Corporations and the need for jobs

Some scattered thoughts which may or may not link up:
* One of the big changes in the last half century is the size of corporate bodies. Companies are simply bigger than they were 50 years ago. The growth has been occurring for some time. Where once a company was Matthew and Son with 10s or 100s of workers, now there is McDonalds with nearly 2 million - and a multitude of satellite companies dependent on their operations.
* The larger any group of people gets the more communication paths there are and the more effort is required to hold it together. Indeed the major purpose of any organisation, and most of the effort it expends, is to hold itself together (I did see this quoted somewhere but I can't find it). Administrative overhead grows exponentially. Stricter controls and tighter hierarchy are required to ensure that the costs of size do not overwhelm any economies of scale.
* Fifty years ago, it was believed that automation and technological advances would reduce the need for work and eventually the majority of our time would at leisure, not at work. Somewhere along the way this has changed and working hours are now longer than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution.
* The type of work which is expanding it office and administrative work. Areas such as primary industry and manufacturing have had some growth but the number of people required to achieve the same outcome has dropped dramatically. The one exception is at head office. Many corporate headquarters now employ more people than a small country.
* I have heard it said that the purpose of many of these jobs is to keep people occupied. I think maybe that is one outcome, but the other consequence is that the administrative tasks necessary to hold together such large numbers can now be done. Management is the highest aspiration of many employees and organising other people is the main task that managers do - whether it is actually needed or not. Note that, in general, this is not productive work in that it does not produce anything. It simply allows others to produce.
* In short, the outcome of technological advance (especially in communications technology) has been to allow larger and larger organisations to balance their bloated managements on a smaller and smaller base of actual workers. Not that the base is necessarily small in many cases (see the numbers for McDonalds above) - not compared to the worker base during the peak of unionism half a century (or more) ago. It is just that the productive employees are a smaller percentage of the whole.

I see a great many people working near me in office buildings and I wonder what they are doing all day. How much actually gets done after all the late nights and meetings and proposals and business cases and evaluation and analysis and revisions and documents and status reports and strategies and estimates and decisions and visions and everything? How much is really achieved for all that work? Is it really just a matter of keeping all those people occupied?

Or perhaps I am just feeling jaded