Just how do you propose eating without working? Someone has to work so she or others can eat.
1. under-bidding automation (this will be decreasingly successful)
2. politically suppressing automation (AKA "creating jobs")
…because nobody wants to abandon the "work = eat" rule.
Sure, China employs a lot of manpower to perform the kind of manufacturing that in more developed economies was automated long ago, and that's profitable for them (for the moment). But that's not in the guise of any "make work" scheme, it's because it's the cheapest thing they can do at their current phase of industrial development.
[1] Even this claim is a little suspect. I have heard that in places like France and Japan, the political pressure for stable, high-wage jobs at the exclusion of others has led to fairly inefficient automation to avoid the subsequent risk and expense of hiring.
Machinery, automation, and corporate food production has a lot to do with why people work less on farms. However, overwhelmingly agriculture in the US uses migrant labor that is often paid very little wage when workers are needed.
Sure, the amount of that work is going down, and has been going down for centuries, but that's not an inevitable, natural process: The technological innovation to make food easier and cheaper to produce also requires work.
1. stuff people would do for free, for patriotism, for fun, or for kudos
2. stuff it takes economic coercion to make people do
I can't offhand think of any #2 that couldn't in principle either be automated away, or harmlessly abandoned.
Just plop a solar panel and eat your manufactured cucumber. Problem is that agriculture today doesn't create it reliably enough (drought, heavy weather can destroy your crops).