I didn’t read Graeber’s essay on this topic but with the repetitive nature of this book I’m sure it was sufficient. However, it’s such an interesting concept and I do have a few friends I will definitely recommend this book to. But for the majority I’ll lead to the essay.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book.

What a great title and a good subject for exploration. It used to be you worked in a car plant and made cars, at least something tangible came from your efforts. This is sort of a book form of the movie "Office Space", what difference does it make if you don't go to work? Most of our work is intangible and almost manufactured to fill a nonexistent need. With the popularity of workplace humor shows like "Silicon Valley" there is surely a large audience for this topic. Highly enjoyable and will make you question your career decisions.

The only reason I can't purchase this title is because of, well, the title. I work in a high school and it isn't allowed. That being said, I thought it was an interesting and well-researched piece of nonfiction.

Fascinating if somewhat depressing look at people who consider their jobs meaningless and what the proliferation of such people and jobs means for society. In depth thoughts and fluid writing.

this book was just ok. I enjoyed the author's premise and it is reflective of the pattern of jobs in today's economy. i feel his views were well presented and would recommend it to others but it was a bit dry

I'm undecided on my personal feeling about this book because there is so much truth to it that I may not want to accept.
A lot of sense into how pointless some jobs are but not a whole lot more. It is a good read bit a little repetitive.

I agree with Graeber's general premise. There is a lot of emphasis on looking busy in the modern workplace and this can create a toxic, soul killing environment for workers. My main issue with the book wasn't the thesis but the repetitive nature of it. I think Graeber's original essay on this topic was sufficient. The book presents many stories about workers who have bullshit job and the effect this has had on them. However, the stories become repetitive and honestly depressing. There isn't a real solution offered for this issue, which made this book even more depressing to read. I give this book three stars since I do think this is an important issue. I just think a shorter length book or even an expanded essay could have conveyed the same point without being repetitive.

I'm a big fan of David Graeber, and particularly Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As always his argument is entertaining as well as informative. Bullshit Jobs arose out of an article on the topic which provoked a massive response, not least with people rushing to confess that their own jobs were indeed bullshit jobs.

This book combines analysis of the what and the why of bullshit jobs with discussion of how they affect us, both as individuals and as a society. As an anthropologist, Graeber draws on examples from different periods and cultures. The first-person accounts many people sent him of the corrosive effect of having a meaningless job were also moving (and sometimes darkly comic).

Some people might feel that the article says all they need to know, but if you want to go a bit deeper then this is an interesting read.

Graeber is a really entertaining writer even though I found that his theorizing of what makes a job bullshit to be too extended for my tastes. (Also I’m pretty sure he’d see most of my work as bullshit, and my belief to the contrary to be at least in part because I’m high enough in the hierarchy that people flatter me that my work is not bullshit.) His basic thesis: many modern jobs are bullshit, in the sense that they could disappear completely and the world would be unharmed or even better off, and also in the sense that most of the people doing them at some level understand this, which inflicts deep psychic harm on them given a human need for effectiveness. One result is increased resentment of the people who do have non-bullshit jobs—teachers, firefighters, nurses—cultivated deliberately by political forces that benefit from dividing and oppressing workers. For those elites, “a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. … 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.”

People holding bullshit jobs (the upper/middle class) thus cooperate in immiserating people with non-bullshit jobs, on the idea that having a job that actually does something is rewarding enough; a living wage would just be too much. This group (my group) resents the fact that janitors, subway workers, line workers in auto assembly plants, and the like are actually important to the operation of ordinary life. These are often shit jobs, which are bad in their own way and deserve improvement, but not bullshit: “Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.” This is also gendered: women tend to end up in shit jobs, but are less likely to feel that their jobs are meaningless. In his engagement with service workers in pursuit of a definition of bullshit jobs, Graeber concludes that most think their work isn’t bullshit, with the exception of information technology (IT) providers, telemarketers, and sex workers—the first two groups tended to think that they were basically engaged in scams, while the third was getting paid far more for work that didn’t fully exercise their human capacities than for work that would engage them more. Graeber deems this to be a sign that we’re living in a bullshit society.

Graeber deems our resentment of teachers and line workers to be a result of moral envy: they seem to be upholding a higher moral standard than our own, by doing really useful work. Thus, Republican attacks on school administrators have died down, while attacks on teachers have skyrocketed. “Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying ‘thank you, thank you for all you did for me.’ For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.” [I hope recent events show that this is starting to change in the US.]

Graeber challenges the usual caveat that many bullshit jobs are in government; he argues that there are at least as many proportionally in private enterprise. The profit motive doesn’t control for this—it does lead to janitors and line workers being fired or outsourced, but not management—because people higher in the hierarchy demand to have a hierarchy: a manager who manages only robots is not a manager at all. Thus each executive must have a number of people “laboring” under them.

