Bread & Circuses

What Does The Future Of 'Work' Look Like?

I don't know if anybody's really pointed out the problem with the drive for productivity in this country, but basically, the increase in productivity is subtracting jobs faster, the more efficient we become. It's pretty apparent when you watch something like 'Mad Men' and the pool of secretaries they used to have that got replaced by computers, that simple jobs are going to be swept away by technology at an ever increasing rate.

Somebody did some sums over in America and it turns out that the man-hours worked in 1998 and 2013 were essentially the same, but produced so much more GDP. The problem was that there were 40 million more people in the pool of workers.:

Martin Ford explained, "In 1998, workers in the US business sector put in a total of 194 billion hours of labor. A decade and a half later, in 2013, the value of the goods and services produced by American businesses had grown by about $3.5 trillion after adjusting for inflation - a 42 percent increase in output. The total amount of human labor required to accomplish that was...194 billion hours. Shawn Sprague, the BLS economist who prepared the report, noted that 'this means that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year-period, despite the fact that the US population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were over thousands of new businesses established during that time.'"

That brown line plateau on the right is essentially the 21st century where productivity keeps growing while private employment has plateau-ed in America. When you consider that America used to be a manufacturing powerhouse but shipped all of its menial manufacturing jobs overseas to China, you get the picture that there really isn't enough work to go around already, and there's going be even less. Which explains the serious anger in some underprivileged communities over in America.

Naturally, this leads us to wonder what the future looks like for us. For a long time it's been apparent that there is a growing gap in the owners capital and workers in the classic Marxist sense. Thomas Piketty's argument essentially is that the post war period was the historic anomaly, and that capitalism always trends towards massive inequality opening up. Based the first 15years of this decade, it seems clear we're seeing that not only will there be inequality, there won't be the work to go around. Which is essentially how the serfs came to be in Russia. If you subdivided work into tiny components to the point that each component alone cannot support an individual, you end up with what the serfs in Tsarist Russia had.

Which is alarming. Because the future of work, after more and more machines take over, is for us to do ever more menial things for less money. Big business might bang on about productivity, but the real picture is that big business is trying to turf people out of jobs. Once out of jobs, people go on welfare; but the same big businesses that turfed people out will also lobby governments to cut spending, which is going to disenfranchise these people more. If this doesn't look like a class war, I don't know what does.

In that context, I present to you this next bit:

Work For Nothing Means Slavery, No?

Tony Abbott's government wants to let businesses audition unemployed people. If they like them, they can hire them; if not, they can let them go.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has come under fire for suggesting employers “try before they buy” when hiring long-term unemployed people. 

Abbott made the comments during an address to the Queensland Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday morning, where he was highlighting a new initiative which allowed people who have been unemployed for more than six months to work for a private enterprise for a month before losing the dole benefits. 

“That person can do up to four weeks of work experience with your business, with a private sector business, without losing unemployment benefits so it gives you a chance to have a kind of try-before-you-buy look at unemployed people,” Abbott said. 

“What we have permitted for the first time in this budget is, if you like, real work for the dole. Work in a business for the dole,” he said.

As far as I can see, it costs the businesses nothing to hire and fire these people. One of the dodgiest and most suspect ideations to do with these work-for-the-dole schemes is that the government is paying a person something so the person should go do work in exchange for that money.

The last time I looked, the labour one undertakes in exchange for money is called 'work' and in fact if the government is calling it work-for-the-dole, then it should pay the person the proper market rate for the work being done. Equally, if a business is in need of such a person to come in and do "real work"(their words not mine), then they should bloody well pay them properly for the work performed instead of leeching off the government for free labour. Pay the person for the work they did. That's how capitalism is supposed to - pardon the pun - work.

Additionally, if a work-for-the-dole person goes and does this work for gratis, it's undercutting a person who genuinely is able to do the work, because that latter person cannot undercut the former who is working for no cost to the company. It might be fun to imagine the biggest dole-bludging teen and forcing them to clean toilets, but really, that company should be paying a professional, their professional rates. Especially when you consider things like WorkCover and workplace health and safety laws which are now Federal, not to mention liability and indemnity insurances. Who is covering this imaginary teenager cleaning toilets? The government? The company using them?

I get it that there's always mileage in picking on the next Paxton kids and demonising the unemployed but this is really pernicious. In a broader picture, what's really worrying is that the leadership of this country has no fucking idea, not a scintilla of a clue as to the problems of a future economy where there might not be enough work; and all they've got to show us is this kind of political stunt. I would think the truth is that the Coalition is very happy to cry 'class warfare' while actually engaging in it with gusto.

So What's Growing?

Would you believe restaurants, and events are growing very fast? I can tell you form an insider's point of view that food and wine fairs have grown more elaborate with larger budgets in the last decade, while governments have started spending serious money in events to boost tourism.

If you want to understand this, it's easier to translate "restaurants and events" into "bread-&-circuses". Especially considering how much government spending on this area has grown, there is a good reason to look at this growth s some kind of attempt to reflate the arts sector, without the highbrow discussions that would plague things like the Australia Council or Screen Australia or whatever the state-based organ for the arts now calls itself.

