make-work 
North American
adjective
Denoting an activity that serves mainly to keep someone busy and is of little value in itself: a make-work scheme for lawyers...
- He may be a wash-out as an MLA, but all by himself, he's served as a one-man make-work project for northern lawyers.
- I don't really care much about Dr. Corday's lovelife, and the boxes in the admissions area seemed like a make-work project for the writers as well as the characters.
- As we can all see now, their actual purpose, apparently, is to create three juicy make-work projects for Nunavut's ailing construction industry.
noun [mass noun]
Make-work activity: leftists are accused of scholarly make-work in studying obscure authors...
- Then they give the companies all kinds of make-work in exchange.
- They are also masters of make-work, bureaucracy, and Kafkaism.
- Martins's two short ballets, both to John Adams music, are unabashed make-work.