Graeber argues that this societal sickness explains a number of things, for example why students so often have to get meaningless jobs to support their education—learning to study in a self-motivated way is one thing, but it’s not learning to work under orders, which is what our current system requires of most of us. Meaningless jobs also teach students “how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done; that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys; that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important that one does not enjoy; and that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying.”

In our sick society, we assume that humans would prefer to be parasites, whereas Graeber argues that most people prefer to do something useful. But historically, most human work has been in spurts of intense work followed by rest—planting, then hanging out and gossiping, then harvesting. Even under intense inequality, close supervision wasn’t generally necessary for the day to day work; as long as the lord got his share of the harvest, he was uninterested in how it came about. Once supervision became a thing, supervisors couldn’t stand to watch their employees hanging out and gossiping, so they invented bullshit work to do. “The modern morality of ‘You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around’ is … the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it.”

Graeber uses the concept of nonconsensual BDSM to explain why bullshit jobs feel so toxic to so many. The job is bullshit, but you’re not allowed to say so; you have to pretend. It’s not clear whom to blame for the job’s meaninglessness. Because there is no obvious change your job makes in the world, there is no defined script for what you’re supposed to do. Unlike members of consensual BDSM communities, “people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic, with the (person on the) bottom struggling desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forthcoming, and the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie.” There’s no safe word in these circumstances; quitting is the only out, and that “might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game.”

Modern capitalism actually resembles feudalism: big institutions extract big pots of money because they have the political power to do so, and their incentives are to distribute them in ways that preserve the institutions and the pots. This is why management swells even as line workers are fired and tenure for professors disappears in favor of immiserated adjuncts. Graeber contends that “production” is essentially a theological, patriarchal concept—it assumes that goods jump into being, fully formed. Most human labor, “which cannot in any sense be considered ‘production,’ is thus made to disappear,” and this is largely done through gender (but also through class). Men “like to conceive of themselves as doing socially, or culturally, what they like to think of women as doing naturally.” The factory actually depends on lots of service work—not production—including cleaning, moving parts around, moving finished goods around, selling the goods, keeping track of the money, and so on. “[M]ost working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking.” By making the factory laborer or miner the prototypical worker—shades of the media focus on the white laborer in the Trump era—we ignore all that other work.

And the structure is very hard to change on one’s own. Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam paved the way for the “Northern European notion that paid labor under a master’s discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.” Because of all this work, consumerist pleasures are often the only ones we can afford—the only solace for our terrible days. And so the cycle continues.

Graeber even argues that the rise of open source software has been sucked into this pathological dynamic: now, all the really interesting and fun tasks are done for free, and programmers are paid to do the hard, unpleasant work of duct taping the fun parts together and smoothing out the rough, buggy, undocumented parts.

I was struck by the justice of Graeber’s point that white middle/working-class resentment of liberal “elites,” when those supposed elites often lack many indicia of real power, makes sense from this viewpoint: The liberal elites are nearly monopolizing many of the jobs that allow one to do something useful, altruistic, or glamorous. Conservative voters are madder at liberal elites than at the rich because they “can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. … [I]f you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; if on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.”

The only possibility for unselfish work if you’re not already well-off is the military, and Graeber points out that many people do enlist because they want to do something bigger with their lives—they want to help others, which is how the military now sells itself. Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties are two or three times more likely to reenlist. Graeber’s take on this is touchingly optimistic: “societies based on greed, even that say that human beings are inherently selfish and greedy and that attempt to valorize this sort of behavior, don’t really believe it, and secretly dangle out the right to behave altruistically as a reward for playing along.” However, Graeber also suggests that this dynamic explains why the right’s valorization of the military doesn’t translate into material support for soldiers once they’ve returned to civilian society—the whole point was to sacrifice, to be noble, to get the chance to do something good in return for all the pain.

Graeber, an anarchist, mostly offers diagnosis rather than solutions, though he’s willing to give Universal Basic Income a go. I was reminded of Joanna Russ on fan fiction: Russ asks what love and sex would be like if we were free; Graeber wants to ask what work would be like if we were free.

In some cultures, people who have just met us might ask if we have children or what we like to do on our weekends or if we have been to the new movie/restaurant/museum exhibit. In America, we ask "What do you do?" which means what is your job? We feel defined by our jobs and strive to have a good answer to the "what do you do?" question. But, as anthropologist David Graeber points out, most of us hate our jobs. And many of us think our jobs are completely useless and contribute nothing to society. So where does that leave us?

Even the people who perform these so-called bullshit jobs are aware of how pointless they are. But we need to earn money and it appears that there isn't really enough work to keep everyone fully employed. Futurists of the past predicted that by now we would have switched to 15 hour work weeks and people would have the time and money to pursue leisure activities and spend more time with their families. It's likely that we actually could do that, but we are so socially conditioned to want to work for a living (everyone, even prisoners prefers working to sitting around doing nothing) that we seem to be stuck in this bullshit jobs trap.

