The rise and rise of the pointless job
Duct-tapers, flunkies and box-tickers of the world, unite!
● Imagine having a job that pays you R200 000 to write a two-page report for a big company meeting where the document is never discussed. Or a job that requires you to rent a car and drive 500km to oversee a person’s computer being moved 5m from one room to another. What about being a receptionist in a publishing company where the phone rings once a day and your only other tasks are filling a dish with mints and winding a grandfather clock once a week?
These nuggets are strewn through David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a provocative book that claims the world has been engulfed by a rising tide of pointless work.
The book is based on a 2013 essay Graeber wrote for a radical magazine called Strike! that was such a hit it crashed the publication’s website and was translated into a dozen languages within weeks. The Economist published a critique of it. Adverts quoting it appeared in the London Underground. Eventually, pollsters based a UK survey on it showing that 37% of people did not believe their job made “a meaningful contribution to the world”. A Dutch poll later came up with similar results.
For Graeber, an American anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, this confirmed he was on to something big about 21st-century capitalism: it looked a lot like 20th-century Soviet socialism, generating myriad pointless jobs to keep workers employed.
Given how that particular venture ended, this is a worrying prospect. And if it is indeed happening, it is bizarre. Capitalism is supposed to deliver efficiency. Technological advances are supposed to mean we spend less time at work of any sort.
Even if this has yet to materialise, the idea that much in the modern office is maddening is hardly new. So why does Graeber’s definition of a rubbish job — work so meaningless or pernicious that employees know it is pointless but must pretend otherwise — still resonate so powerfully?
Graeber struggles to provide an entirely convincing answer in his book. He suggests that such jobs make sense for a rent-seeking corporate elite fearful of giving exploited workers more time and leisure to think.
Perhaps. Yet it is hard to imagine companies around the world have quietly conspired to subdue the mob by creating — or paying for — mountains of meaningless work.
An unconditional lump of cash for all citizens would, he thinks, allow people to pursue lives of real purpose
Graeber is more persuasive when he looks at why people stay in jobs they profess to despise, tracing it back admirably to a theologically inspired work ethic that has convinced people their self-worth lies in labour.
He devises five categories of rubbish jobs that will sound familiar to many.
There are flunkies (like the underemployed receptionist), who exist to make bosses look good, and goons (PR workers, lobbyists, telemarketers), who only exist because others also employ people in such roles. “Duct-tapers” are workers whose jobs only exist to fix organisational glitches that should not exist. Box-tickers allow an organisation to claim it is doing something it actually isn’t, and taskmasters supervise people who do not require supervision.
The stories he reports are often priceless, if sometimes difficult to believe. A person he calls Simon claimed to have spent two years analysing the inner workings of a big bank, where he discovered that at least 80% of the bank’s 60 000 staff were not needed.
This may be true. Or it may not be. There is no way of knowing. It does, however, fit one of Graeber’s central theories about why rubbish jobs have proliferated: “managerial feudalism”, elaborate hierarchies of people who employ underlings to enhance their importance. The result, he claims, is a disaster that amounts to “a genuine scar across our collective soul”. The solution he proposes will be familiar to many: the universal basic income. An unconditional lump of cash for all citizens would, he thinks, free people from meaningless jobs and allow them to pursue lives of real purpose.
It is a concept that already has advocates across the political spectrum. Graeber’s aim is more radical. He wants to shatter the link between livelihood and work entirely.
He may be waiting some time. Pilot basic income programmes have been launched around the world, from Kenya to Canada and the US. The results are still coming in.
But, like much else in Graeber’s book, it is a thought-provoking idea that captures the imagination and deserves our attention. —