to provide compensation to customers that had been involved in the PPI scandal. The accountancy firm was paid by the case, and we were paid by the hour. As a result, they purposefully mis-trained and disorganized staff so that the jobs were repeatedly and consistently done wrong. The systems and practices were changed and modified all the time, to ensure no one could get used to the new practice and actually do the work correctly. This meant that cases had to be redone and contracts extended.

  In case the reader is unaware, the PPI (payment protection insurance) scandal broke in the United Kingdom in 2006, when a large number of banks were found to have been unloading unwanted and often wildly disadvantageous account insurance policies on their clients. Courts ordered much of the money returned, and the result was an entire new industry organized around resolving PPI claims. As Elliot reported it, at least some of those hired to process these claims were intentionally dragging their feet to milk the contract for all they could.

  Elliot: The senior management had to be aware of this, but it was never explicitly stated. In looser moments, some of the management said things like “We make money from dealing with a leaky pipe—do you fix the pipe, or do you let the pipe keep leaking?” (or words to that effect). There had been vast sums set aside by the bank to pay compensation for the PPI.

  This is actually a fairly common story in the testimonies I received: I heard about similar things going on in law firms involved with asbestos compensation payments as well. Whenever a very large sum of money, in the hundreds of millions, is set aside to compensate an entire class of people, a bureaucracy must be set up to locate claimants, process claims, and portion out the money. This bureaucracy may often involve hundreds or even thousands of people. Since the money that pays their salaries is ultimately coming from the same pot, they have no particular incentive to distribute the spoils efficiently. That would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg! According to Elliot, this often led to “crazy, surreal stuff” like intentionally placing offices in different cities and forcing people to commute between them, or printing and destroying the same documents a half dozen times—all the while threatening legal action against anyone who revealed such practices to outsiders.23 Clearly, the point was to siphon off as much of the money as possible before it got to the claimants; the longer the lower-level people took, the more the company would earn; but owing to the peculiar dynamic discussed in the last chapter, the very pointlessness of the exercise seemed to exacerbate levels of stress and abusive behavior.

  Elliot: The cynicism involved was remarkable. I guess it works out to a form of parasitism. As it happens, the job was also extremely difficult and stressful: it appeared that part of their business model was placing impossible targets which would increase all the time so that turnover was high and more staff would regularly have to be brought in and mis-trained, so that, I imagine, the firm could plausibly ask their client that the contract be extended further.

  This was demoralizing, of course. I’m now working as a cleaner, which is the least bullshit/alienated job I have ever had.

  David: So this sounds like a whole new category: jobs intentionally done wrong! How common do you think that is?

  Elliot: From what I’ve heard among other people in different companies, the PPI industry is basically built around this principle, on the basis that apparently it’s only large accountancy firms that really have the capacity to take on contracts like that.

  David: Well, I see how one could make the argument that in any system where you are basically dealing with the distribution of spoils, it makes sense to create as many layers of parasites in between as possible. But who were they ultimately milking? Their clients? Or who?

  Elliot: I’m not sure who was ultimately paying for this. The bank? An insurance company that insured the bank against losses on fraud activities in the first place? Of course, ultimately it would be the consumer and taxpayer who pay; all these companies need to know is how to milk it.

  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.

  Of course, this is basically what the entire FIRE sector does: it creates money (by making loans) and then moves it around in often extremely complicated ways, extracting another small cut with every transaction. The results often leave bank employees feeling that the entire enterprise is just as pointless as the accountancy company’s intentionally mis-training employees to milk a cash cow. Surprising numbers of bank employees can’t even figure out what the real justification for their particular species of bank is supposed to be.

  Bruce: I work as a fund accountant at a custodian bank. I’ve never really figured out what custodian banks do. I understand the concepts associated with custodian banks, but I always thought of them as just an unnecessary added layer of accounting. Custodian banks safeguard concepts such as stocks and bonds. How do they actually do that? Can Russian hackers steal these concepts? As far as I can see, the entire custodian bank industry is bullshit.

