Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  19. A case could be made that often propaganda which is ostensibly aimed at tricking outsiders is really primarily aimed at assuaging the consciences of the propagandists themselves.

  20. The remarks were extempore and not written down. The quotation is reconstructed partly from the passages cited in John Adam Byrne, “Influential Economist Says Wall Street Is Full of Crooks,” New York Post online, April 28, 2013, http://nypost.com/2013/04/28/influential-economist-says-wall-streets-full-of-crooks, partly from a partial transcript in a Business Insider article by Janet Tavakoli, www.businessinsider.com/i-regard-the-wall-street-moral-environment-as-pathological-2013-9?IR=T, accessed April 21, 2017), and partly from my own notes taken at the time.

  21. In fact, over the course of my research, I’ve run into a surprising number of people (well, three) with college educations who, frustrated by the pointlessness of the office work available to them, actually did become cleaners simply to feel they were doing an honest day’s work.

  22. I really shouldn’t have to point this out but since I find there will always be some readers who have a hard time with basic logic: saying shit jobs tend to be useful and productive is not saying that all useful and productive jobs tend to be shit.

  23. House of the Dead, 1862, trans. Constance Garnett (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 17–18. My friend Andrej Grubacic tells me this was actually done to his grandfather as a form of torture in a Titoist reeducation camp in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The jailers had evidently read the classics.

  24. The three-part list is not meant to be comprehensive. For instance, it leaves out the category of what’s often referred to as “guard labor,” much of which (unnecessary supervisors) is bullshit, but much of which is simply obnoxious or bad.

  25. In David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 9, I refer to this as “the Iron Law of Liberalism”: that “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”

  26. In fact, that’s largely what making someone wear a uniform means, since uniforms are often placed on people (say, those working in a hotel laundry) who are never seen by the public at all. It’s a way of saying “you should think of yourself as being under military discipline.”

  27. Oddly, the survey did break down the results by political voting preferences (Tory voters were least, and UKIP voters most likely to think their jobs were bullshit) and region (Southern England outside London was highest at 42 percent bullshit rate, Scotland lowest at 27 percent). Age and “social grade” seemed relatively insignificant.

  28. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, book #2) (London: Macmillan Pan Books, 1980), 140.

  29. There has been some debate as one might imagine among Douglas Adams fans on this topic but the consensus seems to be that while some jobs in the 1970s involved cleaning phones and other electronic equipment, “telephone sanitizer” as a separate profession did not exist. This did not stop Adams from collaborating with Graham Chapman of Monty Python in creating a TV special starring Ringo Starr called The Telephone Sanitisers of Navarone, which, sadly, was never produced.

  30. To be fair, we learn later that the joke was on the Golgafrinchams, since they all eventually die from a plague that started from an improperly sanitized telephone. But no one ever seems to remember that part.

  31. Hair salons in immigrant communities will often serve a similar role for both men and women. I even had some friends who became the in-house barbers for a big London squat who found this started happening to them as well: anyone new to town would stop in for a trim to find out what was going on.

  32. Not to mention, she added, the fact that the amount of money invested in keeping them dancing on boxes could, if redirected, easily suffice to head off the threat of climate change. “The sex industry makes it evident that the most valuable thing that many women can offer is their bodies as sexual commodities when they are very young. It determines that many women earn more at eighteen to twenty-five than they ever do again in their lives. This is definitely the case in my own life”—the author being a successful academic and author who still doesn’t make as much a year as she once might have in three months’ stripping.

  33. As evidence for this generalization: if telemarketers or useless middle managers were to be made illegal, a black market would be unlikely to emerge to replace them. Obviously, historically this has tended to happen in the case of sex work. This is why one might say the problem is patriarchy itself—the concentration of so much wealth and power in the hands of males who are then kept sexually unfulfilled or taught to seek out certain forms of gratification rather than others—and therefore something much more essential to the nature of society itself.

  34. “L’invasion des «métiers à la con», une fatalité économique?,” Jean-Laurent Cassely, Slate, August 26, 2013, www.slate.fr/story/76744/metiers-a-la-con. Accessed 23 September, 2013.

  Chapter 2: What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?

  1. I did this by creating an email account (“doihaveabsjoborwhat@gmail.com”), and asking for input on Twitter. Gmail, rather quaintly, does not allow the word “bullshit” in addresses.

  2. The names therefore are all made up, and I have avoided naming any specific employers, or geographic information that might give identities away: for instance, “a famous university in New Haven, Connecticut,” or “a small publishing firm based in Devon County, England, owned by a consortium in Berlin.” In some cases, such details are changed; in other cases, simply left out.

  3. The quotations that follow are all drawn from this database unless otherwise indicated. I have kept them largely as I received them, except for some light editing—changing abbreviations into full words, adjusting punctuation, minor grammatical or stylistic tweaks, and so forth.

