The Delusion Of Gainful Employment

Since this will be a long post, I'll briefly outline the points that I'm trying to make:

1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.

2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.

3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.

4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.

Kropotkin

We can start this in a number of ways, but I will begin with Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin described himself as an anarchist-communist. These days there is an unfortunate tendency to dismiss an anarchist with the 19^th century caricature of a crazed bomb-throwing hobo; and a communist with the 20^th century caricature of a ruthless Stalinist automaton. Consequently, a person who combines these qualities must be a particularly unholy mixture of evil and irrationality; an outrageous extremist to be either pitied or feared but certainly not someone to be taken seriously.

In fact, Kropotkin was the complete opposite of this, and certainly deserves to be taken seriously. For instance, in 1902 he wrote the pamphlet Mutual Aid, which expressed the same concepts as Dawkins' Selfish Gene and put him decades ahead of contemporary thinkers. Words such as compassionate, scholarly and thoughtful spring to mind.

Which is not to say that he's a personal hero or anything; just to say that you shouldn't dismiss what he says out of hand based on invalid assumptions about his motivations.

Anyway, in 1892 Kropotkin wrote The Conquest of Bread. One thing that struck me on reading this was some back-of-the-envelope calculations he made on just how little work was required to provide the necessities of life. [this is in Chapter 17, if you're interested; unfortunately there aren't any snappy quotes that I can extract which sum it up] Even making some very conservative assumptions and allowing for considerable waste, he calculated that an extraordinarily small amount of labour was required to furnish a lifestyle considerably better than that currently enjoyed by the majority.

While you can always quibble about the exact figures, it's very difficult to escape from the conclusion that the productive capability of the technology available even at that time - 125 years ago - was really very great. Every able-bodied person working for a few hours a week, or alternatively a small proportion of society working normal hours, could easily support everyone in comfort.

Given that in reality large numbers of people were working oppressive hours for pitiful reward, it implied an extraordinary wastefulness in society.

Now let us skip forward in time. Even in the 1920s, a few decades after this work was written, extraordinary technical advances had been made. For instance; heavier-than-air aircraft were no longer science fiction, and radio was no longer a curiosity guarded by a handful of inventors, but both were now established technologies in common use.

More to the point, there were also equivalent developments in fields which directly increased the productivity of society: Steam turbines and electric motors had to a considerable extent replaced inefficient and maintenance-hungry reciprocating steam engines. The modern production line had come into being. Motor vehicles had decimated horse-drawn transport. And so on. The productive power of society had increased many times over in just a few decades. And that was just the start of the twentieth century.

Technical progress sped up still further as time went on. Since that time, pretty much every generation saw the technology of the previous one as almost laughably primitive and inefficient.

Today, in many professions, it would be quite reasonable to say that a single person could produce more than a hundred or a thousand could in Kropotkin's time. [As an aside, I am by no means saying such progress is necessarily sustainable or good (or even that it is bad, for that matter), I'm merely observing what has actually happened.]

Yet even today, the majority still work long hours at jobs they don't want to do. No doubt the average factory (at least in the first world) of the twenty-first century is in a better working environment than the average satanic mill of the nineteenth, and arguably also the average standard of living is better as well, however you have to ask what has happened: Over a hundred years ago, it would have been quite feasible for society to run quite happily with a relatively small amount of work being done by a relatively small number of people. The productivity of each worker has increased by several orders of magnitude over the subsequent hundred years, yet the workload on the individual worker hasn't changed at all.

Overall, you'd have to say that the once excruciating levels of inefficiency have increased to surreal levels.

Even if we assume that Kropotkin was completely wrong and the late Victorian era was in fact the acme of efficient production and fair distribution of wealth (hint: it wasn't), the argument still holds. We now have at least a hundred times the productive capacity we had then, so logically (at least to a first approximation), only one person in a hundred would now need to work to maintain the same standard of living. Yet, the average hours worked per week remains virtually unchanged and the proportions of impoverished, unemployed and overworked people also remain roughly the same now as then.

Looked at objectively, it does not make sense that this would be the case just by coincidence. How come the level of inefficiency of society just happens to keep pace with its increasing productivity?

The only rational explanation is that there is some mechanism in place that keeps things this way.

Economics 101

It turns out there isn't any particular secret about the nature of this mechanism and it's even taught in high-school economics. It's a consequence of having a free market economy.

There is an effect known as the "wage/price spiral".

The idea is that with low levels of unemployment, labour is, by definition, in high demand. The laws of supply and demand dictate that workers will start demanding higher wages (and/or better working conditions, which have the same effect of costing the employer more). Businesses face an increasing wages bill but wish to maintain their profits, therefore they increase their prices. The workers see the prices increase and demand even higher wages to compensate, whereupon business raise the prices still further, and so on.

