Bullshit Job

Graeber defined a bullshit job as a form of paid employment 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 this is not the case. His 2013 essay in Strike! magazine, titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," argued that the economic system had produced an expanding class of jobs that served no discernible social purpose, including corporate lawyers, public relations specialists, financial lobbyists, and large categories of administrative and managerial positions whose primary function was to coordinate, supervise, or justify other positions of equally questionable necessity.

The essay's viral spread prompted Graeber to expand the argument into a full-length book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster. In the book, Graeber identified five categories: flunkies, who exist to make someone else feel important; goons, who serve aggressive functions like corporate lobbying; duct tapers, who fix problems that should not exist; box tickers, who create documentation that serves no practical purpose; and taskmasters, who create and supervise unnecessary work for others. Graeber drew on a YouGov poll conducted in 2015 in which thirty-seven percent of British workers said their jobs did not make a meaningful contribution to the world.

Graeber, who died in September 2020 at age fifty-nine, was a professor at the London School of Economics and an activist associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. His concept of the bullshit job challenged the assumption, embedded in both capitalist and socialist frameworks, that markets and planning systems naturally eliminate unnecessary labor. The persistence of the term in workplace discourse after his death reflects how precisely it identified a form of suffering that existing vocabulary, including burnout, boredom, and disengagement, could describe only partially.