"On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant"
by Graeber, David (2013)
Abstract
… these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit . The same goes for almost all the new in- dustries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried …
Key Passage
productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away […]. But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs. (p.2)
Keywords
Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, Meaningless Work, Job SatisfactionThemes
Bullshit Jobs, Meaningful WorkLinks to Reference
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