The global workplace, apparently, is infested with parasites. Not the sort that burrow under desks or feast on office lunches, but human ones: workers performing what right-wing critics dismissively label ‘non-jobs’ or ‘fake jobs’. According to some media commentators, these allegedly unnecessary positions—from state bureaucrats to corporate administrators—represent a vast waste of resources that could be better deployed in the ‘real’ economy.
The curious thing about this narrative is not its economic illiteracy, though that is considerable. Rather, it is the suspiciously gendered nature of the roles under attack.
The jobs branded as superfluous tend to be disproportionately filled by women: administrative roles, human resources, communications, and the sprawling apparatus of modern corporate compliance. Meanwhile, the ‘real’ work that supposedly matters—manufacturing, construction, traditional male-dominated industries—escapes such scrutiny.
This is not a coincidence. The assault on ‘non-jobs’ is the latest manifestation of a broader conservative project to restore what its adherents consider the natural order: men earning wages whilst women tend hearth and home. It is the ‘tradwife’ movement meets supply-side economics, wrapped in the rhetoric of efficiency.
The Graeber irony
The intellectual foundation for this assault comes, ironically, from the late anthropologist David Graeber, whose 2018 book Bullshit Jobs argued that capitalism had spawned vast numbers of meaningless positions. Graeber, a self-described anarchist, defined these as roles so pointless that even their occupants could not justify their existence.
However, Graeber’s critique was aimed at capitalism itself, not at particular categories of workers. He argued that technological progress should have freed humanity from drudgery, but instead created make-work to keep people busy. His solution was universal basic income and the dismantling of corporate hierarchies—hardly the stuff of right-wing fantasy.
The modern conservative appropriation of Graeber’s ideas is both selective and cynical. Where Graeber saw systemic problems requiring radical solutions, today’s critics see individual women who ought to be at home, given that the jobs they target happen to be those where women have made substantial gains over recent decades.
The data dissent
The evidence for widespread job redundancy is, to put it charitably, thin. Research examining Graeber’s claims found that only a small and declining proportion of workers consider their roles useless. More tellingly, studies of federal employment show that public sector productivity has generally improved over time, even as right-wing critics demand ever-deeper cuts.
Consider the recent purge of federal workers ordered by the Donald Trump administration. The political right celebrated the firing of what they called ‘worthless parasites’ and ‘unnecessary’ bureaucrats. Yet the departments affected included essential services: nuclear security, emergency management, and public health. The notion that such roles are dispensable reveals either breathtaking ignorance or wilful misrepresentation.
The same pattern emerges in the private sector. The administrative functions that critics deride—human resources, compliance, communications—exist because modern businesses require them. Regulatory complexity, employee relations, and stakeholder management are not optional extras in a sophisticated economy. They are the connective tissue that allows large organisations to function.
The gender gap giveaway
The gendered nature of this critique becomes obvious when one examines which jobs escape condemnation. Manufacturing workers, overwhelmingly male, are celebrated as productive heroes. Yet modern manufacturing is highly automated, with productivity gains driven largely by technology rather than human effort. Many factory jobs require no more skill or produce no more tangible value than the office roles dismissed as pointless.
Similarly, construction workers are lauded as essential, despite the industry’s notorious inefficiencies and the dubious social value of many projects. A man building luxury condominiums for the already wealthy is deemed productive; a woman designing diversity programmes to improve workplace equity is not.
This selectivity reflects deeper assumptions about whose work matters. Traditional male roles, however inefficient or unnecessary, retain their status as ‘real jobs’. Traditional female roles—caring, organising, communicating—are forever suspect, requiring constant justification for their existence.
The tradwife trap
The ultimate goal of this critique is not economic efficiency but social restoration. The ideal, promoted by tradwife influencers and conservative politicians, is a return to the 1950s family model: breadwinning fathers and homemaking mothers. Never mind that this arrangement was viable only for a small, privileged minority even in its supposed heyday, or that it leaves women financially vulnerable should circumstances change.
Only 14 per cent of American households can afford the traditional single-earner model today. Inflation has made dual incomes a necessity for most families, not a choice. However, the fantasy persists that eliminating women’s ‘non-jobs’ would somehow restore male wages to family-supporting levels.
This delusion ignores basic economics. The rise of women’s employment coincided with economic growth, not decline. Countries with higher female labour force participation tend to be richer, not poorer. The notion that women’s work is a zero-sum drain on men’s opportunities is both empirically false and morally repugnant.
The productivity paradox
The irony is that many of the jobs dismissed as pointless are precisely those that enable genuine productivity gains elsewhere. A human resources department that improves employee retention saves recruitment costs. A compliance team that prevents regulatory violations avoids costly penalties. A communications function that maintains stakeholder relationships protects the company’s reputation and market position.
Even roles that seem purely administrative often serve essential coordinating functions in complex organisations. The assistant who schedules meetings and manages workflows may not produce widgets, but she enables others to do so more efficiently. The committee that oversees project management may not build anything tangible, but it prevents costly delays and duplications.
This is not to say that all jobs are equally valuable or that inefficiencies do not exist. Every organisation harbours some degree of waste, and periodic reviews are healthy. But the notion that vast swathes of the workforce—particularly women—are engaged in meaningless busy work is both factually wrong and politically motivated.
The choice that isn’t
The tradwife movement’s emphasis on women’s ‘choice’ to leave the workforce reveals the deeper agenda at play. When conservative politicians and media figures promote traditional gender roles, they are not advocating genuine freedom but attempting to re-impose constraints that feminism fought to remove.
The data tells a different story about women’s actual choices. Women’s labour force participation continues to rise despite decades of rhetoric about the joys of domesticity. When women do leave the workforce, it is typically due to childcare costs or workplace inflexibility, not a sudden conversion to traditional values. The solution to these problems is better policy, not nostalgic retreat.
Moreover, the celebration of female domesticity conveniently ignores its economic value. Unpaid care work, predominantly performed by women, is estimated to be worth trillions of US dollars annually in most developed countries.
If this labour were performed by paid professionals—nannies, housekeepers, cooks—it would be counted in GDP and celebrated as economic activity. Because it is done by wives and mothers, it is rendered invisible.
The reckoning ahead
The attack on ‘non-jobs’ will likely intensify as economic pressures mount and traditional hierarchies face challenge. But it will fail, for the simple reason that the modern economy requires the very roles it seeks to eliminate. Try running a contemporary corporation without human resources, compliance, or communications functions. Attempt to govern a complex society without bureaucrats, administrators, and coordinators. The results would be swift and catastrophic.
The real test will be whether societies can resist the siren call of simple solutions to complex problems. The promise that eliminating women’s ‘fake jobs’ will restore prosperity and traditional order is seductive precisely because it requires no difficult choices or fundamental changes. It offers the illusion of progress through regression.
But progress, as any economist will tell you, comes from expanding opportunities, not restricting them. The path forward lies not in driving women from the workforce but in making work more flexible, equitable, and rewarding for all. The alternative—a return to the mythical golden age when men worked and women waited—was never golden for most, and cannot be restored in any case.
The ‘non-jobs’ critique, then, is itself a kind of bullshit. It serves not to improve economic efficiency but to justify a particular vision of social organisation that has little to do with productivity and everything to do with power. In that sense, it is the most pointless job of all.
Photo: Dreamstime.
