The Bullshit Jobs Phenomenon: Quantifying Meaningless Work and Its Systemic Costs to Society

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Author's Note

This paper began where all the papers in this series began: with a person who got hurt, and a system that did the hurting.

The OMXUS Research Series exists because fourteen things need to change. Not fourteen policy preferences. Fourteen prevention requirements — each one traceable to a specific failure that broke a specific person. Goal 2 (22-hour work week) (22-hour work week) of those fourteen says: Work 22 hours max. Keep your pay. Choose your hours. Work from home.

People hear that and laugh. They think it's utopian. They think it's lazy. They think it's impossible.

This paper is the proof that it is none of those things.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Australia has approximately 16 million working-age adults. The functional work that keeps the country running — the healthcare, the food production, the teaching, the building, the maintenance, the research — amounts to roughly 352 million hours per week. Divide one by the other. You get 22 hours.

That is not a dream. It is division.

The remaining hours — the 208 million weekly hours consumed by the consultants, the compliance officers, the middle managers, the corporate administrators, the box-tickers, and the taskmasters — produce nothing that anyone needs. We know this because during COVID-19 lockdowns, approximately 40 to 60 percent of jobs ceased, and the world kept turning. The supermarkets stayed stocked. The hospitals stayed open. The power stayed on. The consultants stayed home, and nobody noticed.

John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by 2030. He was right about the productivity. He was wrong about what we would do with it. We invented bullshit instead.

This paper documents the bullshit. It names it. It counts it. It measures the psychol