Very often the work does not need to get done, the work uses up a poorly paid employee’s entire work day to squeeze out an extra fraction of a percent of profit.
You’re right about money, and employers are often stealing time as well.
See also: bullshit Jobs
I believe it was Marx who first observed that superfluous jobs, as well as unemployment, are inextricably linked to capitalism.
EDIT: Found a relevant Marx quote in Grundrisse:
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.
See also Marcuse, 1969:
The absorption [i.e. disappearance] of unemployment and the maintenance of an adequate rate of profit would […] require the stimulation of demand on an ever larger scale, thereby stimulating the rat race of the competitive struggle for existence through the multiplication of waste, planned obsolescence, parasitic and stupid jobs and services.
Great quote. I’m sure people have been spying out bullshit jobs before the industrial revolution, too.
On call standing in the corner to present candied dates or wave palm fronds over the emperor was necessary only for the emperor to fool himself into thinking he was inherently more important than anyone else.
I can’t imagine nobody noticed.
