Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  Wendy: Example one: as a receptionist for a small trade magazine, I was often given tasks to perform while I was waiting for the phone to ring. Fair enough—but the tasks were almost uniformly BS. One I will remember for the rest of my life: one of the ad sales people came to my desk and dumped thousands of paper clips on my desk and asked me to sort them by color. I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. I did it, only to observe that she then used them interchangeably without the slightest attention to the color of the clip.

  Example two: my grandmother, who lived independently in an apartment in New York City into her early nineties. She did need help, though, so we hired a very nice woman to live with her and keep an eye out. Basically, she was there in case my grandmother fell or needed help, and to help her do shopping and laundry, but if all went well, there was basically nothing for her to do. This drove my grandmother crazy. “She’s just sitting there!” she would complain. We would explain that was the point.

  To help my grandmother save face, we asked the woman if she would mind straightening out cabinets when she wasn’t otherwise occupied. She said no problem. But the apartment was small, the closets and cabinets were quickly put in order, and there was nothing to do again. Again, my grandmother was going crazy that she was just sitting there. Ultimately, the woman quit. When she did, my mother said to her, “Why? My mother looks great!” To which the woman responded famously, “Sure, she looks great. I’ve lost fifteen pounds, and my hair is falling out. I can’t take her anymore.” The job wasn’t BS, but the need to construct a cover by way of creating so much BS busywork was deeply demeaning to her. I think this is a common problem for people working for the elderly. (It comes up with babysitting, too, but in a very different way.)29

  Not just. Once you recognize the logic, it becomes easy to see that whole jobs, careers, and even industries can come to conform to this logic—a logic that not so very long ago would have been universally considered utterly bizarre. It has also spread across the world. Ramadan Al Sokarry, for example, is a young Egyptian engineer working for a public enterprise in Cairo:

  Ramadan: I graduated from the Electronics and Communications Department in one of the best engineering schools in my country, where I had studied a complicated major, and where all the students had high expectations of careers tied to research and the development of new technologies.

  Well, at least that’s what our studies made us think. But it wasn’t the case. After graduation, the only job I could find was as a control and HVAC [heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning] engineer in a corporatized government company—only to discover immediately that I hadn’t been hired as an engineer at all but really as some kind of a technical bureaucrat. All we do here is paperwork, filling out checklists and forms, and no one actually cares about anything but whether the paperwork is filed properly.

  The position is described officially as follows: “heading a team of engineers and technicians to carry out all the preventive maintenance, emergency maintenance operations, and building new systems of control engineering to achieve maximum efficiency.” In reality, it means I make a brief daily check on system efficiency, then file the daily paperwork and maintenance reports.

  To state the matter bluntly: the company really just needed to have a team of engineers to come in every morning to check if the air conditioners were working and then hang around in case something broke. Of course, management couldn’t admit that. Ramadan and the other members of his team could have just as easily been sitting around playing cards all day, or—who knows?—even working on some of those inventions they’d been dreaming about in college, so long as they were ready to leap into action if a convector malfunctioned. Instead, the firm invented an endless array of forms, drills, and box-ticking rituals calculated to keep them busy eight hours a day. Fortunately, the company didn’t have anyone on staff who cared enough to check if they were actually complying. Ramadan gradually figured out which of the exercises did need to be carried out, and which ones nobody would notice if he ignored and used the time to indulge a growing interest in film and literature.

  Still, the process left him feeling hollow:

  Ramadan: In my experience, this was psychologically exhausting and it left me depressed, having to go every workday to a job that I considered pointless. Gradually I started losing interest in my work, and started watching films and reading novels to fill the empty shifts. I now even leave my workplace for hours almost each shift without anyone noticing.

  Once again, the end result, however exasperating, doesn’t seem all that impossibly bad. Especially once Ramadan had figured out how to game the system. Why couldn’t he see it, then, as stealing back time that he’d sold to the corporation? Why did the pretense and lack of purpose grind him down?

  It would seem we are back at the same question with which we started. But at this point, we are much better equipped to find the answer. If the most hateful aspect of any closely supervised wage-labor job is having to pretend to work to appease a jealous boss, jobs such as Ramadan’s (and Eric’s) are essentially organized based on the same principle. They might be infinitely more pleasant than my experience of having to spend hours (it seemed like hours) applying steel wool to clean perfectly clean baseboards. Such jobs are likely to be not waged but salaried. There may not even be an actual boss breathing down one’s neck—in fact, usually there isn’t. But ultimately, the need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.

