I’ve heard it a lot, civil service employees deliberately creating work, or maintaining work for themselves so they don’t get fired or moved.
It happens in private companies too, though a good manager or COO should be able to clear such rubbish from his organisation.
See there is a misconception about work. If the work needs doing, then you will always be employed to do something you already know how to do. But if that work no longer needs to be done, lets say because it’s done by a machine now; then you find yourself without a job, right?
Well no, a great majority of the companies I’ve worked for, have always had a shyness for making people redundant. Some companies go out of their way to find new positions, if they can, during economically certain times.
I’d also suggest that making jobs redundant is a requirement for progress. Doing more with less should make everyone better off. It’s only when the progress is owned as assets that it becomes a problem, because then you have one person benefiting and part of that benefit comes from resources other people would have enjoyed.
In Perl programming we are said to be lazy (in a good way), “don’t do every day, what you can spend 5 days fixing forever”. Remove work permanently from your plate, because there is so much more to do that is so much more useful.