Transcribed from: [David Graeber on Bullshit Jobs]
Bullshit jobs, I define as "a job where even the person doing the job secretly believes the job shouldn't exist". But nonetheless, part of the conditions of employment is that you have to pretend it does. It's important to distinguish between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Mostly when we say bullshit jobs, people at first assume you mean jobs that you don't really want to have: jobs where they don't treat you well, jobs where they don't pay you well, jobs where you work under difficult, or humiliating, or onerous conditions.
Most of the jobs that are shit jobs are actually aren't bullshit jobs. Most of the jobs that oppress you, or jobs like cleaners, or ditch diggers, or nurses, servants of various kinds who are mistreated - still they're doing something.
A bullshit job is actually kind of the opposite of that. A bullshit job: you're given a lot of money, you're treated very well with a great deal of respect. You're often seen as the person in your family who most made something of yourself. But, at the same time, you're secretly haunted by the knowledge that you're not actually doing anything. That if your job didn't exist at all, the world either would change in no way, or even might become a slightly better place.
This is one of the great mysteries of our time, as far as I'm concerned, because we usually associate stupid made-up jobs with state socialism. In the Soviet Union, they used to say "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." They would make up jobs that were completely unnecessary. That makes sense because they had an ideology of full employment.
On the other hand, with capitalism, that's exactly the thing that isn't supposed to happen. A private firm would never hire someone, and put out the money, to someone they don't actually need. But in fact, if you talk to people who work for large corporations, they do it all the time. How does that happen?
I think part of it has to be explained by political pressure, and in a way, just as in the Soviet Union, there was a central directive saying "We need full employment." They didn't say "Therefore make up bullshit jobs." But they didn't say don't do it. In a similar way, we have pressure from both the left and the right to create jobs all the time. On the one hand, we have the left saying "We need public works, we need more money being given to the consumers to stimulate the economy." On the right, they're saying "Give money to capitalists and they'll hire people."
The one thing the left and the right totally agree on is the the solution to all problems is "more jobs." They never never say "jobs that actually do something. Jobs that are worthwhile in any way." It's assumed that if jobs are created, they will necessarily serve a purpose. If you don't specify that, if you don't have self-conscious policy of trying to make sure that jobs actually do something, you're gonna end up with useless make-work, it's just gonna happen.
A lof of bosses, people who hire - get very angry at me about this. They're probably the only people who get angry at this process. They say "Look, I would never hire someone if they didn't serve a purpose. This is is stupid and insulting. You don't know how capitalism works." But bosses are the last people to know what's really going on.
I trust people to understand what they're really doing, or at least if anybody does, they would know.
Transcribed from: [5 Types of Bullsh*t Jobs with David Graeber]
I've been doing a sort of research project where I made up a gmail account called do-I-have-a-BS-job-or-what at gmail.com, and I've been advertising on Twitter. I got like two hundred and fifty testimonies now and I have broken them down into five basic types.
There are flunky jobs, which are basically people who just are there to make someone else look good. A lot of people sitting around day basically don't do anything except like pass emails to someone, and say "no that's spam", or they're just there because if you don't have someone sitting in your desk you're not actually a real executive. Similar to receptionists - such publishing companies where nobody ever calls, you know they have to be there anyway. There are millions of flunky jobs like that.
Then you have what I call goons. Goons are people who you know you don't need unless somebody else has them. Sort of like armies, if nobody had an army, nobody would need an army. Same is true of corporate lawyers, telemarketers, people like that. So they often say "this is total bullshit", there's no need for this.
The next one, I call them duct tapers. Duck tapers are people who are there to fix a problem that does not need to exist and everybody knows it. If you have a leaky roof on a house, instead of getting a roofer, put a bucket down and hire someone to like empty the water every half hour. A lot of corporations do that. They'll hire someone just to deal with the damage of the fact that something is badly organized. It is easier than like fixing the problem. There's millions of those kind of people.
Then there's box tickers. Box tickers are people who are there to allow an organization to say they're doing something that they're not doing. There's a lot of that in government, but the corporations increasingly do that too. One person said "I work in a care home. My job is to do interviews and collect data on what sort of entertainment people would like to have, which I then tabulate and file." The problem with box tickers of course is that it takes up so much time that you could be spending actually doing the thing. They say "you know, I could be entertaining these people but actually I have to spend seven tenths of my time finding out what they would like to be doing for entertainment and then nobody cares."
Finally, taskmasters. Taskmaster are basically middle management: people who are there either to supervise people who don't need supervising, which is most of middle management. People write to me all the time. They say "I'm supposed to be making them work, though they work all by themselves. I have to pretend I'm doing something, so I make up these numbers and do box ticking or something. Also, make up new bullshit jobs." There's a lot of people do that.
Some people that are there to eliminate bullshit jobs but realize their own jobs are bullshit because they're not actually going to do it. They're just box tickers. One guy said he worked for a bank where his job is to come up with more efficient ways to do things but in his 15 years he says he's never seen one of his programs actually adopted because they always figure out it would mean firing someone who's one of their flunkies. Managers and executives are judged basically by how many people they have working under them.
We have a really twisted idea of the value of work. There was a time people thought that work produces something, that all value comes from labor. This is almost universally accepted in the nineteenth century, but they had a very silly focus on factory work, craftsmen, production. Most work isn't production. Most work is caregiving. Most work is maintained maintaining things. You make a cup once, you wash it a thousand times. So most work is keeping things the same. It's not creating things.
They lost that. It became easy to change the discourse and say "no, production is really created by job creators and wealth producers, businessmen who come up with the ideas, and you're just a robot doing what you're told." So then the question is how do you make people validate work at all? It's morally good, if you're not with it you're' parasite, you need to be working harder than you want to be at something you don't really like very much or else you're a bad person. You get people resenting each other. Increasingly, if work is about self-abnegation, self-sacrifice in some puritanical moral discourse. The more you get out of the work personally, the less valuable it is, and people actually think like that. They say "well, you know you're actually making cars, you're teaching children, you want benefits too?"
There's this idea: if you're getting something out of the work they shouldn't probably shouldn't pay you at all, but they certainly shouldn't pay you as much. Weird paradoxical ways, even the knowledge that you're producing something has come to be seen on some unconscious and sometimes conscious level as subtracting from the value of the job rather than adding to it. There is resentment of people who get to do something that with their hands that actually makes a difference. People will say "look at these auto workers, they're being paid twenty five dollars an hour and they're getting all these benefits and vacations!" Some guy sitting in office doing nothing gets much more money than that.
A right-wing activist confirmed this on one of the blogs when I was saying that they cultivate a resentment against people real work. He said "yeah that's true because when we started these campaigns against teachers, we started actually talking about school administrators, because they're ones really create the problems and everybody knows it it don't do anything", and it had no purchase. People wouldn't get excited about them. Then we started talking about teachers it took off.