  4. One BBC video that has been drawn to my attention divides “pointless jobs” into three types, “No Work at Work,” “Managers of Management that Manage Managers,” and “Negative Social Value.” See “Do You Have a Pointless Job?,” BBC online, last modified April 20, 2017, www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170420-do-you-have-a-pointless-job.

  5. So in 1603 one William Perkins wrote “it is required that such as are commonly called serving-men should have beside the office of waiting, some other particular calling, unless they tend on men of great place and state . . . For waiting-servants, by reason they spend most of their time in eating and drinking, sleeping and gaming after dinner and after supper, do prove the most unprofitable members both in Church and Commonwealth. For when either their good masters die, or they be turned out of their office for some misdemeanour, they are not fit for any calling, being unable to labor, and thus they give themselves either to beg or to steal” (in Thomas 1999: 418). On the history of the term “waiter” see chapter 6. I should also emphasize that I am not saying real feudal retainers were “bullshit jobs” in the modern sense, since they rarely felt obliged to claim to be anything other than what they were; insofar as they misrepresented themselves, it was by pretending to do less than they actually did, not more.

  6. They also ran occasional errands. One gets a sense of how common such characters used to be by how many different words for them there were: not just footmen, but flunkies, henchmen, gofers, minions, lackeys, cronies, menials, attendants, hirelings, knaves, myrmidons, retainers, and valets—and these are just those that most immediately come to mind. All these are not to be confused with toadies, cronies, sidekicks, sycophants, parasites, stooges, yes-men, and the like, who are more in the order of independent hangers-on. It’s worthy of pointing out that in European courts it was really the courtiers who performed no useful function; the uniformed attendants actually did all sorts of odd jobs when they weren’t standing around during ceremonial events. B
ut the whole point was to look as if they didn’t.

  7. I recognize that it is extremely rare for the rate of extraction to be that high, but as I say, this is just a thought experiment to bring out the dynamics that tend to emerge in such situations.

  8. One might even say it’s one of those things of which what we call “honor” historically consisted of.

  9. The number of domestic servants in North Atlantic countries has declined precipitously since the First World War, but to a large extent their ranks have been replaced, first by what are called “service workers” (“waiter,” for instance, was originally the name for a kind of household servant), and second by ever-growing legions of administrative assistants and other such underlings in the corporate sector. For an example of old feudal styles of unnecessary labor bleeding into the present day, consider this account: “My friend is working on a film set at an old manor house in Hertfordshire, where he runs errands and ensures that the crew don’t mess up the nice old building. At the end of every day he has to spend two solid hours ‘candle watching.’ The Lord and Lady of the house told the crew that after the candles are extinguished in the main hall someone must watch them for at least TWO hours to make sure they don’t spontaneously burst into flames again and burn the house down. My friend is not allowed to douse the candles in water or ‘cheat’ it any way.” When asked why he wasn’t allowed to stick the candles in water, he replied, “They gave no explanation.”

  10. Just to be absolutely clear: there are plenty of receptionists who serve a necessary function. I am referring here to those who do not.

  11. The same remains true today, incidentally. I am personally acquainted with one young woman who, despite having no military experience whatsoever, ended up, as personal assistant to a NATO official, actually writing many strategic plans for operations in a war zone (neither do I have any reason to believe her plans weren’t just as good or better than any NATO general would have come up with).

  12. At the very least this is true of high-tech weaponry. One might argue that most countries also maintain armies to suppress real or potential civil unrest, but this rarely involves a need for fighter jets, submarines, or MX missiles. Historically, Mexico has had an explicit policy of not wasting money on such expensive toys, arguing that owing to their geographic position, the only countries they’d be likely to enter into hostilities with would be either the USA, or Guatemala. If they went to war with the USA, they’d lose, pretty much regardless of armament; if they went to war with Guatemala, they’d win, with or without fighter jets. Hence, Mexico merely maintains such equipment as would suffice to suppress domestic dissent.

  13. Such conversations are particularly challenging to me since in the 1980s academics such as myself largely abandoned the idea that consumer demand was the product of marketing manipulation, and took up the idea that consumers were basically patching together crazy-quilt identities by using consumer goods in ways that had never really been intended (as if everyone in America had turned into Snoop Dogg, or RuPaul). Granted I was always pretty suspicious of that narrative. But it’s clear that many of those who work in the industry are quite certain that they really are what everyone thought they were in the sixties and seventies.

  14. A crude natural language script dating back to the late 1960s.

  15. I have personal experience of this: lecturers at LSE are expected to fill out elaborate time-allocation reports, with an hour-by-hour breakdown of weekly professional activities. The forms offer endless fine distinctions between different sorts of administrative activity but no explicit category for “reading and writing books.” When I pointed this out I was told I could place such activities under “LSE-funded research,” that is, what was important about research from the school’s perspective was 1. that I had not got myself outside funding to pay for this reading and writing activity, and 2. that therefore they were paying me to do it when I could be doing my real job.

