Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.

There are hordes of people--HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers--whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.

Graeber explores one of society's most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Clever and charismatic (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and a thought-provoking examination of our working lives (Financial Times).

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison's most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities. In this model, those who come out on top are there because they earned it, and everyone else needs to buckle down, glove up, and, maybe one day, they'll get there too.

As the wealth gap widens, communities crumble, and Americans work more for less, Adam Chandler raises the question: What happens when perspiration isn't enough? To answer it, he crisscrosses the country interviewing mayors, teachers, generals, pastors, construction workers, and entrepreneurs, to reveal just how untenable relying on perspiration as a strategy has truly become. He also delves into America's past to reveal how our government, education system, and culture at large have woven the idea of meritocracy deep into the fabric of American society and how some of history's most famous so-called bootstrappers really built their wealth. From George Washington to Seattle, Washington, Jay Gatsby to Bill Gates, 99% Perspiration unpacks the misguided obsession with hard work that has come to define both the American dream and nightmare, offering insight into how we got here and hope for where we may go.

You're told that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Whether it's working for exposure and experience, or enduring poor treatment in the name of being part of the family, all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this labor of love myth--the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries--from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete--Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.

As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

This is a deep exploration of craftsmanship by someone with real, hands-on knowledge. The book is also quirky, surprising, and sometimes quite moving. --Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman

Called the sleeper hit of the publishing season by The Boston Globe, Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a knowledge worker, based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

Studs Terkel's classic oral history of Americans' working lives--and the inspiration for Barack Obama's new Netflix series about work in the twenty-first century

Reading these stories, I started to consider my own place in the world, and understand how connected we are to one another. [Working] helped inform the choices I made in my own work. --President Barack Obama

Perhaps Studs Terkel's best-known book, Working is a compelling, fascinating look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews conducted with everyone from gravediggers to studio heads, this book provides a moving snapshot of people's feelings about their working lives, as well as a timeless look at how work fits into American life.

Working received rave reviews upon its initial publication, including from the New York Times Book Review, which praised its incredible abundance of marvelous beings and very special electricity and emotional power, and the Boston Globe, which called it a magnificent book . . . a work of art, adding, To read it is to hear America talking.

Nearly fifty years after its initial publication, Working remains a deeply relevant American classic, one of the most important works of oral history ever published.

A bottom-up investigation of the broken system of professional licensing, affecting everyone from hairdressers and morticians to doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and those who rely on their services.

Tens of millions of US workers are required by law to have a license to do their jobs--about twice as many as are in unions. The requirements are set by over 1,500 industry-specific licensing boards, staffed mainly by volunteers from the industries they regulate. These boards have enormous power to shape the economy and the lives of individuals. As consumers, we rely on licensing boards to maintain standards of hygiene, skill, and ethics. But their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to work. And where boards could be useful, curbing harms and ensuring professionalism, their performance is profoundly disappointing.

When Rebecca Haw Allensworth began attending board meetings, she discovered a thicket of self-dealing and ineptitude. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with board members and applicants, The Licensing Racket goes behind the scenes to show how boards protect insiders from competition and turn a blind eye to unethical behavior. Even where there is the will to discipline bad actors, boards lack the resources needed to investigate serious cases. The consequences range from the infuriatingly banal--a hairdresser prevented from working--to the deeply shocking, with medical licensing boards bearing considerable blame for the opioid crisis and for staffing shortages during the COVID epidemic. Meanwhile, unethical lawyers who are allowed to keep their licenses are overrepresented among advocates working with the most vulnerable groups in society.

If licensing is in many arenas a pointless obstacle to employment, in others it is as important as it is ineffective. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and outlines an agenda for reform where it is most needed.

In the modern workplace, employees collaborate. Managers are expected to be effective team leaders and employees are expected to be valued teammates. But many teams struggle. Being part of a struggling team can be unpleasant, but it can also hurt your career and waste company resources.

In Teams That Work, Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas present the seven drivers of team effectiveness and the clearest recommendations on what really makes teams great. Applying the lessons they've learned from working with high-stakes, high-risk team situations to any kind of organization, they will dispel some of the most enduring myths (e.g., can you be both a star and a great team player?), feature the most useful psychological research, and share real-world illustrations of effective teams in action. Readers will find actionable, evidence-based tips for being an effective team leader, a great team member, a supportive senior leader, or an impactful consultant.

Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster--disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun.

This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity's first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a machine civilization and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world.

Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics.