  So the situation was not, in the final analysis, all that fundamentally different from when me and my fellow dishwashers had to pretend to clean the baseboards. It is like taking the very worst aspect of most wage-labor jobs and substituting it for the occupation that was otherwise supposed to give meaning to your existence. It’s no wonder the soul cries out. It is a direct assault on everything that makes us human.

  Chapter 4

  What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?

  (On Spiritual Violence, Part 2)

  The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

  And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.

  —Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work”

  In the last chapter, we asked why it was that human beings so regularly find being paid to do nothing an exasperating, insufferable, or oppressive experience—often, even when the conditions of employment are quite good. I suggested the answer reveals certain truths about human nature largely overlooked by economic science and even by the more cynical versions of popular common sense. Humans are social beings that begin to atrophy—even to physically decay—if they are denied regular contact with other humans; insofar as they do have a sense of being an autonomous entity separate from the world and from others, it is largely from conceiving themselves as capable of acting on the world and others in predictable ways. Deny humans this sense of agency, and they are nothing. What’s more, in bullshit jobs, the ability to perform acts of make-believe, which under ordinary circumstances might be considered the highest and most distinctly human form of action—especially to the extent that the make-believe worlds so created are in some way actually brought into reality—is turned against itself. Hence, my inquiry into the history of pretend work and the social and intellectual origins of the concept that one’s time can belong to someone else. How does it come to seem morally wrong to the employer that workers are not working, even if there is nothing obvious for them to do?

  If being forced to
pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person’s power, then bullshit jobs are, as noted above, entire jobs organized on that same principle. You’re working, or pretending to work—not for any good reason, at least any good reason you can find—but just for the sake of working. Hardly surprising it should rankle.

  But there’s one obvious difference, too, between bullshit jobs and a dishwasher being made to clean the baseboards in a restaurant. In the latter case, there is a demonstrable bully. You know exactly who is pushing you around. In the case of bullshit jobs, it’s rarely so clear-cut. Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around? At least in the traditional workplace, there was someone against whom you could direct your rage.

  This is one of the things that comes through strongly in the testimonies I assembled: the infuriating ambiguity. There is something terrible, ridiculous, outrageous going on, but it’s not clear whether you are even allowed to acknowledge it, and it’s usually even less clear who or what can be blamed.

  why having a bullshit job is not always necessarily that bad

  Before exploring these themes, though, it’s important to acknowledge that those who hold bullshit jobs are not uniformly miserable. As I mentioned in the last chapter, there were a handful of largely positive testimonials from workers who were quite satisfied with their bullshit jobs. It’s hard to generalize about their common features because there really weren’t all that many of them, but perhaps we can try to tease out a few:

  Warren: I work as a substitute teacher in a public school district in Connecticut. My job just involves taking attendance and making sure the students stay on task with whatever individual work they have. Teachers rarely if ever actually leave instructions for teaching. I don’t mind the job, however, since it allows me lots of free time for reading and studying Chinese, and I occasionally have interesting conversations with students. Perhaps my job could be eliminated in some way, but for now I’m quite happy.

  It’s not entirely clear this is even a bullshit job; as public education is currently organized, someone does have to look after the children in a given class period if a teacher calls in sick.1 The bullshit element seems to lie in pretending that instructors such as Warren are there to teach, when everyone knows they’re not: presumably this is so the students will be more likely to respect their authority when they tell them to stop running around and do their assignments. The fact that the role isn’t entirely useless must help somewhat. Crucially, too, it is unsupervised, nonmonotonous, involves social interaction, and allows Warren to spend a lot of time doing whatever he likes. Finally, it’s clearly not something he envisions doing for the rest of his life.

  This is about as good as a bullshit job is likely to get.

  Some traditional bureaucratic jobs can also be quite pleasant, even if they serve little purpose. This is especially true if by taking the job one becomes part of a great and proud tradition, such as the French civil service. Take Pauline, a tax official in Grenoble:

  Pauline: I’m a technical bankruptcy advisor in a government ministry equivalent to Britain’s Inland Revenue Service. About 5 percent of my job is giving technical advice. The rest of the day, I explain incomprehensible procedures to my colleagues, help them locate directives that serve no purpose, cheer up the troops, and reassign files that “the system” has misdirected.