  16. A fairly typical testimony from within the IT industry: “I have often seen projects designed to obscure responsibility. For example, to evaluate an IT system. The purpose is not to affect the decision, which is taken somewhere in the corridors, but to claim that everyone was heard and all concerns were taken seriously. Since the project is only a pretense all work on the project is wasted, and people soon realize and stop taking it seriously.” This kind of false consensus-seeking is common in ostensibly collegial institutions like universities or NGOs, but is quite common in the more hierarchical corporations as well.

  17. To give a sense of the scale of this industry, Citigroup announced in 2014 that by the next year, it would have thirty thousand employees working in compliance, or about 13 percent of the total staff. Sital S. Patel, “Citi Will Have Almost 30,000 Employees in Compliance by Year-end,” The Tell (blog), MarketWatch, July 14, 2014, http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/07/14/citi-will-have-almost-30000-employees-in-compliance-by-year-end.

  18. Except, of course, by trying to make some special arrangement that would allow someone else to do the paperwork for her, this was considered, for some reason, quite out of the question.

  19. Another good example of a public/private box-ticking industry is in construction. Consider the following testimony:

  Sophie: I’m in this lucrative ‘consultant’ line of work for planning permissions. Back in the sixties just about the only consultant who submitted information for a planning permission was the architect. Now a planning permission for a large-ish building is accompanied by a long list of reports by consultants (including me!):

  Environmental impact assessment

  Landscape and visual impact assessment

  Transport report

  Wind microclimate assessment

  Sunlight/daylight analysis

  Heritage setting assessment

  Archaeology assessment

  Landscape maintenance management report

  Tree impact assessment

  Flood risk assessment . . .

  . . . and there’s more than that!

  Each report is about 50 to 100 pages, and yet the strange thing is, the resulting buildings are ugly boxes remarkably similar to the ones we built in the sixties, so I don’t think the reports are serving any purpose!”

  20. Or only ostensible role.

  21. One corporate consultant wrote: “I look forward to the day that someone in my industry steps up and goes full Sokal affair—i.e., submits a consulting report that is entirely made up of vague business buzzwords, and doesn’t actually contain any structured information at all. Although I suspect this has already happened many times, just without the consultants in question being conscious of it.”

  22. This made sense, in retrospect, because if you are a medical researcher, you already have all these journals in the library or have access to digitized versions; there would be no reason to fall back on interlibrary loan.

  23. It’s interesting to compare corporate magazines with the ones that Labor unions put out, which I suspect predate them as a literary form. They certainly have their share of puff pieces, but also discuss serious problems. My father was a member of Amalgamated Lithographers Local 1 in New York, a printers’ union, and I remember as a child taking pride in the fact that their in-house magazine, Lithopinion, was by far the most beautiful magazine I’d ever seen, owing to their eagerness to show off new graphic techniques. It also contained real hard-hitting political analysis.

  24. For instance, a recent survey determined that 80 percent of employees feel their managers are useless and that they could do their job just as well without them. It does not appear to document how many managers agree, but one has to assume the number is substantially lower (“Managers Can be Worse than Useless, Survey Finds,” Central Valley Business Times, December 5, 2017, http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=33748, accessed December 18, 2017.

  25. As we shall see, this is no less true of America, or anywhere else.

  26. Here Chloe seems to be responding to the
title of a version of my original essay that had run on evonomics.com under the title “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs.” I didn’t make up the title. Normally I avoid attributing agency to abstractions.

  27. This must be assumed unless there is some reason to believe that pointless occupations require either more or less support work than useful ones.

  28. This figure is obviously inexact. On the one hand, a very large percentage of cleaners, electricians, builders, etc., work for private individuals and not for firms at all. On the other hand, I am counting the 13 percent who say they aren’t sure if their jobs are bullshit or nonbullshit jobs. The 50 percent figure (actually 50.3 percent) is based on the assumption these two factors would roughly cancel each other out.

  Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1)

  1. And as we’ll see even these tended to be highly ambivalent.

  2. After writing this I presented my analysis to Eric, who confirmed it and added details: “I could definitely see that the middle- and upper-middle-class kids in the lower rungs of that job were seeing it as a path to career advancement—partly in terms of how they socialized around work (watching the rugby on a weekend in someone’s suburban Bovis-home conservatory; cocktails in tacky wine bars but always networking, networking), and that for some it was merely a stop-gap that filled in an otherwise-blank spot on the CV until a family member found them a better opportunity.” He added, “It’s interesting that you mention the idea of the caring classes. My father’s first remark when I quit that position was to say that I was a nonsensical idiot to turn down such a good paycheck. His second was to ask, ‘What good could that job do for anyone anyway?’ ”