A Living is a vivid portrait of the working lives of the patients who visit Dr. Michael Stein, a primary care doctor in urban America. What makes his patients unique is that they, by and large, do demanding manual labor. Very few have the luxury of working remotely, or seated.

Inspired by Studs Terkel's classic Working, Stein produces an eye-opening look at what it's like to have to work long hours at physical jobs for a paycheck in America. A Living is composed of vignettes, snap shots of people's working lives, the dramas, disappointments and frustrations workers have with their colleagues, family co-workers, and supervisors.

And yet it also captures the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, the opportunities for initiative and self-expression that come from doing intricate work with one's hands. Work gives Stein's patients a sense of identity and a social environment to thrive in.

Ultimately, A Living is an extraordinarily powerful and poetic tableaux of working-class America at this moment when manual labor may be the final refuge in the new era of AI.

This book introduces readers to cognitive economics, a rapidly emerging interdisciplinary science built on economic, psychological, and data scientific foundations. Throughout the book, economist Andrew Caplin provides new approaches to help scholars collaborate and solve problems that can shape economic outcomes and bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and the real world.

Divided into two parts, the first section brings readers up to speed on economic concepts that underlie decision-making mistakes, such as utility functions, subjective beliefs, and costs of learning. It also explores real-world applications, including improvements in legal decision-making, online privacy protection, and optimizing human-AI collaboration. The book also discusses the future impact of AI on the workforce and emphasizes the need for decision-making skills and financial literacy in navigating this evolving landscape. In the second section of the book, Caplin addresses the barriers to progress within social sciences, advocating for interdisciplinary cooperation and innovative measurement techniques to advance the field.

The book invites readers to contribute to the development of cognitive economics. Whether you are a socially-conscious and hard-working citizen, business leader, scholar, or policymaker, this book will help you understand why cognitive economics matters to you and how you can contribute to its takeoff.

This book is available open access, which means it is freely available online.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES & MCKINSEY 2020 BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR
One of Fortune Best Books of the Year
One of Inc. Best Business Books of the Year
One of The Times (UK) Best Business Books of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

From an Oxford economist, a visionary account of how technology will transform the world of work, and what we should do about it

From mechanical looms to the combustion engine to the first computers, new technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. But as Daniel Susskind demonstrates, this time really is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.

Drawing on almost a decade of research in the field, Susskind argues that machines no longer need to think like us in order to outperform us, as was once widely believed. As a result, more and more tasks that used to be far beyond the capability of computers - from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts, from writing news reports to composing music - are coming within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is now real.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, Susskind emphasizes. Technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of humanity's oldest problems: how to make sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenges will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, to constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and to provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the center of our lives. Perceptive, pragmatic, and ultimately hopeful, A World Without Work shows the way.

This book gave me a new lens to see the world.--Robert Krulwich, former co-host of WNYC's Radiolab

In Wall Street's War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains.

Original and insightful, Wall Street's War on Workers places US labor practices in the broader context of our social and political life, examining the impact financial strip-mining and legalized looting are having on party politics, destroying the integrity of democratic institutions. Leopold expertly lays out how the proliferation of opioids coupled with Wall Street's destruction of jobs in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have led to widespread mass layoff fatalism. Democrats have unarguably lost the longstanding support of millions of urban and rural workers, and Leopold points out how party leaders have been wrong about the assumption that the white working class is becoming less progressive and motivated to abandon the Democratic Party by reactionary positions on divisive social issues.

With deep analyses, stark examples, and surprisingly simple proactive steps forward, Leopold also asserts that:

• Surviving and thriving in a competitive global economy does not require mass layoffs.
• A new virulent, financialized version of American capitalism is policy driven.
• To end mass layoffs, Wall Street's domination of our economy must end.
• The accepted wisdom about white working-class populism is wrong.
• Ending stock buybacks and changing corporate officers' pay structures could eliminate mass layoffs.
• Mass layoffs are not the result of inevitable economic laws or new technologies like artificial intelligence.

Both groundbreaking and urgent, Wall Street's War on Workers not only offers solutions that could halt mass layoffs but also offers new hope for workers everywhere.

Leopold offers a contrarian yet compelling take on America's white working class . . . [and says] Democrats in 2024 ignore this massive, potentially sympathetic voting bloc at their peril.--Booklist (starred review)

Wall Street's War on Workers [is] the book neither party wants you to read . . . [It] penetrates one of the chief media deceptions of the 21st century, namely that working-class voters are driven by racism and xenophobia, and not by a more simple, enraging motive: they've been repeatedly ripped off, by the wealthy donors to both parties.--Matt Taibbi

In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web--and that foreshadows the true future of work.