  Oddly enough, I enjoy going to work. It’s as if I were being paid sixty thousand dollars a year to do the equivalent of Sudoku or crossword puzzles.2

  This sort of carefree, happy-go-lucky government office environment is not as common as it used to be. It appears to have been extremely common in the mid-twentieth century, before internal market reforms (“reinventing government,” as the Clinton administration put it) massively increased the degree of box-ticking pressure on public officials; but it still exists in certain quarters.3 What makes Pauline’s job so pleasant, it seems, is that she clearly gets along with her coworkers and is running her own show. Combine that with the respect and security of government employment and then the fact that she’s aware it’s ultimately a rather silly show becomes not nearly so much of a problem.

  Both of these examples share another factor in common: everyone knows that jobs like substitute teacher (in America) or tax official (in France) are mostly bullshit—so there’s little room for disillusionment or confusion. Those who apply for such jobs are well aware of what they’re getting into, and there are already clear cultural models in their heads for how a substitute teacher or tax official is supposed to behave.

  There does seem to be a happy minority, then, who enjoy their bullshit jobs. It is difficult to estimate their total numbers. The YouGov poll found that while 37 percent of all British workers felt their work served no purpose, only 33 percent of workers found it unfulfilling. Logically, then, at least 4 percent of the working population feel their jobs are pointless but enjoy them anyway. Probably the real number is somewhat higher.4 The Dutch poll reported roughly 6 percent—that is, 18 percent of the 40 percent of workers who considered their jobs pointless also said they were at least somewhat happy doing them.

  No doubt there are many reasons why this might be true in any individual case. Some people hate their families or find domestic life so stressful they treasure any excuse to get away from it. Others simply like their coworkers and enjoy the gossip and camaraderie. A common problem in large cities, especially in the North Atlantic world, is that most middle-class people now spend so much time at work that they have few social ties outside it; as a result, much of the day-to-day drama of gossip and personal intrigue that makes life entertaining for inhabitants of a village or small town or close-knit urban neighborhood, insofar as it exists at all, comes to be confined largely to offices or experienced vicariously through social media (which many mostly access in the office while pretending to work). But if that’s true, and people’s social life really is often rooted in the office, then it’s all the more striking that the overwhelming majority of those in bullshit occupations claim to be so miserable.

  on the misery of ambiguity and forced pretense

  Let us return to the subject of make-believe. Obviously, a lot of jobs require make-believe. Almost all service jobs do to a certain extent. In a classic study of Delta Airlines flight attendants, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the notion of “emotional labor.” Hoschschild found air hostesses typically had to spend so much effort creating and maintaining a perky, empathetic, good-natured persona as part of their conditions of employment that they often became haunted by feelings of emptiness, depression, or confusion, unsure of who or what they really were. Emotional labor of this sort is not limited to service workers, of course: many firms expect such work even in inward-facing office workers—especially women.

  In the last chapter, we observed Patrick’s indignation at first encountering the demand to pretend to enjoy being a cashier. Now, flight attendant is not a bullshit job—as I’ve observed, few service workers feel that the services they provide are entirely pointless. The kind of emotional labor required by those in most bullshit jobs, however, is usually rather different. Bullshit jobs, too, require maintaining a false front and playing a game of make-believe—but in their case, the game has to be played in a context where one is rarely quite sure what the rules are, why it is being played, who’s on your team, and who isn’t. At least flight attendants know exactly what’s expected of them. What is expected of bullshit jobholders is usually far less onerous, but it is complicated by the fact that they are never sure exactly what it is. One question I asked regularly was “Does your supervisor know that you’re not doing anything?” The overwhelming majority said they didn’t know. Most added that they found it hard to imagine
their supervisors could be totally oblivious, but they couldn’t be sure because discussing such matters too openly appeared to be taboo. But tellingly, they weren’t even entirely sure about exactly how far that taboo extended.

  To every rule there must be exceptions. Some did report supervisors who were relatively open about the fact that there was nothing to do and who would tell their underlings that it was acceptable to “pursue their own projects.” But even then, such tolerance was only within reasonable parameters and what sort of parameters were considered reasonable was rarely self-evident; such matters had to be worked out by trial and error. I never heard a single case of a supervisor just sitting down with an employee and spelling out the rules, simply and honestly, regarding when she had to work, when she didn’t, and how she could and could not behave when she wasn’t working.

  Some managers communicate indirectly, by their own behavior. In the local British government office in which Beatrice worked, for example, supervisors indicated the appropriate level of pretense (just a little) during the week by livestreaming important sports events and similar acts of self-indulgence. On weekend shifts, in contrast, no pretense was required:

  Beatrice: On other occasions, my role models known as “senior management” would stream World Cup football matches live into the office onto their desktops. I understood this gesture to be a form of multitasking, so I started to research my own projects whenever I had nothing to do at work.