NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS (profanity alert):

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn't have enough to do. He'd mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn't claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who'd come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities. [...]

The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bull[***]t Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much--or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it. [...]

Graeber's book expands on his viral 2013 essay "On the Phenomenon of Bull[***]t Jobs," in which he took aim at "employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." [...]

His method for identifying bull{***}t is, by his own account, unscientific. He draws from a pool of anecdotes to produce an anatomy of bull[***]t workers, who fall into five categories: "flunkies," "goons," "duct-tapers," "box tickers," and "taskmasters."

"Flunkies" are the modern equivalent of feudal minions who make bosses feel big, important, and strong. Whereas they were once doormen and concierges, they now tend to be receptionists who do little besides answer cold calls and refill the candy bowl, or personal assistants who drop off their boss's dry cleaning and smile when he walks through the door. "Goons" essentially bully people into buying things they don't need: Marketing managers and PR specialists do this, as do telemarketers. "Duct-tapers" are employed to fix things that aren't or shouldn't be broken or do tasks that could easily be automated--data entry, copying and pasting, photocopying, and so on. "Box tickers" help companies comply with regulation (or offload responsibility for complying), and finally "taskmasters," or middle managers, spread more BS by assigning it to others.

"The creation of a BS job," one manager tells Graeber, "often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the [prescribed] format and special bureaucratese." She explains that her organization's bureaucracy created odd incentives to retain employees whose work was inadequate. It was easier for her to hire someone in a new position than to fire and replace the incompetent employee. This, she notes, helped BS jobs proliferate.

Graeber attempts to quantify just how much--and after some back-of-the envelope calculations, he wagers that 37 to 40 percent of all office jobs are "bull[***]t." He further contends that about 50 percent of the work done in a nonpointless workplace is also bull[***]t, since even useful jobs contain elements of nonsense: the pretending to be busy, the arbitrary hours, the not being able to leave before five. "Bull[***]tization" is even infecting the most nonbull[***]t professions, with teachers overloaded with administrative duties that didn't use to exist and doctors forced to deal with paperwork and insurance firms that probably should be abolished.

There's no sure way to verify Graeber's estimates, but for white-collar workers, they seem basically right. Work backward: How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor's appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.

This state of affairs seems to defy not just human reason, but also basic capitalist logic: Wouldn't a profit-seeking organization tend to cull unnecessary compensated labor rather than encourage it? Graeber proposes that there is an explicitly irrational reason why such jobs exist--a system he calls "managerial feudalism," wherein employers keep adding layers and layers of management so that everyone can feel their job is important or at least justified. (They're "mentoring" young people. They're helping others develop careers!) The bigger the staff, the more important the company and its leaders feel, regardless of purpose or productivity.

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