Meaningless Job

AKA: Stupid Work, Useless Job, Pointless Job.
Context:
- It can (typically) be performed by an Unhappily Employed Person.
- It can be created to avoid High Unemployment.
Example(s):
- a Low-Pay Service Job, such as a Low-Pay Retail Job.
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- a Meaningful Job.
See: Dirty Job, Dull Job.

References

(Williams, 2014) ⇒ Joseph Williams. (2014). “My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.” In: The Atlantic, March 11 2014.
- After veteran reporter Joseph Williams lost his job, he found employment in a sporting-goods store. In a personal essay, he recalls his struggles with challenges millions of Americans return to day after day. …
  I hadn’t had a job in retail since the 1980s. Perhaps youthful nonchalance and the luxury of squandering my paycheck on clothes or beer had helped camouflage the indignities of minimum wage retail job, though I don’t ever recall being frisked at the door. Yet over the decades, employee bag checks have become standard operating procedure in the retail environment, …
  … Mop the floors in the bathroom, replace the toilet paper and scrub the toilets if necessary. Vacuum. Empty the garbage. Wipe down the glass front doors, every night, even if they don’t really need it.

(Graeber, 2013) ⇒ David Graeber. (2013). “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” In: Strike Magazine, 2013-08-17
- QUOTE: … (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) …
  … But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
  These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
  … This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?

(Ehrenreich, 2001) ⇒ Barbara Ehrenreich. (2001). “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America." Henry Holt and Company. ISBN:0805063889

(Woolf, 1929) ⇒ Virginia Woolf. (1929). “A Room of One's Own." ISBN:1614272778
- QUOTE: ...I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide -- a small one but dear to the possessor -- perishing and with it my self, my soul, -- all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart.

…