P r e f a c e :
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
In the spring of 2013,1 unwittingly set off a very minor international sen-
sation.
It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine
called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no
one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas
like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented h i m with a
brief piece entitled " O n the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs."
The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort
of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything:
H R consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial
strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic
contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss
the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless.
What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them
are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel
their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more
demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven
days of ones adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did
not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources,
or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic
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w o u n d r u n n i n g across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever
seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people
were happy at work. There were none, as tar as I knew, about whether or
not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.
This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one
wants to talk about d i d not seem inherently implausible. The subject of
work is riddled with taboos. Even the tact that most people don't like their
jobs and would relish an excuse not to go to w o r k is considered something
that can't reallv be admitted on T V — c e r t a i n l y not on the T V news, even if
it might occasionally be alluded to in documentaries and stand-up c o m edv.
1 had experienced these taboos myself: 1 had once acted as the media
liaison for an activist group that, r u m o r had it, was planning a civil disobedience
campaign to shut d o w n the Washington, D C , transport system
as part of a protest against a global economic summit. In the days leading
up to it, you could hardly go anywhere l o o k i n g like an anarchist without
some cheerful civil servant walking up to you and asking whether it was
really true he or she wouldn't have to go to work on Monday. Yet at the
same lime, T V crews managed dutifully to interview city employees—and
1 wouldn't be surprised if some of them were the same city e m p l o y e e s commenting
on how terribly tragic it w o u l d be if they wouldn't be able to
get to work, since they knew that's what it would take to get them on T V .
N o one seems to feel free to say what they really feel about such matters—
at least in public.
It was plausible, but I didn't really know. In a way, I wrote the piece as a
kind of experiment. 1 was interested to see what sort of response it w o u l d
elicit.
This is what I wrote for the August 2013 issue:
O n the P h e n o m e n o n of B u l l s h i t Jobs
In the year 1930, John M a y n a r d 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 fifteen-hour
work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technolog-
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ical terms, we are quite capable of this. A n d yet it didn't happen. Instead,
technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways
to make us all w o r k more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to
be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in
Europe and N o r t h A m e r i c a i n 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.
W h y d i d Keynes's promised Utopia—still being eagerly awaited
in the sixties—never materialize? The standard line today is that he
didn't figure in the massive increase i n 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 m o ment'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
twenties, 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 U S between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear piclure
(and I note, one pretty m u c h exactly echoed in the U K ) . O v e r 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 " f r o m 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 C h i n a ,
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 w o r k i n g hours to
tree the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures,
visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so m u c h of
the "service" sector as of the administrative sector, up to and inelud-
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ing 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. A n d these numbers do not even reflect 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 i n dustries
(dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because
everyone else is spending so m u c h of their time working i n all
the other ones.
These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs."
It's as if someone were out there m a k i n g up pointless jobs just for
the sake of keeping us all working. A n d 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 U n i o n , where
employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system
made up as many jobs as it 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 very sort of 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.
W h i l e 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 forty or
even fifty-hour weeks on paper but effectively w o r k i n g fifteen hours
just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing
or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles,
or downloading T V 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
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happen when this even began to be approximated i n the sixties.) A n d ,
on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and
that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some k i n d of intense
work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is
extraordinarily convenient for them.
Once, w h e n 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 cabinetmakers, and then discover they are expected
to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. N o r 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 coworkers might be
spending more time m a k i n g 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 o w n economy.
Now, I realize any such argument is going to run into i m m e d i ate
objections: " W h o are you to say what jobs are really 'necessary'?
What's 'necessary,' anyway? You're an anthropology professor—what's
the 'need' for that?" ( A n d , indeed, a lot of tabloid readers would take
the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.)
A n d 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? N o t long ago, I got back in touch with a school
triend w h o m 1 hadn't seen since I was fifteen. I was amazed to discover
that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front m a n in
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aa indie rock band. Ill heard some of his songs on the radio, having
no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. H e 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.1
' N o w he's a corporate
lawyer w o r k i n g in a prominent N e w York firm. H e was the first to
admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the
world, and, in his o w n 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 percent 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 pointless jobs are u l timately
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.
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. H o w can one even
begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job
should not exist? H o w 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 meaningiul
work. For instance: in our society, there seems to be 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
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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 doekworkers 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 h o w humanity would suffer
were all private equity C E O s , lobbyists, P R researchers, actuaries,
telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants to similarly vanish.1
( M a n y
suspect it might improve markedly.) Yet apart from a handful of welllouted
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 w h i p up resentment against
tube workers for paralyzing L o n d o n d u r i n g contract disputes: the very
tact that tube workers can paralyze L o n d o n shows that their work is
actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people.
