All bull, no point

Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber ISBN: 9780141983479, paperback London & New York, Penguin Books, 332 pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

In 2013, British-American anthropologist David Graeber published an article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in a little-known British magazine called Strike! (Graeber, 2013). Bullshit Jobs received worldwide attention. In February 2019, Penguin Book launched Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It. Graeber says that many bullshit jobs appear to be ‘HR [human resources] consultants, communications coordinators, PR [public relations] researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers’ and so on (preface, p. xiii). Some might say these are useless jobs. Once there were productive jobs in manufacturing but many of these have been ‘automated away’ (p. xv) or relocated overseas. Still, there are plenty of jobs that will never be sent overseas. We do not fly to Bangladesh for a haircut and our cars will not be serviced in Zimbabwe just because it is cheaper. Similarly, we do not attend universities in Mongolia, India, Honduras and China just because it is cheaper. The very opposite is the case: too many Australian universities live off too many overseas students (Robinson 2019).

Many of the jobs that have been exported, because they can be, have created unemployment at home. While some sections of the working class are unemployed or confined to precarious employment (Wright, 2016; Standing, 2016) others are overworked, toiling away for 60+ hours per week. Overwork and the capitalism 24/7 culture (Cray 2013) have created a host of ancillary industries like ‘dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen’, etc. (p. xvi). These exist because others work for too long. This may also apply to what Graeber calls paper pushers. Their numbers seem to be on the increase. Overall, one is inclined to think that capitalism seems to generate a general rule that says that the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less it is likely to get paid for. In other words, a nurse earns less than a merchant banker.

It is not at all clear how our society would suffer if all ‘private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR experts, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, legal consultants and HR professionals would disappear overnight’ (p. xix). These jobs are ideologically legitimised by the corporate business press, US billionaires

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020 masquerading as working-class heroes, right wing political parties and their lackeys and missionaries. For decades, these have been ‘highly successful in engineering resentment against train drivers, school teachers and car workers’ but, of course, not against CEOs and rafts of managerialists guarding train drivers, car workers and school teachers. More importantly, the former group has contributed to the pathologies of capitalism including unseen environmental vandalism (Wallace-Wells 2017) far beyond what train drivers, teachers, nurses and lecturers could do.

When some of those in bullshit jobs were asked ‘does your job make a meaningful contribution to society? [an amazing] thirty-seven per cent [said] it does not’ (p. xxii). In other words, there are jobs that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, and even insidious, that even those who do these jobs cannot justify what they do. They – in fact many of us – are forced to perform complex but ultimately worthless administrative rituals only to be told admin wants it and just do it for admin. A Wall Street banker even admits ‘I regard the moral environment as pathological’ (p. 13). My peers are ‘greedy and ruthless’ [they believe they have] ‘a God-given belief to make as much money as they can in any way that they can – legal or otherwise’ (p. 13).

Their jobs seem to be bullshit jobs as many listed in Graeber’s astute book admit themselves. But what defines a bullshit job? Graeber says that his ‘definition is mainly subjective [and that his book represents a] worker’s perspective [because] I think it is safe to assume the worker knows best’ (p. 10). In other words, bullshit jobs are a ‘form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence’ (p. 3). But bullshit jobs are not shitty jobs. Shitty jobs are bad jobs like those filled by slaughterhouse workers, cleaners, promotional mascots, traffic wardens, animal food tasters, port-a-loo toilet cleaners, road kill removers, sewer cleaners and the like. Bullshit jobs are different. Shitty jobs are mostly manual labour jobs. They are paid hourly. By contrast, bullshit jobs are mostly white-collar, salaried jobs. These bullshit jobs are found in public administration as well as in corporations. Some work in outright bullshit jobs while

others have experienced a slow but steady bullshitisation – filling their day with useless paper work, box ticking and form filling. One might distinguish between five types of bullshit jobs (p. 28). There are… 1. Flunkies needed to make a boss look good; ‘you cannot be magnificent without an entourage’ (p. 29); just as an anonymous British academic [says] every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them are only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs’ (p. 181). 2. Goons are put in place to oversee others, to bully and control others; ‘most universities…now have public relations offices with staffs several times larger than would be typical for, say, a bank or an auto manufacturer of roughly the same size’ (p. 36). 3. Duct-tapers are employed to deal with organisational glitches that really should not exist; then there are 4. Box tickers who are there to pretend that an organisation does something that in fact it does not do; and finally, there are 5. Task masters – there job is to assign work to others. They are also more likely to spend a substantial amount of time assessing and justifying what they do rather than actually doing something. These five types are found as managerialism ingrains itself into not-for-profit organisations, companies and corporations (Klikauer, 2013). In some of its worst expressions, they dehumanise work while claiming to humanise the workplace. This takes the form in elaborate propaganda games often linked to new-age-like ‘mindfulness’ (p. 58) – a current fad. The mindful university offers mindfulness.

