In the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, that system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). 
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars.
These are bullshit jobs
‘who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary”? What’s necessary anyway? And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value. I do not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not.
Question: What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for teachers, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
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
There is a profound psychological violence against those who actually do get to do meaningful work.
Say what you like about nurses, teachers, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against union workers for invoking a ‘fairness’ during their contract disputes. Transit workers for example, the very fact that they can paralyze New York City shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people.
Business interests (advancing on their interests to privatize education and employ non union teachers) have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers. “For them to have a value that we appreciate, they must carry guns and be ready to kill!” But, noteworthy is that their channels of contempt are not directed significantly directed against the school administrators for their ‘supposedly’ bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if the teachers are told ‘but you get to teach children! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’
Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class and its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.