A general point to keep in mind here is that unemployment numbers are hard to compare. The best example is a country like India which has no social security net to speak of, so if you're unemployed and are not rich you will actually die of hunger. Which means that the unemployment rate is actually the percentage of people who can afford to stay unemployed. A less drastic comparison might be between unemployed people in Sweden and the US. I'd think that being unemployed in Sweden is lot better than being unemployed in the US because of the US's lack of a medical safety net.

Similar logic applies to your example of people doing "meaningless work". There are lots of those in India as well. I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs. Life as a greeter at a mall or a lift-operator is way better than life as a struggling farmer. And this doesn't even consider all the second-order benefits these people enjoy. Life in a big city means better education, more access to information, more opportunities, all of which almost certainly guarantee a much better life for their children.

This was a bit of a rambling post, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that both comparing unemployment rates as well as comparing the types of employment on offer are too simplistic to make any useful judgments about an economy. I think some aggregate quality of life measure is what we really need to look at.