Why are we so good at creating work?

Modern economies have become very good at creating work. But do we really need all of it?

There is a particular kind of work that is difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. In retail, I spend a surprising amount of my shift picking things up. A customer takes a bag from a shelf and decides they don't want it. Rather than walking back to where they found it, they leave it wherever they happen to be standing. Someone picks up a jumper, looks at it, changes their mind and leaves it inside out on the nearest rail. Someone drops something on the floor and walks away. I put it back. A few minutes later, someone else moves it. I put it back again.

None of this is particularly difficult. None of it is pointless, either. The shop needs people to keep it running. But sometimes I find myself wondering how much of the work we do exists only because of the way we have organised everything around us.

I had the same thought on the bus home recently. I opened a wrapper, and a tiny corner broke off. Without thinking, I flicked it onto the floor. I don't litter. I've never been someone who litters. But I did it almost automatically. Then I thought about the bus driver. I have watched him, between services, walk upstairs and pick up the rubbish people have left behind. I had just created a tiny piece of work for another human being because I couldn't be bothered to hold onto a tiny piece of rubbish. It was a stupid thing to do. But it made me think about how much of modern work consists of dealing with the consequences of what everyone else does.

Years ago, the anthropologist David Graeber gave this phenomenon a much more provocative name. In his essay and later book Bullshit Jobs, he argued that modern economies had somehow managed to produce vast quantities of employment that even the people doing it privately believed did not need to exist.

His question was essentially: if technology has made us vastly more productive, why haven't we used that productivity to give people more free time? John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress could eventually reduce the working week to around 15 hours. Instead, Graeber argued, we created new layers of administrative, managerial and service work to keep people employed.

Something is compelling about that argument. But I am not convinced that the answer is simply that capitalism has invented millions of useless jobs.

For one thing, I am not sure that the jobs we are most tempted to call pointless actually are. Take my own job. Retail is not useless. Someone has to receive the deliveries, put the stock out, serve customers, organise the shop and clean it. Some of the work is repetitive, and some of it exists because customers create more work for each other, but that does not make the people doing it unnecessary.

In fact, I think almost everyone should work in retail or hospitality at some point in their lives. Not because these jobs are some sort of character-building punishment, but because they teach you what it feels like when another person's convenience becomes your responsibility. You learn how to deal with difficult people. You learn patience. You learn to communicate when you are tired. Most importantly, you learn very quickly that the person serving you is a person.

There is also plenty of work that looks bureaucratic or managerial from the outside but is actually essential. One of our team leaders at the shop is a good example. She is constantly doing the difficult jobs nobody else wants to do, organising people, solving problems, keeping the shop moving, and supporting everyone around her. She is not a pointless layer of management. If anything, she is doing three people's jobs.

So perhaps the more interesting question is not whether particular jobs are pointless. It is whether we have become exceptionally good at creating work. A shop needs employees because a shop exists. But how much of the work in that shop is generated by the sheer volume of things we buy?

There are enormous deliveries full of things I sometimes struggle to understand the existence of: novelty gifts, craft kits, seasonal decorations, gadgets for extraordinarily specific purposes, endless variations of things that nobody knew they needed until they were put on a shelf. The more we sell, the more stock arrives. The more stock arrives, the more people we need to move it. The busier the shop becomes, the more people we need to maintain it. The more things people pick up, move, reject, and leave lying around, the more time we spend putting them back. The work is real. The question is why there is so much of it.

“We have become very good at measuring whether people are busy. We are much less interested in asking whether what they are doing needs to be done.”

That takes us back to a much older argument about work itself. Marx wrote about the alienation that occurs when people become separated from the product and purpose of their labour. Work can cease to feel like an expression of what we are capable of doing and instead become something we sell in order to survive. Graeber takes this in a different direction. His great provocation is that we have reached a point where some people are paid to perform work they themselves cannot see the purpose of, while other people perform work that is obviously essential but are poorly paid for doing it.

That contradiction is difficult to ignore. We can be surrounded by people whose work keeps society functioning — nurses, carers, teachers, cleaners, drivers, tradespeople — while creating increasingly elaborate systems for managing, selling, administering and repairing everything else.

And yet I don't think the answer is to start making lists of which occupations deserve to exist. That is where the argument becomes too easy.

The person who cleans up after me is not doing pointless work because I created the mess. The work became necessary because I created the problem. The same is true of a huge amount of modern employment. We don't necessarily employ people to do nothing. We employ people to manage the consequences of a society that generates enormous amounts of activity.

Some of that activity is valuable. Some of it is enjoyable. Some of it is necessary. Some of it exists because somebody else has decided that their time is more valuable than yours. The problem is that we rarely distinguish between them. We have become very good at measuring whether people are busy. We are much less interested in asking whether what they are doing needs to be done.

And perhaps that is why the idea of a shorter working week remains so difficult to imagine. We have built a culture in which work is not simply a way of producing the things we need. It is a moral expectation. Being busy is evidence of virtue. Having nothing to do is treated as a personal failure.

This is where Graeber's argument about a Universal Basic Income becomes more interesting to me than his taxonomy of “bullshit jobs”. If people need employment in order to survive, there will always be enormous pressure to create employment. We will continue to ask how many jobs an investment creates, rather than what those jobs are actually for. We will continue to treat paid employment as the gateway to dignity, regardless of whether the work itself provides any sense of purpose.

A Universal Basic Income would not mean abolishing work. It would mean breaking the connection between survival and the need to sell your labour. It could mean that someone can leave a job they find meaningless without facing destitution. It could mean that someone can study, care for another person, make art, start a business, volunteer or simply have more time without having to prove that these activities are economically productive.

And it might force us to confront something we have spent a very long time avoiding. What if we don't actually need to keep everyone busy? Common Weal has argued for years that a Universal Basic Income could provide that security, and has produced detailed work on how such a system could be designed and funded.

But the point, for me, is not really about whether the person restocking a shop shelf is doing a worthwhile job. It is about why we have built a society in which so much of our time is spent doing things for each other that we could have avoided doing in the first place.

I will probably still pick up the bags. I'll put the jumpers back on the rails. I'll tidy the shop after customers have left. And next time I have a tiny piece of rubbish in my hand, I'll keep it until I find a bin. Not because the bus driver shouldn't have a task between services. Perhaps we should stop creating unnecessary work for one another and pretending that the number of hours we spend working is the same thing as the value we create.

Maybe the question we should have been asking all along is not how to give everyone a job. Maybe it is what we would do if we didn't have to.