Graeber describes the phenomenon at length, gives numerous examples, and even suggests a few possible alternatives, but it read like pretty much what it is -- a magazine article fleshed out and padded to puff it up to book size. Definitely food for thought, though.

(Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a digital review copy.)

https://www.aminext.com/blog/2018/1/20/bullshit-jobs-graeber

Still reeling from that aftereffects of this book. Wondering myself if my own job qualifies as a bulls@#t job.
Thanks to author, publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

Facebook Salvation for BS Jobholders

The astounding number of hours spent weekly by social media users is a direct result of bullshit jobs, says David Graeber, in his book of the same name. In this context, the average smartphone being consulted 221 times a day is no longer unbelievable. Graeber has uncovered a whole new field for research: jobs where nothing real happens.

We often think of neoliberalism as the era when companies are lean and mean, all the fat is excised and operations optimized. That however, only applies to low-level labor, such as factory workers, teachers, nurses and cleaners. Meanwhile, managers are busy bulking up, overstaffing and underworking. The people who actually produce the goods or care for patients, customers and students are continually punished. Much of the rest is BS, he says.

David Graeber is an anthropologist, unwilling celebrity of Occupy Wall Street, and bestselling author of Debt. His approach is always clear, clean, organized and direct, and Bullshit Jobs is no exception. It began in 2013 when Strike! magazine published his essay on bullshit jobs. It immediately went viral. He asked why Oxford needs a dozen PR specialists to promote the university as a top notch school and why TV production companies need armies of development vice-presidents. (Consider too that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has a marketing department of 400.) His essay told BS jobholders they were not alone. They reposted it, blogged about it, and talked it up. It led Graeber to ask questions over Twitter, and he distilled the mountain of response into categories and examples. Polling firms started asking those questions too. It is becoming clear, in country after country, that 37-40% of jobs are either bullshit, or bullshitized by the corporation.

There are five main categories of bullshit jobs:
-Flunkies (eg. assistants, receptionists, or secretaries who make others look important)
-Duct tapers (who bridge gaps and errors instead of fixing obvious flaws in systems)
-Goons (such as telemarketers whose work function is to annoy)
-Box tickers (report generators, form fillers and surveillance agents)
-Taskmasters (who assign useless jobs, or worse, cause harm to others: eg unemployment or welfare agents)
-Flak catchers, on the other hand, provide a real service, allowing customers and co-workers to vent at someone totally powerless to resolve their issue. They may think they have BS jobs, but they have a genuine purpose. Sorry people.

Being ”the cause” of something is the most rewarding part of work. If workers can’t see any effect of anything they do, there’s steady decline, both mental and physical. “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist,” he says. They sit all day, surf the internet, become sullen and depressed, and long for human interaction and any sense of accomplishment.

Graeber says it all began in the Gilded Age, when labor lost its reputation as the means of production. Capital became the means, to the point where governments now fawn over capital to the detriment of everyone and everything else.

People can be resourceful, and seek fulfillment where they can. One hiring manager said she actually rewrote candidate résumés to show experience in an open BS position. Because her company’s HR software would not permit her to interview candidates without all the right boxes ticked, she had to give them the experience herself. But the receptionist whose only tasks are to answer the phone once a day and keep the mints bowl filled has no such opportunity.

There were those who wrote in saying they had written whole plays or learned a new language at work, but for the most part, neoliberalism has provided the BS jobholders with BS fillers like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube to wile away the years. BS jobs are responsible for their rise. For those who want more, there is risk. One wrote that “Doing something worthwhile is subversive.” The perversity is striking.

The main driver seems to be siege mentality and aggrandizement of executives: the need for underlings to prove how important they are. We used to call this empire-building. Graeber calls it managerial feudalism. So even though neoliberalism frowns on inefficiencies, there are many who are more about their own careers than the profits of the company.

Graeber’s first example is both the best and the worst. He quotes a man who works at a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a contractor to the German army. When a soldier wanted to move to the empty office next door, the requisition filtered through all the companies to him. He arranged for security and movers to meet him at the office (several hours away), pack up the laptop and seal it securely, then unpack it again in the next office, while army security kept watch. Everybody signed off and filed their paperwork. This is a bullshit job. Or is it? What Graeber doesn’t see is the obvious reason for subcontractors to employ far too many people. They are not about efficiency, they are about billing the company above them. They mark up the employee’s salary 50-100%, so the more bureaucratic and process-oriented they are, the more profitable they will be. Those BS employees are pure profit. This is capitalism at its finest.

So the private sector is no different from the public sector. The market economy is not ruthlessly efficient, and far from rewarding to all but the top one percent. Graeber quotes President Obama, who created a healthcare plan that added to, rather than subtracted from the complex mess. He specifically cited the three million jobs that just process billing data, that might disappear had he proposed a single payer system. Instead, he institutionalized the BS jobs.

Graeber suggests we look at Universal Basic Income as an option, so that (among many other things) BS jobholders can quit and regain some purpose in life. In the meantime, there’s Facebook.

David Wineberg