This is the 19th installment in a series about extending the Green New Deal to confront multiple global crises. Read Part I (Deconstructing environmental racism), II (Rural renewal), III (Upcycle the war machine), IV (GND manifestos), V (No oil bailouts), VI (No corporate ecocide), VII (Defund the police), VIII (Zero Covid approach: NZ), IX (Finnish equality lessons), X (Denmark stops drilling), XI (Costa Rica rewilding), XII (Indigenous justice), XIII (Free public transport) XIV (No borders), XV (Chile's democratic revolution), XVI (Undermining neoliberal dogma), XVII (Climate Litigation) and XVIII (Degrowth).
Work and jobs creation are sacrosanct. They are supported by many people across the political spectrum, even Green New Deal advocates. The same can be said of growth. One measure of the degree that work and growth are currently worshiped can be seen by turning on the news. Just count how many policies are justified as a form of either growth or job creation. Frequently many.
Yet should most people actually have to work eight hours a day, five days a week? How about four days? Or even less? These questions were brought into sharp focus by the pandemic, as people everywhere suddenly realized there are more important things than work. Caring for their loved ones, working in their communities, being creative, learning, partying, growing plants, socializing: the pandemic helped us see that life can be – indeed it needs to be – about so much more than work.
Many studies also show how destructive work is, not least because it involves a sometimes authoritarian relationship with one’s boss. People also consume in unhealthy ways in order to work longer hours – for example, buying plastic-wrapped packed lunches that they eat while sitting mostly stationary in rush-hour, or buying other goods to make up for having so little time to actually live.
In addition to enjoying life and becoming more healthy, cutting out useless work also offers a chance to cut our climate emissions.
At this point, the climate crisis has become so severe that we need to take every action today to transform our societies. In 2022, the International Panel on Climate Change reported that our collective survival depends on cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030.
One crucial intervention in the discussion about the value of work was Bullshit Jobs, a best-selling 2018 book written by the late David Graeber. In it, Graeber asserts there is a great deal of work that makes little or no contribution to the world.
What is a Bullshit Job?
Bullshit Jobs is a provocation. Graeber originally published the idea in Strike Magazine in 2013. The concept of “bullshit jobs” went viral. After that, the British pollsters YouGov asked people whether they thought their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. The results: 37 percent said no and 13 percent were unsure, while 50 percent said yes. A Dutch poll's results were similar.
In the book, Graeber traces why work has become, to many, a noble venture: an end, not just a means. Partly it’s the Puritan-Protestant work ethic that has become globalized from northern Europe and Anglo-Americans, inspired by the biblical notion that “idle hands do the work of the devil.” As before, this sentiment remains useful for today's elite, as working all day gets in the way of people organizing other more just ways of living.
To unpick the bullshit jobs phenomenon, Graeber's book relies on many mainly anonymous testimonies, including from employees, known as flunkies, who work to make their bosses look more important, or “box tickers,” who gather information without purpose. The toxic work we hear about ranges from telemarketers, to subcontractors working for subcontractors, to museum guards working in empty rooms.
Society-wide, Graeber explores how, in the last century, there has been an explosion of unnecessary sectors. These include the enormous gatekeeping administration for U.S. healthcare; bloated global bureaucracies that means-test whether people receive welfare or not; and administrators who create meta-work that obstructs workers from working – whether in the form of teachers teaching, nurses nursing, and so on.
Why has this happened? One explanation is that throughout the last century, and especially during the era of neoliberalism, the fastest growing part of the economy have been finance, insurance and real estate. “A rising tide of bullshit soils all boats,” Graeber laments.
From a purely capitalist economic perspective, such a logic is senseless. Yet Graeber argues we are living in a system more like managerial feudalism, where money is extracted from the masses and elevated to the billionaires. In effect, today's middle manager flunkies, box tickers, lobbyists and the like are contemporary versions of earls, knights and other royal hangers-on. Their narrow purpose is to uphold the corporate establishment and, in so doing, “share” the spoils of their extractivism that created wealth.
This system is even more toxic, Graeber highlights, since the majority of useful jobs are the worst paid – such as care work, cleaning, or looking after children. In turn, the book explains how populists have exploited this system while exuding envy, jealousy and loathing in their message to topple the elites.
As work is so central to the engine of capitalism, anyone who questions it is deemed a threat to the system – whether it’s in the form of advocating for a shorter work week or advocating for closing down whole sectors of the economy, as Graeber does. Countering this claim is a backlash in which people espouse the idea that all work is valid, meaningful and necessary. A key target of this ire is against Bullshit Jobs.
Bullshit backlash
Much of the backlash against Bullshit Jobs has stemmed from the academic paper, “Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs,” published in 2021. Yet this study hardly rests on solid foundations, with its claim that only 5 percent of jobs across Europe are “bullshit,” far fewer than Graeber suggests.
The study’s conclusions are based on a lengthy European Working Conditions Survey, which is itself a massive box-ticking exercise orchestrated by a complex Europe-wide bureaucracy (its management structure alone is laid out across nine pages).
Does this operation itself smell like a bit of bullshit? Take a guess. A more direct question to ask might be: are controversial topics really discovered from box-ticking surveys like these? And is there a danger of survey fatigue when the fundamental question your research relies on only comes in the form of Question 61, sub-section J?
It’s interesting how triumphant some advocates of neoliberalism sound when they declare that only 5 percent of jobs are bullshit. That's still a lot.
Another contradiction to those bullshit deniers is the four-day-a-week trial that took place across 70 UK companies. The trial showed that with 20 percent less work, productivity broadly remained the same or even went up – suggesting at least a fifth of most people's work time is unnecessary.
The counter-attack on Bullshit Jobs aside, the pandemic has clearly pushed questions about work's social value higher up the agenda. In 2020, people found out whether or not they were “essential workers”; in 2021 we experienced the Great Resignation, and in 2022 we are continuing to explore the contours of Quiet Quitting. Not all of this is about bullshit work, but it is about people questioning how much work rules their lives.
What does this all mean for the Green New Deal?
Many advocates of the Green New Deal propose more jobs and productivity, and they don’t necessarily question growth. But what is the point of jobs for jobs' sake?
Instead, degrowth and degrowing jobs need to be central within a Green New Deal. Toward this end, it’s important to explore, as the next installment in this series will do, the merits of Universal Basic Income while also looking at “Batshit Jobs” – a term coined by Bue Rübner Hansen in 2019 to describe jobs that have an impact on the world, which the world cannot sustain. Ultimately, we need to work out how to support people when their jobs disappear.
In the meantime, it is worth imagining a world without unnecessary work, where what is needed – like care – is shared out. Another upshot would be to imagine how to transform cities, so there is no need for highways heavily polluting the communities that currently suffer the worst air pollution. We could transform masses of offices into spaces for life.
In a nutshell, we can create a world not dominated by so much work, but steered more by an ethos of creativity, or care; a world where billionaires would be disempowered as more people organize collectively. No wonder the powers-that-be aren’t discussing bullshit jobs, or reducing them.
Read Part I (Deconstructing environmental racism), II (Rural renewal), III (Upcycle the war machine), IV (GND manifestos), V (No oil bailouts), VI (No corporate ecocide), VII (Defund the police), VIII (Zero Covid approach: NZ), IX (Finnish equality lessons), X (Denmark stops drilling), XI (Costa Rica rewilding), XII (Indigenous justice), XIII (Free public transport) XIV (No borders), XV (Chile's democratic revolution), XVI (Undermining neoliberal dogma), XVII (Climate Litigation) and XVIII (Degrowth).