  One reason for the confusion, perhaps, is that the level of general fear, stress, and paranoia appears to be much greater in banks than in most of the other enterprises we’ve been considering so far. Employees are under enormous pressure not to ask too many questions. One rebel banker, who described to me in detail the machinations by which the biggest banks would lobby the government to introduce regulations to their advantage and then expect everyone to play along with the pretense that the regulations had simply been imposed, told me he thought it’s almost as bad as coming out as gay would have been in the 1950s: “There are many people who have read ‘on the phenomenon of bullsh*t jobs’ and know of the reality of our industry, yet they (including myself) are consumed by fear of losing our jobs, so we don’t talk about or discuss these issues openly. We lie to ourselves, our colleagues, and our families.”

  Such sentiments were commonplace. Almost all bank workers I corresponded with insisted on elaborate secrecy, effacing any detail that might possibly connect them to their employer. At the same time, many emphasized how cathartic it was to be able to finally express things that had been percolating through their minds for so many years. Here, for instance, is the testimony of Rupert, an economic refugee from Australia now working in the City of London, on bullshitization within the financial institution where he presently works:

  Rupert: So in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore bullshit. But let’s leave that to the side for a minute and look at those within banking who literally do nothing. There actually are not all that many of these because banking is a weird mix. Overall we do nothing, yet within that nothing it’s efficient, meritocratic, and in general lean.

  Still, the most obvious is the cheerleader Human Resources Department. At some point, banking realized that everyone hates them, and that their staff knows this, too, so they set about trying to make the staff feel better about it all. We have an intranet that HR was told to make into a kind of internal “community,” like Facebook. They set it up; nobody used it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it, which made us hate it even more. Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal
blogs” that nobody cared about. Still nobody comes.

  Three years they’ve been at this, the internal intranet Facebook page is just full of HR people saying something cheesy about the company and then other HR people saying “Great post! I really agree with this.” How they can stand this, I have no idea. It’s a monument to the total lack of cohesiveness in banking.

  Another one is they have some big drive to do charity for a week. I refuse to participate as though I give to charity, I will not give through my bank, as for them it’s just a big advertising drive in an attempt to shore up morale internally and make it look like banking isn’t appropriating labor through usury. They put out a “target” of, say, ninety percent participation—all “voluntary”—and then for two months, they try to get people to sign up. If you don’t sign up, they note your name, and then people come and ask you why you haven’t signed up. In the last two weeks before the end of it, we get automated mails that look like they come from the CEO “encouraging” you to sign up. The last time, I was actually worried about losing my job over holding out. For me, this would have been bad, as I’m in a foreign country on a work visa with no right to remain. But hold on I did.

  The number of man-hours spent chasing this “voluntary” charity work is amazing. “Voluntold” is, I believe the technical term.

  The charity work itself is totally empty. Things like two hours of litter picking. Giving bad sandwiches to the homeless where someone else organizes all the sandwich packages, etc., and bank employees just turn up and hand them out then go home again in their nice cars. A lot of the charity work is driven by “best company to work for in X” awards that stipulate criteria like “charitable work.” The bank then has to hit that criteria to be considered, which will then help them with recruiting. They spend god knows how many hours every year trying to do this.

  Okay, next: the time sheet guy . . .

  After listing a few positions that could easily be automated away and seem to exist only to provide employment, Rupert ends with the most apparently useless position of all:

  Rupert: Finally, middle management. The other day, I had to get an approval from someone at middle-management level. I clicked on a system to email out approval requests. Twenty-five middle managers were listed (only one needed to approve). I had only ever heard of one of them. What are these people doing all day long? Are they not worried about being found out and having to work at McDonald’s?

  According to those middle managers who’ve contacted me, the answer to “What are these people doing all day long” would be, in many cases, at least, “Not much.” So in Rupert’s estimation, at least, in the lower echelons, competence and efficiency actually do seem to be the reigning values; the higher one goes up the ladder, the less true this appears to be.

  Rupert’s account is fascinating from any number of perspectives. Take the theme of how artificial contests operate as a mechanism of bullshitization, one that cropped up in numerous other contexts as well. Many of the follies of local government in the UK, for instance, are driven by a similar desire to be named “best council” in a given region, or in the country as a whole. In every case, such contests set off a frenzy of box-ticking rituals, climaxing, in this case, in the ridiculous simulations of charity demanded of present employees so as to be able to tell potential future employees that their company has been voted one of the best places to work. Most of the other elements in Rupert’s testimony appear in other accounts from inside major financial institutions as well: the confused mix of frenetic, stressful, but almost magic efficiency in some sectors, the obvious bloat in others; all in a context where no one was quite sure what the bank really did or if it was even a legitimate enterprise; the fact that such questions could never be discussed.

