make-work

See also: makework

English

Alternative forms

makework

Etymology

From make +‎ work.

Pronunciation

(UK) IPA^(key): /ˈmeɪkwəːk/
Audio (US): (file)

Noun

make-work (uncountable)

(chiefly US) An activity or task assigned or undertaken for the sake of activity or busy-ness, rather than because of a particular need. [from 20th c.]
- 2011 November 10, Lord Gilbert, House of Lords Hansard‎^[1]:
  I once described this rather vulgarly as a Euro-wanking make-work project and I do not resile from that.
- 2011, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, published 2012, page 802:
  They are more sympathetic to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and less sympathetic to protectionism, make-work policies, and government intervention in business.
- 2025 February 12, Dan Vergano, Jeanna Bryner, “Return-to-Office Demands Don’t Benefit Employees or Businesses”, in Scientific American‎^[2]:
  In that COVID era, in June of 2020, I interviewed the anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a few months ahead of his untimely death. His book had suggested that many modern jobs were make-work, created out of “managerial feudalism,” where bosses needed minions around to feel important and signal their importance to other bosses. Graeber felt vindicated by the revolution in working life triggered by COVID, which had exposed some jobs as “essential”—while others were not. Those nonessential workers, he concluded, never needed to clog highways, or sit through meetings where, one by one, people would update the boss while everyone else stared off into space, contemplating what they’d rather be doing with their brief time drawing breath, aka office life.

Derived terms

make-work job