Bullshit Jobs
09 Feb 2025On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant
David Graeber, August 2013
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would
have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have
achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological
terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been
marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs
have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and
North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly
believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this
situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the ’60s—never materialise?
The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given
the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.
This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true.
Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the
’20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or
fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US
between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the
UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in
industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional,
managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters
of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely
automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India
and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they
used to be.)
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population
to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not
even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the
creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented
expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources,
and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to
provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the
whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because
everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all
working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed
to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment
was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to
(this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course,
this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic
theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers
they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably
fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things;
through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers
ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet
workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours
just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational
seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out
that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think
of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ’60s). And, on the
other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit
themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves
nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities
in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection
of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and
are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and
then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the
task really need to be done—at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be
fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of
their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share
of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked
fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does. I think this is actually a
pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘who are you to say
what jobs are really “necessary”? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor,
what’s the “need” for that?’ (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my
job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true.
There can be no objective measure of social value.
I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful
contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves
convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who
I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a
poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having
no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his
work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet,
after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a
newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, ‘taking the default choice of so many directionless folk:
law school.’ Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the
first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his
own estimation, should not really exist.
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society
that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an
apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls
most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or
important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately
aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was
bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class
of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something
that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even
discussing their line of work entirely (one or t’other?) Give them a few drinks, and they will
launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in
labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep
rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a
way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who
actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule
that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would
happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses,
garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the
results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would
soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly
be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs,
lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.
(Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions
(doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be.
This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip
up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very
fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this
seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have
had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not,
significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the
problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told ‘but you
get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the
nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance
capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are
relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of
the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing,
in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling
class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time,
foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.
Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial
and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not
all working 3–4 hour days.