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing ghost work make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this ghost economy, and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.

There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in--and all too often overwork and underpay--a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can't get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity--rather than misery--for those who do it.

When viewed from our turbulent times, the Minneapolis of fifty years ago might seem serene, but Minneapolis schoolteachers of the day remember it quite differently. It was, author William D. Green said of their recollections, as if they'd been through war. This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis's public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval--and forever changed the city's politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining.

Since the inception of public education in Minnesota, teachers were expected to pursue their vocation out of civic spirit, with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. Strike! describes the history and circumstances leading to the teachers' extraordinary action, which pitted the progressive and conservative teachers' unions against each other--and both against the all-powerful school district, a hostile governor and state legislature, and a draconian Minnesota law. Capturing the intense emotions and heated rivalries of the strike, Green profiles the many actors involved, the personal and professional stakes, and the issues of politics, law, and the business of education.

Informed by interviews, firsthand accounts, news reports, and written records, Strike! brings to life a pivotal moment not just for Minneapolis's teachers but for the city itself, whose government, school system, and culture would, in a complex but inexorable way, change course for good.

Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association

Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic.

In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time.

Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers--how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic's market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world.

Rockman's research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation's first living wage campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.

[Sennett] compellingly explores the universe of skilled work.--Brian C. Anderson, Wall Street Journal

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman's work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today's world.

The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill--from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Nearly one-third of US workers must obtain a license from a government agency to perform their jobs legally. This impacts employees across all areas, including lawyers, doctors, and accountants, as well as florists, hairdressers, physical therapists, and plumbers. The justification for occupational licensing is that potential consumers allegedly lack the information and knowledge to judge the competence of a service provider. This necessitates a licensing system built to ensure that customers are served by people who have received adequate training and certification in their profession.

While there are recognizable benefits of occupational licensing, the training and certification requirements create barriers to entry for employees or those entering the profession. These barriers can limit competition, raise service costs, and restrict consumer access to essential services. Recent empirical work suggests that consumers have incurred these costs without being adequately protected from incompetent or unscrupulous service providers. This book addresses this situation head on.

In light of occupational licensing's shortcomings, the authors of this book propose and analyze constructive reforms, assessing their effects on key professions such as law, medicine, and finance. Chapters identify the significant costs of current policies and they recommend practical reforms that rely more on market forces. The resulting book provides new ways to reduce licensing costs without compromising service quality.

A timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them ​-- ​and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere. ​-- ​Barack Obama

We're used to thinking of the United States in opposing terms: red versus blue, haves versus have-nots. But today there are three Americas. At one extreme are the brain hubs ​-- ​cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Durham ​-- ​with workers who are among the most productive, creative, and best paid on the planet. At the other extreme are former manufacturing capitals, which are rapidly losing jobs and residents. The rest of America could go either way.

For the past thirty years, the three Americas have been growing apart at an accelerating rate. This divergence is one the most important developments in the history of the United States and is reshaping the very fabric of our society, affecting all aspects of our lives, from health and education to family stability and political engagement. But the winners and losers aren't necessarily who you'd expect.

Enrico Moretti's groundbreaking research shows that you don't have to be a scientist or an engineer to thrive in one of the brain hubs. Carpenters, taxi drivers, teachers, nurses, and other local service jobs are created at a ratio of five-to-one in the brain hubs, raising salaries and standard of living for all. Dealing with this split ​-- ​supporting growth in the hubs while arresting the decline elsewhere ​-- ​is the challenge of the century, and The New Geography of Jobs lights the way.

In a world increasingly under surveillance, this cutting-edge documentary collaboration turns the camera on the ever-expanding American security state. Job/Security bears photographic and narrative witness to the people tasked with safeguarding our modern world. In these uniquely revealing interviews and photographs, authors Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild assemble a multifaceted portrait of the labor of security. They offer a close-up, in-depth look at what the near-ubiquitous business of monitoring, guarding, and protecting life and property in the United States means for the individuals who do the work, and for the society they ostensibly serve.

Representing a wide range of perspectives from inside this vast field, Job/Security features men and women who work in homeland security, border patrol, the secret service, and emergency management, among other fields. In candid terms, these enforcers, critics, and targets of security regimes describe their working lives--their jobs, routines, backgrounds, and families--as well as their feelings about what they do. Their stories offer a rare glimpse into the internal complexities of security work and fresh insight into what the encroaching security state is doing to America's hearts and minds, one worker at a time, and to society at large, on an intimately human scale.