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This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.
David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It, would have smiled at Elon Musk’s sacking half the Twitter workforce. Musk seems to be confirming the main thesis of the book, that much work in a modern economy is not productive. That includes work in businesses which does not add to profitability.
Graeber reports estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of all jobs may be ‘bullshit’, which he defines as:
a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though as a part of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend this is not the case.
(I would prefer to focus on ‘bullshit work’, since often there is a useful element in a job, even if a small one. Graeber’s definition also excludes workers who with hindsight realise they were in a bullshit job, although they had convinced themselves they were useful at the time.)
The main source of evidence for Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, is a host of people who wrote to his website describing their meaningless work. They are mainly from the private sector although there are a number of stories from academia. The book is worth reading for its recounted gossip alone.
‘Just a moment’, says a narrowly trained economist, ‘private businesses are under competitive pressure; they cannot afford bullshit jobs. Sure, they may exist in the public sector which is a monopoly but not in competing businesses.’ Graeber and those who wrote to him say they exist in the private sector; so does Musk. (Most academics would support them, despite universities competing against each other)
What may be going on here is that the competition which ought to drive out inefficiency is actually a long-term process. In the short term, most businesses are monopolies or quasi-monopolies prone to employing bullshit jobs.
Graeber, attempting to systematise the vast quantity of amorphous anecdotes forwarded to him, identifies the following five categories of bullshit jobs. (I am not sure these categories work. They are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.)
1. Flunkies who exist primarily to make someone look important. (Graeber has in mind personal assistants and the like, but I suspect he would add those promoted to protect people at the top. Academics tell me of deans (oops, I mean deputy-vice chancellors – status inflation is endemic in bullshit jobs) with no academic reputation who keep creating sub-deans or whatever so they are surrounded by a phalanx of flunkies to support them if the staff get stroppy.)
2. Goons who find their job objectionable not just because they feel lack positive value but also because they see them as essentially manipulative and aggressive. Examples include corporate lawyers, advertising marketing and publicity. Perhaps ‘goon’ is not a good term for them. An example would be many in a PR department. One convinced a vice chancellor there was a need to ‘rebrand’ his university. To this outsider, and indeed to the academics, the rebranding had nothing to do with the values and purpose of the university – research, scholarship, teaching. The great advantage of the rebrand is it gave the PR department a purpose and employment, with a lot of follow-up work. What happens when that runs out? The department will recommend another rebranding exercise without mentioning that its last effort was a failure.
3. Duct Tapers are those who are there to deal with problems ‘that ought not to exist’. The term comes from the software industry describing those who fix up badly designed programs. Graeber applies the notion to similar fixers outside the software industry citing someone whose job was to turn a statistician’s report into English: ‘He struggled to produce grammatically correct sentences. He tended to avoid using verbs.’
4. Box Tickers are those who exist to allow an organisation to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. Academics spent precious research time – literally days – filling in tedious forms to enable their performance to be assessed for Performance Based Research Fund purposes. The universities provided box tickers to assist them, although uniformly, so I am told, they knew nothing about research; their skills were filling in forms. Some of the university bureaucracies got so enthusiastic, that they required the forms to be filled in years when the PBRF was not being assessed. What would their box tickers do in an off-year?
5. One type of Taskmasters assigns work to others believing there is no need for their intervention because the job will be done anyway. They are the opposite to flunkies, being unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates. The other type create bullshit tasks for others, supervise bullshit and create entirely new bullshit jobs. Organisations set up complicated systems to prevent cheating and then have to create a higher layer to ensure the anti-cheaters don't cheat. (Very often the effect is to create an expensive monitoring system which saves peanuts.)
Clearly Graeber has identified an important phenomenon although I did not find the latter part of the book provided convincing explanations; some of the history about the role of work ethics was fascinating.
I cannot help noticing that the rise of bullshit jobs occurs about the same time as the rise of generic managers, those who claim to be able to manage anything even though they know nothing about what they are managing. Many might argue that many of the layers of management they create are bullshit jobs, but generally such generic managers are unaware of their uselessness.
Perhaps generic management and bullshit jobs are the result of the demise of the clerical profession as a consequence of the digital revolution, with the clerks having moved on.
How do bullshit jobs relate to the Jahoda-Maslow ‘latent functions of paid work’? In addition to the income a job also:
– imposes a time structure on the working day;
– involves regularly shared experiences and contacts with people outside the household;
– links an individual to goals and purposes which transcend her or his own;
– enforces activity;
– provides social status (typically people who meet for the first time ask each other what do they do).
Perhaps bullshit jobs are characterised by people getting paid for work they do not think is socially valuable. It may be a form of alienation, raised by Marx in relation to nineteenth-century industrialisation; the notion is accepted today by a wider group of thinkers than just Marxists.
An economist cannot help noticing that many of Graeber’s respondents seemed well paid. In contrast, sewerage workers are low-paid; they may work with shit but their’s is not bullshit jobs.
Economic theory would predict that people doing useless work would be poorly paid, so for economists, bullshit work is a troubling phenomenon. They are not experts on organisational theory. The discipline generally treats businesses as black boxes, which have predictable responses to external stimulus. What goes on inside is a mystery they don’t need to understand. Except that bullshit jobs undermine the sorts of theories economists rely upon to explain the responses. Thankyou David Graeber for pointing this out, and Elon Musk for inadvertently confirming he is right.
