The sadomasochism of the current employment structure is an ideal heat engine, the Rankine cycle of capitalism.
— from the Substacker’s insidious mind
Sanctimonious of me to talk about a book titled Bullshit Jobs while being unemployed? Or did it make so much sense after watching my peers, friends, and colleagues plod through drudgery synonymous with so many job titles that it is exhausting and finally a book outlines the causes of the phenomenon in a coherent academic manner that suits my sensibilities? Yes, the latter.
At the outset, Graeber clarifies that most of the information in the book is qualitative and not quantitative. He asked people around the world to describe their job experiences. The nature of the argument that numerous jobs are unfulfilling placeholders rests on subjective data. There goes the running argument against this book by scores of readers who need pie charts and percentages to accept a trend. Something that the advertising agencies are responsible for instilling in the popular psyche. 10% extra toothpaste! 5% less trans-fat! We love numbers. But I digress.
I can attest to Graeber’s subjective thesis from my observations of my time in academia. I never held a placeholder job myself, part of the reason I chose to be in academia was because I learnt very early I wanted to do something that had lasting social value: scientific research. Every citation my article gets reminds me of the longevity of my experimental research however short-lived the tenure might have been. On the other end of the spectrum, I saw hundreds of people operating within the confines of five types of bullshit jobs stipulated by Graeber in the book. They are as follows:
Flunkies
Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another. Not all of these are actually employed in the grandee’s household, and many of those who are, are expected to do at least some actual work; but especially at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive. You cannot be magnificent without an entourage.
Graeber calls them ‘feudal retainers’. The modern equivalents are job titles created to make some higher-ups feel powerful and good about themselves. Coordinators, assistants, under-managers, etc. Check LinkedIn and Indeed for synonymous titles. At my previous institution, there were 20 admin staffers for one research student. A gigantic waste of government resources and taxpayers’ money. Most of the admin served under a superior officer with a swanky office space lined with expensive furniture. You would never find said superior in his office by the way; always in a meeting.
Some of these flunkies just sat around with a packet of crisps for four hours a day because they were secretaries to their superiors. Not exaggerating. You could smell the crisps as soon as you entered the instrument room huffing and puffing with your experiment samples because God forbid there was justice in this world and your research got you more salary than the crisp-munchers. Researchers still don’t. A fact stated clearly by Graeber in the book.
Goons- Jobs that require manipulation, aggression, and deception. Typically found in advertising, call centres, PR, market research, and movie and television production industry.
Duct tapers- Jobs that arise out of glitches in the system usually stemming from the faults of upper echelons in companies. Omnipresent. The ‘this-zoom-meeting-could-have-been-an-email’ feeling.
Box tickers
employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.
Behold commissions and committees and chairperson and deputy chairperson of said committees and their endless meetings regarding vigilance and fact-finding inside organizations. Grant committees. Quality control. Powerpoints. Reports. Ever wonder how many of those “target figures” on slides are done keeping in mind the basics of statistics?
In academia, these committees comprise both faculty and non-faculty staff. Their sole mission is to figure out how best to redistribute the money siphoned into institutions while convincing the investors and grant agencies of the relevance of their research work (where do I even begin about the relevance factor) and thereby having less and less time devoted to their actual job titles: teaching and research.
Graeber writes,
Universities were basically craft guilds run for and by scholars, and their most important business was considered to be producing scholarship, their second most, training new generations of scholars. True, since the nineteenth century, universities had maintained a kind of gentleman’s pact with government, that they would also train civil servants (and later, corporate bureaucrats) in exchange for otherwise being largely left alone. But since the eighties, Ginsberg* argues, university administrators have effectively staged a coup. They wrestled control of the university from the faculty and oriented the institution itself toward entirely different purposes. It is now commonplace for major universities to put out “strategic vision documents” that barely mention scholarship or teaching but go on at length about “the student experience”, “research excellence” (getting grants), collaboration with business or government, and so forth.
[…] in most US states, the highest-paid public servant is a football or basketball coach at a state university […]
*Relevant information taken from Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fall of the Faculty
Taskmasters- Unnecessary superiors. The horrors of middle management. Ever spent a day navigating the hubris of your immediate superior so as not to piss off another superior to get a signature before they sign out for the day? Fun, wasn’t it?
After the classification of bullshit jobs, Graeber discusses the psychological effects of having these jobs- loss of creativity, general misery, self-loathing, etc. This is followed by my favorite chapters in the book where he looks at the sociopolitical and economic reasons for the rise of this phenomenon. Some crucial points:
Capitalism cannot be blamed alone. Socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Communist China have been equally responsible for the rise of bogus jobs as part of their public policies: full employment looked good on party manifestos.