Its even clearer in the U n i t e d States, where Republicans have had remarkable
success m o b i l i z i n g resentment against schoolteachers and
iiuloworkers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators
or auto industry executives 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! O r make cars! You get to have real jobs!
A n d 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 m a i n taining
the power of finance capital, it's hard to see h o w he or she
could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly
squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a
terrorized 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 s i m m e r i n g resentment
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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 w o r k i n g threeto
four-hour days.
If ever an essay's hypothesis was confirmed by its reception, this was it.
" O n the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" produced an explosion.
The irony was that the two weeks after the piece came out were the
same two weeks that my partner and I had decided to spend with a basket
of books, and each other, i n a cabin i n rural Quebec. We'd made a point of
finding a location with no wireless. This left me in the awkward position
of having to observe the results only on m y mobile phone. The essay went
viral almost immediately. W i t h i n weeks, it had been translated into at
least a dozen languages, including G e r m a n , Norwegian, Swedish, French,
Czech, R o m a n i a n , Russian, Turkish, Latvian, Polish, Greek, Estonian,
Catalan, and Korean, and was reprinted i n newspapers from Switzerland
to Australia. The original Strike! page received more than a m i l l i o n hits
and crashed repeatedly from too m u c h traffic. Blogs sprouted. C o m m e n t s
sections filled up with confessions from white-collar professionals; people
wrote me asking for guidance or to tell me I had inspired them to quit
their jobs to find something more meaningful. Here is one enthusiastic
response (I've collected hundreds) from the comments section of Australia's
Canberra Times:
W o w ! N a i l o n the head! I am a corporate lawyer (tax litigator, to be
specific). I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable
all of the time. I don't like it when people have the nerve to say " W h y
do it, then?" because it is so clearly not that simple. It so happens to be
the only way right now for me to contribute to the I percent in such a
significant way so as to reward me with a house i n Sydney to raise m y
tuture k i d s . .. Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive i n
two days as we previously were i n five. But thanks to greed and some
busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away
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for the profit of others ahead of our o w n nonremunerated ambitions.
Whether you believe in intelligent design or evolution, humans were
not made to work—so to me, this is all just greed propped up by i n flated
prices of necessities.'
At one point, I got a message from one anonymous fan w h o said that he
was part of an i m p r o m p t u group circulating the piece within the financial
services community; he'd received five emails containing the essay
just that day (certainly one sign that many i n financial services don't have
much to do). None of this answered the question of how many people
really felt that way about their jobs—as opposed to, say, passing on the
piece as a way to drop subtle hints to others—but before long, statistical
evidence d i d indeed surface.
O n January 5, 2015, a little more than a year after the article came out,
on the first M o n d a y of the new year—that is, the day most Londoners
were returning to work from their winter holidays—someone took several
hundred ads in L o n d o n U n d e r g r o u n d cars and replaced them with a series
of guerrilla posters consisting of quotes from the original essay. These
were the ones they chose:
• Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly
believe do not really need to be performed.
• Its as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the
sake of keeping us all working.
• 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.
• H o w can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly
feels one's job should not exist?
The response to the poster campaign was another spate of discussion
in the media (I appeared briefly on Russia Today), as a result of w h i c h the
polling agency Y o u G o v took it upon itself to test the hypothesis and conducted
a poll of Britons using language taken directly f r o m the essay, for
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example, Does your job "make a meaningful contribution to the world"?
Astonishingly, more than a third—37 p e r c e n t - s a i d they believed that it
did not (whereas 50 percent said it d i d , and 13 percent were uncertain).
This was almost twice what I h a d anticipated—I'd imagined the percentage
of bullshit jobs was probably around 20 percent. What's more, a
later poll in H o l l a n d came up with almost exactly the same results: i n fact,
a little higher, as 40 percent of D u t c h workers reported that their jobs had
no good reason to exist.
So not only has the hypothesis been confirmed by public reaction, it
has n o w been overwhelmingly confirmed by statistical research.
Clearly, then, we have an important social p h e n o m e n o n that has received
almost no systematic attention.' Simply opening up a way to talk about it
became, for many, cathartic. It was obvious that a larger exploration was
in order.
W h a t I want to d o here is a bit more systematic than the original essay.
The 2013 piece was for a magazine about revolutionary politics, a n d it
emphasized the political implications of the problem. In fact, the essay
was just one of a series of arguments I was developing at the time that the
neoliberal ("free market") ideology that h a d dominated the w o r l d since
the days of Thatcher and Reagan was really the opposite of what it claimed
to be; it was really a political project dressed up as an economic one.
