Then who is paying them?
Unless they are being payed by the government, they are obviously creating value for someone (their customers).
If the government gets involved, it's a different story; you have to pay for all government services whether you like them or not, and then the government (which doesn't efficiently respond to market demands) pays for a lot of things that aren't really worth as much to anyone as they cost, but the government buys them anyway because it's someone else's money.
I believe that quite a lot[0] jobs and companies do not create value for society, nor that they do create any value that is needed for anything else than perpetuating the market corner they're in. This is the kind of value that I personally care about.
Take marketing, which is my go-to example of industry that's increasingly a "loopy" kind. A lot of money goes into companies trying to outmarket one another, fighting over the same pool of customers. This here is a negative feedback loop that eats up increasing amount of resources for zero gain for the participants. Money for this often comes from marginal temporary gains (i.e. a company manages to sell more widgets before their competitors cancel out their marketing) and borrowing. The industry is big, so that the feedback loop is subdivided into many links forming a chain, one type of company doing work for another. Think about the graphic design studios that do work for on-line and off-line advertising. Their work is valuable to their direct customers (companies that run advertising for other companies), even though the whole value chain loops around and create little value outside of itself.
(Now add to that a lot of new adtech companies playing support roles, for which the business model is bullshiting their clients into believing their solutions actually make marketing more effective...)
The thing is, if most of the advertising industry suddenly disappeared, the world would not be worse off in any way except lots of people who suddenly found themselves unemployed. That kind of points out that a lot of those jobs were of the bullshit kind - a loops within the market that contribute nothing to society except providing employment.
Maybe in a perfect, efficient free market with no information asymmetry and spherical cows, such things would not be possible. But in real world, market is inefficient, and those inefficiencies is what lets such "loops" exist and grow.
[0] - I initially wrote "most", but I might be undercounting the amount of small businesses that support local communities; those are companies/jobs providing real value to a limited, local market, and there's probably very many of them.
So most of us create "value for people".
"Value for society" is perhaps "meaning"?
Baking bread has value, and no meaning: people pay for it, but it won't change the world -> it's a bad job, per your definition
People pay for bread to avoid cooking it themselves, and for the pleasure of delicious bread... Giving pleasure is getting closer to meaning, but it's an intrinsic feeling: only the baker can feel it, because made his bread with love.
But delicious bread is more expensive: maybe even "meaning" has a price... I think the "value" you're looking for, which is meaning, can be found in almost any job. A marketer can find meaning in a clever/funny ad instead of a phony one.
So don't expect to "find" meaning in a job, but add meaning to your job instead... and it will add value too ;-)
This is only true provided that a free and fair market exists.
Large corporations are often able to exact monopoly rents through a combination of outright monopolization of key resources or capital, favorable / gameable regulations, and by acquiring competition or substitutes, just to name a few strategies.
This means that you and/or your employer might not be adding value at all, but could actually be destroying value, just like any other sufficiently-ineffective bureaucracy.
I'm not sure that a concept drawn from explicitly utopian science fiction, whose creator also believed (for example) that workplace interpersonal conflict would cease to exist some time in the next three or four hundred years, is the best principle on which to attempt to develop a coherent real-world theory of economics or government.
Personally, I like to have this ideal that tells me people can get better every day, that we can make the world brighter for the future generation than we found it ourselves - than to keep looking at the real past and use its worst parts to excuse and justify perpetuation of wrong or evil behaviour. The latter is exactly what we're doing when we're saying "UBI smells too much like Soviet Union, so let's keep people working increasingly pointless jobs, hoping the Market will solve things before they all blow up in our faces".
> I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice.
I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible.
> I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.
Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
[1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.