File:Percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation (per workers' own perceptions).jpg

English: "Note: Data presented as two-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) with standard errors.

Source: American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS), 2015 (n = 1811)."

"In total, more than 19% of all respondents in the 2015 AWCS sample perceive their jobs as socially useless. This is a considerably larger share than Dur and van Lent (2019) found in their 47 countries (8%) and Soffia et al. (2022) found in the EU28 (4.8%). At the same time, however, it is also considerably less than the 37% that were found for the UK by Dahlgreen (2015). These differences may arise for various reasons. Thus, it has been argued, for example, that Anglo-Saxon countries are more heavily financialized than others and therefore feature a higher share of socially useless jobs (Soffia et al., 2022). Furthermore, results may vary based on the specific wording of the survey questions used. For example, people may be more likely to have a ‘feeling of doing useful work’ (Soffia et al., 2022) than to agree with the statement that their jobs are making a ‘positive impact on [their] community and society’. Thus, only the latter statement specifies who people’s work should be useful to (‘community and society’), while the former statement leaves this open. Similarly, one may argue that ‘making a meaningful contribution to the world’ (Dahlgreen, 2015) is even more demanding, which is why fewer people agree to this statement. In any case, the 19% found here clearly show that perceiving one’s job as socially useless is more than just a marginal phenomenon in the US.

Furthermore, breaking down these 19% by occupation (Figure 1) reveals that workers who believe their jobs are useless are distributed very unevenly across occupations. Shares thus vary between 4.6% (education, training and library occupations) and 31.7% (transportation and material moving). This strongly supports the notion that occupations are meaningful categories to analyse when trying to explain why workers consider their jobs socially useless. In addition, Figure 1 reveals that Graeber’s occupations do not stand out as the ones with the highest share of socially useless jobs. Even though three of them are located clearly above the average (sales and related, office and administrative support, business and financial) and the other two are only a little below (legal occupations, management), the highest share of socially useless jobs is found in other occupations. This provides only limited support to Graeber’s theory since it clearly cannot explain the observed distribution all by itself. However, this distribution may also be affected by other factors that vary across occupations. Multivariate analyses are therefore needed to estimate the effect of occupations themselves."