David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs theory’ has generated a great deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions. Marx’s concept of alienation and a ‘Work Relations’ approach provide inspiration for an alternative account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

David Graeber 的“废话工作理论”引起了学术界和公众的极大兴趣。该理论认为，大量且迅速增加的工人正在从事他们自己认为无用且没有社会价值的工作。尽管产生了明确的可检验假设，但该理论并非基于稳健的实证研究。因此，我们使用来自欧盟的代表性数据来检验其五个核心假设。尽管我们发现对做无用工作的看法与幸福感不佳密切相关，但我们的发现与格雷伯理论的主要主张相矛盾。将自己的工作描述为无用的员工比例很低，而且在下降，与 Graeber 的预测几乎没有关系。