The theory is that this feedback effect causes runaway inflation.

One method of solving this problem is to manipulate the economy to create unemployment to keep wages low. Clearly a worker is unlikely to demand higher wages (or improved conditions) if there is a starving hoard of people eager to take their job, and willing to work for even less.

There are other solutions possible (there is in fact a whole area of economics known as "prices and incomes policy"), but this solution will naturally be favoured by a society where the employers have the whip-hand, and this is what appears to be the case at the moment.

You can't have too much unemployment, though, because it creates unrest, and more importantly, people without any money tend not to buy very much, which is bad for business. More about this later.

So we reach the not-too-surprising conclusion that the economy is regulated by the employers who control it to maintain the required level of unemployment, in order to control wages.

The Unemployed

Now let us put on an Economic Rationalist cap for a moment and assume that this is good and the way things are meant to be.

If so, it follows that the unemployed perform a critical role in society. The unemployed person - simply by virtue of being unemployed and even if they contribute nothing else whatsoever - is more necessary and useful in a capitalist society than a middle-manager, and costs far less to maintain.

The company director who is angry at an unemployed person for being a "moocher" is being both irrational and hypocritical because the company director himself is quite probably gaining more income as a consequence of that person being unemployed than that person is receiving in unemployment benefits.

The Roman writer Tacitus said of this attitude:

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.

Which I believe translates to something like "It is human nature to hate those you have injured". This tendency also explains that hostility many hold towards Aboriginal people and refugees.

But not everything can be reduced down to economics and if we take off our Economic Rationalist cap, we can see that there is very much more to the story.

There is a huge amount of unpaid and unrecognised work that goes on in society. Those who are not employed (in the paid sense) contribute more of this type of work than those whose time is being wasted in a mind-numbing 9-5 (or these days, more like 8-6) job.

Housework is a particularly important example of this.

The person who helps out a friend in need performs a genuine and important service; often more important than anything money could buy.

Look on the web. There are so many web sites and blogs and message boards that provide important information, that make you think, or are even just interesting or amusing. Nearly all are contributed either free, or for a pitifully small reward. And the more commercial ones are notoriously much less good. If I want to know what whether a product is any good, I don't go to the site advertising that product, or read a review in a magazine paid for by advertising; instead I go to a forum where people who use that product and are able to comment on it objectively. [Of course even in this case you have to watch out for trolls from rival companies running a product down. But this just reinforces the point that corporate interest is poison on the web.]

The graffiti artist who decorates a prison-grey concrete wall, or the busker on a street corner, contributes a little pleasure to our lives. And don't look down on this as being "just entertainment". If entertainment was not important, we wouldn't have an absurdly rich entertainment industry which is powerful enough to dictate ridiculously selfish copyright laws to governments.

I should also add that the Linux operating system is produced by people for no financial reward, and runs rings around the offerings of the multi-billion-dollar Microsoft and Apple corporations.

Money does not make the world go round and it is worth repeating that just because you don't have a paid job, does not mean that you are being unproductive.

The Employed

There is another side to the coin.

Before I go any further, I'd like to say that I am less certain about my facts regarding the following. I'm basing my argument primarily on personal experience and it's not clear how you would prove, in any objective way, what I'm proposing.

This qualification out of the way, consider the following:

With the extremely high levels of productivity inherent in modern technology, the problem of maintaining the right level of unemployment (high enough to be a threat to workers, but not so high that there are masses of desperate people rioting), may at times become one of finding enough work for people to do.

If there's only two hours per week of (economically) productive work required for an employee to "earn their keep", you can't very well let them go home after they've done their two hours. That would make the way the system works somewhat too obvious, and you'd have a bunch of people with plenty of time on their hands (but not marginalised or starving) so they'd have time to think and maybe devise ways of changing the aforesaid system.

Consequently, in order to keep those who are employed working long enough hours to keep them out of trouble, it's necessary for many jobs to be done very inefficiently.

I'm not sure how precisely to prove this, but I would think that pretty much everyone who has worked a white-collar job would agree and could probably give specific examples of bureaucratic rules (and persons), employed specifically for the task of making everyone's job harder.

In fact, there are entire groups within an organisation, and even entire organisations, which seem entirely dedicated to this end. The Security Theatre being performed at our airports is a prime example of this - it's an entire industry which serves no purpose other than wasting people's time and causing disruption.

Within an organisation, most management jobs are an example of this category. I have seen quite a number of people in management whose contribution is such that everyone else would be much happier, and would work much efficiently, if they were paid to stay away from the office.

The whole thing is extremely uneven, however. In some jobs, the worker is treated like a machine and their every action is optimised for maximum efficiency. The example of a kid making pizzas at Dominos springs to mind. The productivity, in terms of useful work per dollar of pay, must be absurdly high for such an employee.

