Before we get to that question, let’s discuss what we mean by a bullshit job.
The defining feature of a bullshit job: one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing it. He might not be able to admit this to his coworkers — often there are very good reasons not to do so. But he is convinced the job is pointless nonetheless.
Some jobs are so pointless that no one even notices if the person who has the job vanishes. This usually happens in the public sector:
Spanish Civil Servant Skips Work for Six Years to Study Spinoza
– Jewish Times, February 26, 2016
This story made headlines in Spain. At a time when the country was undergoing severe austerity and high unemployment, it seemed outrageous that there were civil servants who could skip work for years without anybody noticing. Joaquin Garcia’s (civil servant) defense, however, is not without merit. He explained that while he had worked for many years dutifully monitoring the city’s water treatment plant, the water board eventually came under the control of higher-ups who loathed him for his Socialist politics and refused to assign him any responsibilities. He found this situation so demoralising that he was eventually obliged to seek clinical help for depression. Finally, and with the concurrence of his therapist, he decided that rather than just continue to sit around all day pretending to look busy, he would convince the water board he was being supervised by the municipality, and the municipality that he was being supervised by the water board, check in if there was a problem, but otherwise just go home and do something useful with his life.
It’s stories like these, of course, that inspire politicians all over the world to call for a larger role for the private sector — where, it is always claimed, such abuses would not occur. Still, if all these cases are anything to go by, the main difference between the public and private sectors is not that either is more, or less, likely to generate pointless work. It does not even necessarily lie in the kind of pointless work each tends to generate. The main difference is that pointless work in the private sector is likely to be far more closely supervised. So if the above mentioned Water Board had been privatised, Joaquin Garcia might still have been deprived of responsibilities by managers who disliked him, but he would have been expected to sit at his desk and pretend to work every day anyway, or find alternate employment.
Contemporary capitalism seems riddled with such jobs. A YouGov poll found that in the United Kingdom only 50 percent of those who had full-time jobs were entirely sure their job made any sort of meaningful contribution to the world, and 37 percent were quite sure it did not. A poll by the firm Schouten & Nelissen carried out in Holland put the latter number as high as 40 percent. If you think about it, these are staggering statistics. After all, a very large percentage of jobs involves doing things that no one could possibly see as pointless. Then why does this happen?
There are shit jobs and then there are bullshit jobs. Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they’re doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honour and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well- paid, and treated as high achievers — as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie — as, indeed, it is.
It’s also theoretically possible to have a job that is both shit and bullshit. Once, while serving time in exile at a Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task. Even though convicts sent to Siberia had theoretically been sentenced to “hard labour,” he observed, the work wasn’t actually all that hard. Most peasants worked far harder. But peasants were working at least partly for themselves. In prison camps, the “hardness” of the labour was the fact that the labourer got nothing out of it. This oppression has continued to this day. So, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.
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The above excerpts are taken from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It. The author is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economic
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