It's nice to have landed on my feet for once and watched the sector grow in the last decade or so. I also get front row seats to the fact that the government is running out of ideas as to how to make itself useful so it's decided show bit of leg and spend bigger money on events. But you know the best circuses in Ancient Rome were when Rome was closest to its demise. It really doesn't bode well for our government that they have to go with bread-&-circuses.

Maybe The Work Ethic Thing Is Not Universal

The Weird Things You Think Up When You've Got The Flu

I had the flu (again) and was laid out for a couple of weeks. I'm really only recovering my lungs this week and I've had a lot of stuff to think about at work so I haven't been writing much here. Apologies for the break in transmission.

Anyway, in-between the moments of headaches and coughs and general ordinariness, I had this insight that maybe our society putting too much emphasis on the work thing. It sounds crazy, I know, but here's the thing. We've come to the point where our government has so demonised the 'dole bludger'. that they don't want to hand out unemployment benefits to somebody under 30 for 6months while they are unemployed. The work-for-the-dole programs are presented as this great idea where these young long term unemployed people are made to work for their unemployment benefit money.

But when you think about that, you have to ask if that job they're doing is absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, then why isn't the government paying proper money to get that done by proper professionals? It's paradoxical because if the government had that kind of money it wouldn't have to cut the dole. So what you have is the government insisting that some random, context-free 'work' be accomplished when in reality it might not be relevant to the economy except it makes some people feel better that lazy people are being made to work.

What if the point of life isn't work and getting money? Maybe we're looking at unemployment benefits all wrong. Maybe what the dole really is, is a kind of dividend we pay out to members of our society based on the increasing efficiency of our society? Consider for a moment that the rewards for work are not distributed in any kind fair way.

Take Gail Kelly, the retiring CEO of Westpac who reportedly got paid 12.8million dollars this financial year. No wonder she's quitting. That's like winning lotto. With all due respect to her fine acumen as CEO and qualifications, there's no way her efforts were really worth that much. And her effectiveness probably had a lot to do with turfing people out of jobs to make Westpac a more efficient organisation. Which is to say part of her $12.8million remuneration involved putting people on the dole and taking their share of the capitalist money pie.

This sort of distorted sharing of the profits of business is happening all over the place. If there's such a disconnect between work and the rewards, I don't see why we have to pretend that it's all about the effort. Let's face it, somebody can only work so many hours the work-for-the-dole program, as hard as they can, for as long as they can, but nobody is ever going pay that person $12.8million a year. That $12.8million is simply not related to effort or dedication or skill. How can we then pretend that it represents fair value for Gail Kelly's work?

It's more rational to say, at some point there is no connection between work and its rewards. It's just circumstance and chance. So why do we insist that the connection applies to unemployed people all the time? It seems more delusional to think that the merits of the work ethic applies to everything all the time, given the extreme ends of employment and unemployment.

And it's not like the unemployed come from nowhere.

Economic Rationalism Always Kills The Golden Goose

Try this for an example. Imagine a person working for company A, manufacturing product B. Company A decides to move production to China. This is good for the company because the production of B gets cheaper. usually, it's like the fraction a cost, so let's say there's a 75% saving right there.

So let's say they're generous and Company A might pay out a redundancy to the worker which effectively buys them out for length of time until they allegedly find another job. But the person might not find another job because all the companies are moving their manufacturing to China to get that 75% saving. Pretty soon you have all these workers who lost their jobs who can't get another equivalent job, because those jobs disappeared too. Pretty soon, they're the long term unemployed.

Meanwhile, company A has pocketed the 75% saving in manufacturing costs and posted it up as profit. Shareholders lap this up because it represents 'efficiency' and 'productivity'. So in one fell swoop, they've made an unemployed person in their own country and then given that job to somebody halfway around the globe, and pocketed the change. This has more in common with killing  the golden goose; but this kind of thing has been the mainstay of managerial theory for something like three decades. And they keep coming up with reasons why this is somehow going to lead to a better economy while in fact the middle class has collapsed in America and is sinking in Australia. it's clearly self-serving corporate nonsense.

What most governments say when this happens is that these people have got to be re-trained. In reality the retraining programs often fly in the face of what actually happening in the market place for jobs. If a person loses a join the manufacturing sector, then it's cheap and easy to retrain them for something else in the manufacturing sector. If the entire manufacturing sector is shrinking overall, then it's just musical chairs where somebody misses out on the chair each round. At some point the government has to re-train these workers out of their sector which is going to cost more time and money.

The point of all this is to say, corporations regularly export the jobs and collect the difference as profit. They even devise ways to pay taxes by going international and feeding earnings through some weird tax scheme in tax havens like Luxembourg. It seems incredibly inequitable to lump the government with the costs of the unemployment imported from the third world, then complain that the government is spending too much money on welfare. If the business lobby don't like this so much, they should just bring those jobs back and employ people. It always amazes me that the ALP don't just tell the business people this, but instead go on about working with businesses and hand over subsidies which are bribes to stop them killing these golden geese.