But for every kid doing the actual work of turning out pizzas, there's someone sitting behind a desk in head office, paid ten times as much, whose only contribution - if they do anything at all - is to waste money on an ill-thought out and unnecessary advertising campaign, or to have yet another ugly and off-putting design printed on the pizza box.

I do have to say, however, that it's difficult to entangle what is a deliberate strategy to manipulate employment rates, and what is a consequence of the endemic incompetence that seen to pervade most aspects of Australian society. Australians are exceptionally bad when it comes to being managers.

Also, there are other explanations for some things. For example, Security Theatre is no doubt more than simply busywork, and is to a large extent the no-longer-so-thin edge of the wedge of a Police State.

The Myth of Jobs=Good

So while the above mechanism remains in place, it would seem that the rise and fall of various industries plays comparatively little part in the overall scheme of things. Unless things fall apart to the extent that the system itself breaks down, the system is able to create or eliminate jobs as it needs to maintain itself.

Consider the most economically disruptive event of the last century - the Great Depression. This, like the more recent Global Financial Crisis, was driven by greedy people with too much power overreaching themselves. It was a case of the system itself breaking down and it had far worse effects than any of the major technological revolutions that happened during the same time period and which have wiped out entire industries.

It would seem logical that starting up a factory which employs 100 people would create 100 jobs and reduce the number of unemployed by 100, and I would hate to be in the position of having to convince the general public that this is untrue.

Yet this must be untrue in general, for the reasons explained at length above.

Clearly the situation is complex. If an industry deserts a region that is dependent on that industry - in effect The System abandoning an area - then this will indeed increase unemployment in that area.

But this generally happens for economic reasons, and, with the current system, there isn't any real solution to it. The government can protect certain industries, but this can easily become a form of extortion ("keep giving us money or we'll shut out doors and sack everyone"), and tends to be resented by the majority who are not benefiting from the protection.

And if we aren't allowed to prevent job losses for "economic" reasons, why should we sacrifice the environment to this end? The environment is actually important because if we destroy it we are all dead; even the rich.

In Conclusion

So what's your solution, you ask?

The short answer is that I don't have one. In fact I think you should be very suspicious of anyone who raises a serious fundamental problem like this and then immediately proposes a simple solution.

I think the whole concept of Having A Job [and by the way, my theory is that the word Job comes from the sufferings of the biblical character of that name], and rewarding and defining a person based on that job, is fundamentally wrong. Yet even the Soviet Union, which was (in theory at least) based on the Marxist principle of "from those with the ability, to those with the need" - which would seem to be a step in the right direction - didn't end up doing much better. In the Soviet Union, you might have been working for a state organisation rather than a private company, but you'd still be doing the same thing you didn't want to do, for the same sort of hours, to get the same sort of pay.

Now you could argue endlessly on whether things were actually better or worse over all for the average Soviet worker [who can see through the decades of propaganda clearly enough to say?], and what would have happened had this society evolved further, and so on. I don't want to speculate on this and my point is that even an actual literal revolution which fundamentally altered the way the system worked still didn't manage to change very much when it came to the concept of Having A Job, even though this was a major part of what the revolution was about. Given that we're unlikely to have as powerful an upheaval as the Russian Revolution in the foreseeable future, the chance of anything changing seems even more slim.

But then it's difficult to foresee the future and I'm often wrong when it comes to politics, so just because I can't think of a solution doesn't mean there isn't one.

However, I will say some things by way of a conclusion:

a) Don't get hung up about how much anyone is "contributing" to society; the contribution required per person to keep things running is incredibly small and many people contribute in ways that are non-obvious.

b) In particular, don't equate income received with work contributed. There is little relation between the two, and there is some evidence of a negative correlation. And on this subject, I really hate it when some rich bastard is said to be "Worth" X billion dollars. That is not their worth, that's their cost to society.

c) Treat those without paid employment as equals. Not as unfortunates who've lost the race and need compassion, but people who are just as smart and just as able as you and are most likely contributing just as much. That doesn't mean I'm saying you should be blind to a person's faults. A low-paid or unemployed person might be just as incompetent or evil as a rich bastard; I'm just saying to judge them based on their actual qualities and not the position they have been allocated by society.

e) If you have a chance, join a union. Yes, some unions are pretty shitty, and they're all caught up in the "Jobs=Good" mentality, but they're not as bad as the media says (union-bashing has always been a feature of the Australian media). If you are stuck in the rat-race, a union will at least be on your side regarding wages and conditions. Be guided by the fact that those in power abhor unions, which means they must be effective to at least some extent.

f) Stick it to the man wherever possible.