I had come to this conclusion because it seemed to be the only way to
explain h o w those in power actually behaved. W h i l e neoliberal rhetoric
was always all about unleashing the magic of the marketplace and placing
economic efficiency over all other values, the overall effect of free market
policies has been that rates of economic growth have slowed pretty m u c h
everywhere except India and C h i n a ; scientific and technological advance
has stagnated; a n d in most wealthy countries, the younger generations
can, for the first time in centuries, expect to lead less prosperous lives
than their parents d i d . Yet o n observing these effects, proponents of market
ideology always reply with calls lor even stronger doses of the same
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medicine, and politicians duly enact them. This struck me as o d d . If a
pi ivate company hired a consultant to come up with a business plan, and
it resulted i n a sharp decline i n profits, that consultant w o u l d be fired. A t
the very least, he'd be asked to come up with a different plan. W i t h free
market reforms, this never seemed to happen. The more they failed, the
more they were enacted. The only logical conclusion was that economic
imperatives weren't really driving the project,
WTiat was? It seemed to me the answer h a d to lie i n the mind-set
of the political class. A l m o s t all o f those m a k i n g the key decisions h a d
attended college in the 1960s, when campuses were at the very epicenter
of political ferment, a n d they felt strongly that such things must never
happen again. A s a result, while they might have been concerned with
declining economic indicators, they were also quite delighted to note that
the combination of globalization, gutting the power of unions, a n d creating
an insecure and overworked w o r k f o r c e — a l o n g with aggressively
paying lip service to sixties calls to hedonistic personal liberation (what
came to be k n o w n as "lifestyle liberalism, fiscal conservativism")—had
the etlect of simultaneously shifting more a n d more wealth a n d power
to the wealthy a n d almost completely destroying the basis for organized
challenges to their power. It might not have worked very well e c o n o m i c
i l l v hut politically it w o r k e d like a dream. If nothing else, they had little
incentive to abandon such policies. A l l I d i d i n the essay was to pursue
this insight: whenever you find someone d o i n g something i n the name of
economic efficiency that seems completely economically irrational (like,
say, pa\ ing people good m o n e y to do n o t h i n g all day), one had best start
hv asking, as the ancient Romans d i d , "Cut bono?"— " W h o benefits?"—
and how.
I his is less a conspiracy theory approach than it is an «nficonspiracy
dicoiA. I was asking w h y action wasn't taken. E c o n o m i c trends happen for
a 1
' soils o| reasons, but if they cause problems for the rich a n d powerful,
those n c h and powerful people will pressure institutions to step i n and
U(
> something about the matter. This is w h y after the financial crisis of
-00s 09, large investment banks were bailed out but o r d i n a r y mortgage
holders weren't. The proliferation of bullshit jobs, as we'll see, happened
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for a variety of reasons. The real question I was asking is w h y no one intervened
("conspired," if you like) to do something about the matter.
In this book I want to do considerably more than that.
I believe that the p h e n o m e n o n of bullshit employment can provide us
with a w i n d o w on m u c h deeper social problems. W e need to ask ourselves,
not just h o w d i d such a large p r o p o r t i o n of our workforce find themselves
laboring at tasks that they themselves consider pointless, but also w h y do
so many people believe this state of affairs to be n o r m a l , inevitable—even
desirable? M o r e oddly still, why, despite the fact that they hold these o p i n ions
i n the abstract, and even believe that it is entirely appropriate that
those w h o labor at pointless jobs should be paid more and receive more
honor and recognition than those w h o do something they consider to be
useful, do they nonetheless find themselves depressed and miserable if
they themselves end up i n positions where they are being paid to do nothing,
or nothing that they feel benefits others i n any way? There is clearly a
jumble of contradictory ideas and impulses at play here. O n e thing I want
to do i n this book is begin to sort them out. This will mean asking practical
questions such as: H o w do bullshit jobs actually happen? It will also
mean asking deep historical questions, like, W h e n and h o w d i d we come
to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful, or, h o w did we ever
come up with the notion that it would be possible to sell one's time? A n d
finally, it will mean asking fundamental questions about h u m a n nature.
W r i t i n g this book also serves a political purpose.
I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization.
There is something very w r o n g with what we have made ourselves.
We have become a civilization based o n w o r k — n o t even "productive
work" but w o r k as an end and meaning i n itself. W e have come to believe
that m e n and w o m e n w h o do not work harder than they wish at jobs they
do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance
from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to
our o w n enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that
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half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive
activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to
rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there w h o
are not i n the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion
have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state
of affairs. 1 wish it to end.
If this book can i n any way contribute to that end, it will have been
worth writing.
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