Meanwhile, the proportion of hours spent on research and teaching declines while the proportion dedicated to so-called administrative tasks increases constantly. Are these useless paper pusher tasks that many academics are forced to endure? Systems like these mark the managerialist takeover of universities. Crucially, the number of managerialists in private institutions has increased at more than twice the rate as it did in majority government-funded universities (Murray & Frijters 2017). Unsurprisingly, managerialism finds its expression in the fact that ‘the proportion of hours spent teaching in class or preparing lessons has declined, while the total number of hours dedicated to administrative tasks has increased dramatically’ (p. 79). Managerialism always means that academics are tormented through one of HR management’s preferred instruments: performance management (Klikauer, 2017). As a worker called Finn says, ‘performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit’ (p. 124).

Still, a senior lecturer based in Melbourne showed me her key performance indicators (KPIs) for 2013. They said that

All bull, no point Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer she had to bring in between $11,500 and $34,000 of external grants per year and publish between 1.05 and 2.1 journal articles per year. In fact, both goals are way beyond what most academics do. As for publications, it not only fosters quantity over quality (Nathan & Shawkataly, 2019) but managerialists also support what Fleck calls Impact Factor Fetishism (Fleck, 2013. We know that KPIs are bullshit, but it has had serious consequences for academics who are measured against unachievable goals so that university managerialists can deny promotions because academic X or Y is an underachiever. The terror wrought by the managerialists is by no means accidental. Graeber writes ‘much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror’ (p. 133).

HR trickery, managerial bullshit and a terrorising office existence (Schrijvers, 2004) are every day occurrences under managerialism or what Graeber calls managerial feudalism. By this, he means that middle managers like to establish and run little fiefdoms (ABC, 2005). Still, one needs an explanation for why corporations, and private and public universities create rafts of wasteful jobs. Is there a gigantic conspiracy of politicians who have created Graeber’s Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs? Perhaps none other than the former US president Barak Obama hit the nail on the head in explaining how it works. Graeber writes:

Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialised health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do. So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legis

lative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs’ (p. 157). Consequently, we have bullshit jobs, and these can even be measured in terms of economic wastefulness. Graeber emphasises, ‘the closest I know to such a study that does use such a broader sample was one carried out by the New Economic Foundation in the United Kingdom, whose authors applied a method called “Social Return on Investment Analysis” to examine six representative occupations, three high-income, three low. Here is a summary of the results: 1. City banker – annual salary c. £5 million – estimated £7 of social value destroyed for every £1 earned. 2. Advertising executive – annual salary c. £500,000, estimated £11.50 of social value destroyed per £1 paid. 3. Tax accountant – annual salary c. £125,000, estimated £11.20 of social value destroyed per £1 paid. 4. Hospital cleaner – annual income c. £13,000 (£6.26 per hour), estimated £10 of social value generated per £1 paid. 5. Recycling worker – annual income c. £12,500 (£6.10 per hour) – estimated £12 in social value generated per £1 paid. 6. Nursery worker – annual salary c. £11,500 – estimated £7 in social value generated per £1 paid. In other words, ‘the more one’s work benefits others, the less one tends to be paid for it’ (p. 212). Since, a lecturer’s work tends to benefit others, such a lecturer is paid less than a university managerialist. Such a university managerialist, at a well-known American private university for example, does not have to sit in an open plan office. The manger has a corporate (read: university) car with chauffeur (in this case, a Maserati with personalised license plate) receiving a substantially higher salary than the lecturer. Inside such Selling-Students-Short (Hil, 2015) and grant-driven universities, managerialists speak of research excellence, which means winning external grants: one of the worst excesses occurs in research. An external grant agency funds roughly ten per cent of all the applications it receives from researchers working at universities. This means the following: A whopping 90% of academic work that goes into writing such grant applications is for nothing in any given round of applications. This is astonishingly wasteful. Much time, money and human creative energy is drained away. All this is engineered by managerialists as they are the important decision-makers, not the researchers in the field. The scale of such wastefulness is mind-numbing. A ‘study determined that European universities spend roughly €1.4 billion a year on failed grant applications’ (p. 188). Thankfully, the €1,400,000,000 is not wasted on teaching and research! To put such stratospheric numbers into perspective, European academics are forced to waste the value of roughly 3.5 Boeing

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020 747-800 aircraft (fully equipped) every year. One should not engage in the foolish belief that things are better in AngloSaxon countries; in fact, they are worse.

This marks the triumph of managerialism (Krakauer, 2019). Managerialism works its way through business organisations just as through universities. It colonises workplaces. Above that towers neoliberalism – managerialism’s evil twin brother and the all-guiding global ideology for decades. Neoliberalism’s political catechism means shaping politics in terms of anti-unionism, anti-government, taxation for the poor – not the rich and corporations – deregulation (read: re-regulation in the interest of business and corporations), relentless competition, the privatisation of everything, and a quasi-religious belief in the still rather illusive free market, etc. Undeterred, neoliberalism and its political henchmen follow a global script. Graeber writes ‘first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilise lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority… against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed’ (p. 255).

Finally, Graeber concludes ‘I look forward to a day sometime in the future when governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations, but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs’ (p. 270). With this, Graeber ends his very readable, highly enjoyable, insightful and most exquisite book on the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave MacMillan. 2013) and 450 other publications. He teaches PhD and MBA students at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia. Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

References

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