  Another common theme was the way many of those laboring in financial institutions—to a much larger degree than those in most large corporations—had little or no idea how their work contributed to the bank as a whole. Irene, for example, worked for several major investment banks in “Onboarding”—that is, monitoring whether the bank’s clients (in this case, various hedge funds and private equity funds) were in compliance with government regulations. In theory, every transaction the bank engaged in had to be assessed. The process was self-evidently corrupt, since the real work was outsourced to shady outfits in Bermuda, Mauritius, and or the Cayman Islands (“where bribes are cheap”), and they invariably found everything to be in order. Nonetheless, since a 100% percent approval rate would hardly do, an elaborate edifice had to be erected so as to make it look as if sometimes, they did indeed find problems sometimes. So Irene would report that the outsider reviewers had okayed the transaction, and a Quality Control board would review Irene’s paperwork and duly locate typos and other minor errors. Then the total number of “fails” in each department would be turned over to be tabulated by a metrics division, this allowing everyone involved to spend hours every week in meetings arguing over whether any particular “fail” was real.

  Irene: There was an even higher caste of bullshit, propped atop the metrics bullshit, which were the data scientists. Their job was to collect the fail metrics and apply complex software to make pretty pictures out of the data. The bosses would then take these pretty pictures to their bosses, which helped ease the awkwardness inherent in the fact that they had no idea what they were talking about or what any of their teams actually did. At [Big Bank A], I had five bosses in two years. At [Big Bank B], I had three. The vast majority were installed, cherry-picked by higher-ups, and “gifted” these castles of shit. In many cases, sadly, it was how the companies met their minorities-in-management quota.

  So once again, we have the same combination of fraud, pretense (no one was allowed to talk about the shady companies in the Cayman Islands), a system designed not to be understood, which was then pushed off on managers who had no idea what was going on below them, largely because it made no sense. It was all just a meaningless ritual. What’s entirely unclear is whether anyone on top of the food chain—the data crunchers, the just-passing-through executives, even the higher-ups who chose them—actually knew how pointless it all was.

  Finally, on top of the usual artificially induced stress and tension and barking about deadlines, the usual sadomasochistic interpersonal relations, and the usual fearful silences (that is, all the things that typically happen when pointless projects are organized on top-down lines), there was the intense pressure on employees to take part in a different set of rituals designed to prove the institution really cared. In Irene’s case, these were not staged charity events, but New Agey seminars that often drove her to the point of tears:

  Irene: On top of the metrics, 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.

  The mindfulness seminars were even worse. They attempted to reduce the unfathomable beauty and stupefying sadness of the human experience into the raw physicality of breathing, eating, and shitting. Breathe mindfully. Eat mindfully. Shit mindfully, and you can be successful in business.

  All of this, presumably, to remind the employee that if one reduced life to pure physicality, the fact that some abstractions were more “real” than others, and that some office tasks seemed to serve a legal and moral or even economic purpose and others did not, was not really all that important. It’s as if they first forbid you to acknowledge you are engaging in empty ritual, then force you to attend seminars where hired gurus tell you, “In the final analysis, isn’t everything we do just empty ritual?”

  What we’ve seen so far from Elliot, Rupert, and Irene are all partial, situated perspectives on very large and complicated organizations. None of them has an overall, panoptic view. But it’s not entirely clear if anyone else does, either. One has to assume the higher-ups in Irene’s story, who intentionally ass
ign executives from minority backgrounds to the onboarding sector, are aware that most of what goes on in that part of the company is bullshit. Even they might not know precisely how and why. Nor would it be possible to create some kind of secret survey to determine what percentage of bank workers secretly believe their jobs to be bullshit and the divisions in which they tend to be concentrated. The closest I was able to find to general insight came from a certain Simon, who had been employed by a series of large international banks in risk management, which basically, he says, means to analyze and “find problems in their internal processes.”

  Simon: I spent two years analyzing the critical payment and operations processes at one bank, with the sole aim to work out how a staff member might use the computer systems to commit fraud and theft, and thereby recommend solutions to prevent this. What I discovered by chance was that most people at the bank didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing. They would say that they are only supposed to log into this one system and select one menu option and type certain things in. They didn’t know why.