David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

(Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, Simon & Shuster, May 2018)

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…