Why aren't we working 15 hours a week? Pointless jobs, and the hours we could get back

The promise

In 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". He predicted that "the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day". With that much wealth, he wrote, the work left to do could be shared: "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while" (Keynes, 1930/1931).

The wealth arrived. The short week didn't. Australia's National Employment Standards still set 38 hours as the ordinary full-time week (Wikipedia, 2026a).

Graeber's answer: we invented work

In 2013 the anthropologist David Graeber wrote a short essay for a magazine called Strike!. "Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed" (Wikipedia, 2026b). It was read more than a million times and translated into 12 languages.

Two years later the pollster YouGov asked British workers whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. 37% said no (Wikipedia, 2026c).

In 2018 Graeber turned the essay into a book, Bullshit Jobs. He defined one as paid work "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence", while the worker still feels obliged to pretend otherwise. He sorted them into five kinds:

Type	What the job does
Flunkies	Make someone else look or feel important
Goons	Exist because the other side has them, like lobbyists
Duct tapers	Patch a problem nobody fixes at the source
Box tickers	Let an organisation say it did something it didn't
Taskmasters	Supervise people who don't need it, or invent work for them

(Wikipedia, 2026c)

Graeber kept writing. With the archaeologist David Wengrow, he finished The Dawn of Everything, a history of how early societies chose to organise themselves, around August 2020. He died in Venice on 2 September 2020, weeks later. The book came out in October 2021 (Wikipedia, 2026b; Wikipedia, 2026d).

What the later studies found

Graeber's numbers came from polls. Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell tested his theory against a large, representative European survey of working conditions. Fewer than 8% of workers felt their jobs were useless, and the share was falling, not rising (Soffia et al., 2021).

That's a fair blow to the headline claim. Most people think their own job is useful, and the evidence doesn't show pointless jobs multiplying.

The same study found something just as important. People who did feel their work was useless had poorer wellbeing, and strongly so, and the feeling tracked bad management and toxic workplaces more than the job itself. Some workers in plainly essential jobs, such as refuse collection, felt it too (Soffia et al., 2021; Wikipedia, 2026c). Feeling useless is often about how people are treated at work, not what the work is.

Why that doesn't settle it

A survey asks whether your job is useful. It can't see the hours inside a useful job that produce nothing. A nurse's job is essential; the fourth form recording the same visit may not be.

Those hours can be measured. In 2017, American health insurers and providers spent 34.2% of all health spending on administration, $2,497 per person. Canada spent 17.0%, or $551 per person. Before Canada moved to a single public payer, the two countries looked alike (Himmelstein et al., 2020). Same kind of doctors, same kind of patients. The difference is the system, and the system decides how much of a working day goes on paperwork.

Australian universities show the same pattern. A 2025 survey of 350 academics at 37 universities found that the two big efficiency moves, centralising administration and automating it, left staff feeling their administrative load had grown, and that it bit hardest in teaching and research (Woelert et al., 2025). The work didn't disappear. It moved onto the people meant to be teaching.

So Graeber and his critics can both be partly right. Few people hold a wholly pointless job. Many people spend a slice of every week on work that serves nobody.

A company that cut it out

In 2006 Jos de Blok and a small team of nurses in Almelo, in the Netherlands, were fed up with how the big home care organisations delivered care. They founded Buurtzorg ("neighbourhood care"): self-governing teams of 10 to 12 nurses, each caring for 50 to 60 people in one neighbourhood, with a simple, flat structure. Nurses also do the dressing and bathing that other providers hand to cheaper staff (Wikipedia, 2026e).

By 2018 Buurtzorg employed about 10,000 nurses, and more than half of all district nurses in the Netherlands work for it. KPMG found it a low-cost provider of home care. Its staff are the most satisfied of any large Dutch company (Wikipedia, 2026e).

That fits the country. Much of the Netherlands sits below sea level, and for centuries neighbours had to agree on keeping the dikes up whatever else they argued about. The Dutch call their habit of consensus the polder model, after the reclaimed land. In 1982, with the economy in trouble, unions, employers and government signed the Wassenaar Agreement, trading shorter working time and less pay for more jobs (Wikipedia, 2026f). The Netherlands has since had the highest share of part-time workers in the EU (Wikipedia, 2026g). A country used to sharing the work found it natural to trust nurses to run themselves.

Give the hours back

Keynes asked the right question: once there's enough, why keep working as if there isn't? The aim here is a 22-hour week. Work 22 hours at most, keep your pay, choose your hours, and work from home where the job allows. It sits between Keynes's 15 hours and today's 38.

The way there is to cut work that produces nothing, not the work that keeps people fed, housed, well and taught. Every report nobody reads, every approval that approves nothing, every system that makes staff type the same thing twice is time that could go back to someone as rest, care or a life. Trials that cut hours without cutting pay are already running, and the results are in Does a shorter working week work?

What you can check this week

• Keep a log. For one week, note each task and ask: who uses this, and what would break if it stopped?
• Find the duplicates. The same information entered twice, the same meeting held for two audiences, the report that restates another report.
• Take one to whoever sets the rule. Most pointless work isn't anyone's fault. It's a rule nobody has had time to remove.

Graeber put a rude name on a real feeling. The studies since show the feeling is rarer than he thought, and more about how work is run. That's the good news. How work is run can change.