this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Office jobs are still jobs. If a business genuinely was wasting vast amounts of money on fake work, then these jobs would be eliminated already. They are gradually being automated away, same as physical labor, but they still exist because they are still important for production.
The target of your ire should not be this or that subsection of the working class, but instead the capitalist class.
A lot of jobs are pure bullshit jobs that only exist because the corporation needed to hire inorder to appear growing. They then do mass firings to appear like they're cutting costs. It's all smoke and mirrors for the shareholders.
That doesn't make the people filling those roles not working class, in fact it highlights how disposable the working class is to the capitalist class, and further reinforces my point: capitalists are the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
The word meaningless is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it meaningless to sort and file reports? In the grand scheme of things, and to society, maybe. But not to the company that's paying you. They have value from it.
I'm not saying the companies are hyper efficient with only purposeful work. I'm saying that companies aren't intentionally throwing out money on work that they know is useless. They're too greedy for that.
Once a company reaches a certain size, being able to micro manage individual workloads to max efficiency become impossible and individual middle managers have an incentive to appear like their whole workforce is necessary.
They're not intentionally throwing money away because to them, the appearance of growth has to come before actually growth. They consider useless hires the cost of doing business. And when it fails, "they can just make the though decisions" and do the layoff the shareholders want. Otherwise, how to do explain the waves of mass hirings and mass firings?
Right. But back to the context of this thread: they're all given work and they're all real workers, even if their work isn't ultimately providing dollars to the balance sheet. They still have a value to the company.
And all workers should have labor day off.
The original comic is being needlessly divisive.
I'm aware of Graeber's work. I don't really agree with much of his conclusions or analysis, as he is an anarchist and I'm a Marxist-Leninist, but we would agree that much of office work is indeed socially unproductive, if we were to pivot to a socialist economy. That being said, we exist in capitalism, and thus office workers are working class, regardless of how necessary the work they do is beyond helping generate profit.
Yeah, I'm an anarchist who generally does agree with Graeber, but I do think that it's vital to understand that he did see office workers, including ones in bullshit jobs, as working class. He resented the bureaucracy not the bureacrat. And it's important to note that plenty of office work isn't inherently within his definition of bullshit jobs. Hell, I'd argue there's a fair chance that the largest portion of people working bullshit jobs are in the category of "industry does more harm than good and the worker knows it".
This was an important part that shouldn't be discounted since it was still at the core of the argument.
I doubt that. You could do the same thing with fake job postings if you really wanted, and it's cheaper.
But let's say you're right. Those people would still be given lots of work and be busy, because if they were allowed to be not busy everyone else would see and not want to work.
They do do that with fake job listings.