*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.
19 Comments
Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It
I've bought this book, but not yet had the time to read it. Looking forward to it though.
There's an emerging body of work to suggest that one of the main reasons we're seeing such an increase in mental illness these days, is lack of meaning and satisfaction in our jobs. I honestly believe this to be the case, and it's fascinating to consider why this might be, and what could be done about it.
I'm also convinced a lot of mental issues arise from pointless work. It's called 'bore-out' and there has been expirements showing the negative mental and health effects if people are stuck for hours without meaningful tasks.
IMO the best thing we could do is to introduce an universal basic income. It provides financial security to people to select work they like & find interesting to do or start their own business.
Many opponents of an UBI think people will just sit on the couch and do nothing but this couldn't be further from the truth.
Everybody I know is pursuing some form of "recreational work" (hobby) in their leisure time. Most of us are wired for action and achievement (otherwise we get bored) and the few of us that aren't are usually experiencing some physical & mental health issues that are holding them back.
A lot of it has to do with the destruction of the workers' social contract, which was smashed as part of the industrial revolution. Unions were essentially eliminated, and workplace management handed over to owners.
Henry Ford's biggest contribution to all this wasn't the car, it was the production line. Each worker was "compartmentalised", meaning getting assigned a single repetative task, which means unskilled and easily replacable, which means low-paid. If each worker needs to know how to build a car from start to finish, and exercises some control over the way it is done, they will take pride in their work and gain a sense of satisfaction in helping complete it. But if such a worker decides to get uppity about how the workplace is run, or how much they earn, they hold more clout in threatening to quit. Compartmentalisation enables companies to treat workers like cogs in a machine, and means that those workers take no pride or satisfaction in their work, have no emotional or financial investment in a successful end result, and don't need to make any meaningful personal relationships in the workplace to get their job done.
I suspect that attitude has been carried through to the present day, albeit in different forms. As you say, hobbies and other surrogate activities seem to fill the gap that meaningful occupation used to fill. I guess I'll have to read the book and find out.
I can't speak for Ford's factories , but most Kiwi factories rotate staff around to build up a multi skilled team , and to prevent boredom ....
.... by contrast , the BS jobs in the article seem to be alienated from nature ...
Whereas job satisfaction comes from tactile industries : cooks work with food , carpenters with wood , farmers with plants & animals , craft brewers with malt & hops , teachers with students , vets with animals ...
No idea about the factories here Gummy but totally agree with you about the "tactile industries". Anyone with a garden or a workshop (or a kitchen) knows how satisfying it can be; now imagine getting paid for it! Not many hobbies involve pushing papers around a desk and sitting in meetings all day.
I've transitioned through a wide range of manufacturing industries , and that " hands on " tactile experience gives satisfaction in work ... blatting around on forklifts , shifting stuff , smashing up stuff for recycling , creating products for export ... fricking brilliant ...
Ahhhhhh ! ... I love the smell of 240°c molten plastic in the morning ....
The level of brown-nosing Musk in this article is repulsive.
Elon hasn't proved anything except that Twitter is still online with fewer staff.
This is somewhat expected from a company that operates software. If I write code it can in theory run for hundreds of years without any support. You DON'T need people to run software nowadays.
However, the ability to innovate (implement new ideas) requires people and there has been many reports of service degradation and content moderation issues (hate speech being rampant).
In regards to innovation, more people doesn't necessarily mean more innovation. I have often witnessed companies descent into analysis paralysis if there were too many people involved.
Twitter is still a loss making business and trimming some of the fat was certainly a good idea but the way the boss is conducting himself and the fact that it's still a loss making business falls short of proving it's performing better.
Bullshit work - often times being management and the plebs serving management. Piling up unread mountains of paper or wating entire days on a screen.
I used to encounter the above types when quarterly reviews were due. Dragged from productive work to compile a demoralizing table of unrealistic KPIs versus actual achievements... all work that could have been done with a click of a button, without dragging me from my primary task... all to feign a reason for the management team to exist, but costing the business productive work in the process.
Isn't it inevitable with the rise of automation and AI that more and more BS work will need to be created?
The current TV ad with the young girl saying that she travels, sits on a beach and works digitally has caused me to reflect that a lot of the new "jobs" are really of no productive use. If all the influencers, bloggers etc disappeared tomorrow it would make no difference to peoples fundamental needs, in fact, would probably improve many others productivity.
I wonder whether there are stats on the proportion of work actually spent on fundamentally useful stuff vs useless or recreational activities.
It would seem that historically the majority of people needed to work the land or hunt and gather to provide for their communities basic needs. Now the majority don't need to do anything fundamentally productive.
Yesterday coming out of the sea and using the nearby public male toilet/changing room the cleaner made a noise at the door. As I left I told the young woman that the place was now empty and in she went with her bucket, mop and cleaning products. That was an important job. She was council worker cleaning at 9am on a Sunday morning.
Meanwhile at home I have a retaining wall that despite the council approving it in 2002 had failed. Cost not covered by either insurance or the council. It needs replacing since it is falling against a granny flat. A reputable engineering company submitted a design for its replacement 11 months ago and we are still waiting for consent. Bet the consent department was not working on Sunday.
An ambivalent attitude to Auckland council.
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