Legend has it that Japanese companies, rather than terminate under-performing employees, will seat them "at the window" and not assign them any tasks at all ... This is not terribly compelling short-term, but is horribly boring .
Also, you probably would have to hide all the work, since depending on your contract your employer would probably have some claim to it, since it was during work hours.
I once worked at a newspaper, when "online" was new and side project of the marketing department so that they could sell more ads.
Until I automated things, we were cutting and pasting a few articles each night from Quark into BBEdit and hand-massaging it into HTML templates for upload. They assigned us an "editor". Poor guy had written pro-civil-rights editorials at a time when that didn't go over well. Got assigned shit jobs for decades to try and force him out. We didn't create new content; there was nothing to edit. But, they made him go to all the meetings and report that each day. Dude used a giant trackball and knew nothing about tech, but somehow landed in the department that would one day rule the newsroom. I wonder how he's doing these days.
What do you think they do with the managers they want to fire? ;)
Hell, even in the entertainment industry, where employment is gig-based, Masashi Tashiro didn't get blackballed until he was convicted twice for voyeurism, twice for drug abuse, once for nearly crippling a guy in a car accident he caused, and once for posessing an illegal weapon [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masashi_Tashiro#Second_trial_f...
The "pointless simple make-work" isn't to build up cause, it's to abuse and degrade them until they have enough of it and quit. The technical term for this is "constructive dismissal".