Since the 1980s, the rise of the “service economy” and the decrease in agricultural and manufacturing jobs both in developed and developing nations have triggered the proliferation of meaningless jobs. In the case of developed nations, the manufacturing sector appears steady because they moved their factories to the poorer countries. Nevertheless, the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) and the digital economy and information-oriented jobs since the 1990s replaced the old-fashioned labor classes.
The FIRE sector creates the largest chunk of bullshitization because it involves taking money (loans) and regurgitating it around in complex ways taking small cuts each step of the way. They involve players like bankers, hedge-fund managers, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and fintech consultants. Many of Graeber’s respondents were clueless about the true nature of their jobs. And interestingly, swirling money through various obscure funnels can get you the highest salaries in this economy.
There is a 2017 paper that attempted to quantify the social value of different jobs and how well they were compensated. One of their findings given in the book is as follows:
Their conclusion: the most socially valuable workers whose contributions could be calculated are medical researchers, who add $9 of overall value to society for every $1 they are paid. The least valuable were those who worked in the financial sector, who, on average, subtract a net $1.80 in value from society for every $1 of compensation.
Tax the rich, eh? Not so simple because be it the left-wing or right-wing, most governments benefit from the status quo. However, the book gave me no straight answers as to why altruistic jobs like teaching, research, and healthcare have lesser compensation than those in the finance sector.
It is impossible to develop an absolute measurement of value. Questions like “Why is your job more important than mine?” or “Who decides what’s a necessary job?” are tricky because the phenomenon of “work” has theological and political roots.
The notion of service dates back to the European Middle Ages when everyone working as an apprentice under some lord was involved in a system of “life-cycle” service. Work was considered painful labor. Apprentices both male and female, spent significant years of their lives learning from their masters the tricks of the trade and social etiquette all of which enabled them to become future masters, marry, and run their households. This system transformed once capitalism (not markets) took over and apprentices were suddenly untethered. This led to a large population of trained but poor youngsters with no stable income. The proletariat as a class evolved, the “term derived from the Latin word for “those who produce offspring” because, in Rome, the poorest citizens who did not have enough wealth to tax were useful to the government only by producing sons who could be drafted into the army.” Yikes. The creation of the proletariat is intricately bound to the rise of Puritanism and the Protestant work ethic. The poor were rounded up and handed labor wages under a master/owner, and work became associated with self-mortification, having a value in itself, God’s work, and the basis of a dignified living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some sort of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
—Buckminster Fuller
There was something profoundly satisfying in working for a wage and it was a distinguishing feature for British economic scientists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo that separated them and other industrialists from the aristocrats who sat on their asses on generational wealth. Thus, work became a source of dignity and purpose in one’s life even if it made most people miserable.
Graeber doesn’t want to speak at length about solutions to this problem he calls “managerial feudalism”. But, the solution he provides is, of course, the universal basic income. Personally, I do not support the handing out of a basic income to everyone since it is simply difficult to ascertain who needs such a handout in a complex, heterogeneous society. Rationing government funds with the risk of perpetual parasitism is a risky game with unknown consequences. Handing out money before general or local elections in countries like India has done more social and political harm than good. I can only speak for my country. Political parties have given everything from bicycles to cash to laptops to gain votes here. As ridiculous as this sounds, they controlled the voter psyche by providing gifts.
I did not read the book looking for solutions. We must have this difficult conversation as our jobs continue to colonize our well-being. It did mine. And by the time I realized it had affected my health and sanity. The sadomasochism of the current employment structure is an ideal heat engine, the Rankine cycle of capitalism. And Graeber’s entertaining and erudite work here has something of a bite to reckon with.
“The least valuable were those who worked in the financial sector, who, on average, subtract a net $1.80 in value from society for every $1 of compensation.”
This, together with the latest Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Boeing, increasingly convinces me that the majority the financial market is a pyramid scheme.
“I do not support the handing out of a basic income to everyone since it is simply difficult to ascertain who needs such a handout in a complex, heterogeneous society”
One doesn't need to ascertain because the universal in UBI means it is given to everyone no-questions-asked. It is somewhat the opposite of taxation, which works too, except for rampant tax evasion…
Wonderful insights into this book Sayani, I loved it. I personally believe that work, or labor in this case, cannot be a source of meaning. Since I read Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, it totally made sense to me. I agree that UBI cannot be a solution under this system. Solutions like that require a huge paradigm shift and even a different system. It makes me sick that technology was invented in the first place to reduce labor, that is the whole point of it, but we continue to believe "it's okay, we will get new jobs." New bullshit jobs.