Book Review: David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’

I’m very fortunate that my current job adds meaning to my life. This is not true of many jobs, including some I’ve had in the past. David Graeber describes these as ‘bullshit jobs’, which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

Graeber’s book shows the misery, waste and lost potential of these jobs, then applies his understanding of anthropology to looking at how this situation came to be, and why no-one does anything about it. ’The economy’ is made by people and through their participation and it could be constructed in a different way.

for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics

When President Obama talked about the money that might be saved by an alternative healthcare system, he backed off from this, saying that it represented millions of jobs. He directly implied that it was important to keep these jobs, even while describing them as unnecessary.

This waste is everywhere, and contributes significantly to climate change through commuting and business travel. The arts are particularly wasteful, with bureaucracies consuming huge sums of money in managing grant proposals. A lottery might be more a effective means of producing great art.

Graeber also shows that, at the same time, jobs are eliminated as ‘unproductive’ simply because they do not produce profits. One example of this is the presence of staffed ticket offices on the underground. He points out that these roles were not just about selling tickets, but also provided a sort of ‘caring labour’, helping lost people and others in need.

One of the most satisfying jobs I’ve had was working as a hospital cleaner. It was hard and boring work, but it was good to know that I was doing something useful. As Graeber points out “Other jobs—ordinary cleaning, for example—are in no sense inherently degrading, but they can easily be made so”. One technique for this is through outsourcing. A present-day hospital cleaner is far less connected to the NHS than I was.

Graeber is cautious about discussing a solution to the problem, not wanting readers to get distracted from the book’s main argument by seeing it as simply an argument for a policy change. But he gently suggests that a Universal Basic Income might be a more humane and efficient way of managing the economy.