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Every day we get unsatisfactory news about employment. People who worked their whole lives find themselves out of work for years and with diminishing prospects of ever working again -- losing their retirement prospects, losing their homes. And young people, freshly-minted qualified experts, cannot get a toehold on the career ladder they've worked so hard to get access to.
Peoplw keep blaming this on automation, on culture changes, everything but the real cause. It's simply not true that automation has put us all at ease and made us all redundant. And the changes in the workplace are not due to an abandonment of the work ethic. The changes are due to who pays for what and what is being paid for.
In many industries, while thousands of people are being laid off, their coworkers left behind are expected to work well beyond the forty hour work week with little or no extra compensation. This has a ripple effect of course. With less leisure they'll spend less on optional activities. And in many cases their real income is falling anyway. so they're spending less even on the basics. So that puts more people out of work.
And then there's the work that simply isn't being done though there is a crying need for it. We need an army of technical workers to monitor and tend to the greater environment, more so in the face of climate change, but we aren't even doing the things we used to take for granted: road maintenance and upgrading, for example. But all those science majors out there working at fast food joints ought to be sampling water, tagging birds, testing soils, replanting devastated lands. The entire fleet of sidelined fishermen ought to be out on the water, monitoring it, engaged in mitigation. "Cities with crumbling infrastructure" -- which has become a set phrase -- ought to be getting the lead out, getting renovated, getting planted and fitted with solar and fiber and stormwater facilities. Instead of closing schools and privatising education, we ought to be hiring enough teachers, aides, and support staff -- yes, janitors and cooks and bus drivers -- to bring the quality up past the paltry standards of before. There's more, so much more.
We should be hiring all these people at good wages -- forty-five thousand a year -- with good benefits and generous time off. Because with those good wages and generous time off they're going to inspire the kind of goods and services that will support a healthy blue-collar population. The whole economy will benefit.
"But we have no money" -- this is entirely untrue. We have lots and lots of money. Collectively we are ridiculously wealthy. But we've chosen to rob our people and funnel all the wealth to a few corrupt, selfish, visionless criminals, who simnply pile the money up like Scrooge McDuck so they can play in it. They don't spend the money on projects that create jobs: they don't even spend most of it. They "invest it" in elaborate scams that don't create anything. That money is the fruit of generations of unpaid and underpaid labor (a lot of it got its birth in the profits of institutionalized slavery, which is not something most people want to think about): it belongs to the people.
That's why I say taxing the rich is not sufficient (though it is probably more than we can do in the present climate): we should be confiscating that money and folding it into the economy at large by funding the real work of this world which ought to be done, which our people are more than capable of doing.
Peoplw keep blaming this on automation, on culture changes, everything but the real cause. It's simply not true that automation has put us all at ease and made us all redundant. And the changes in the workplace are not due to an abandonment of the work ethic. The changes are due to who pays for what and what is being paid for.
In many industries, while thousands of people are being laid off, their coworkers left behind are expected to work well beyond the forty hour work week with little or no extra compensation. This has a ripple effect of course. With less leisure they'll spend less on optional activities. And in many cases their real income is falling anyway. so they're spending less even on the basics. So that puts more people out of work.
And then there's the work that simply isn't being done though there is a crying need for it. We need an army of technical workers to monitor and tend to the greater environment, more so in the face of climate change, but we aren't even doing the things we used to take for granted: road maintenance and upgrading, for example. But all those science majors out there working at fast food joints ought to be sampling water, tagging birds, testing soils, replanting devastated lands. The entire fleet of sidelined fishermen ought to be out on the water, monitoring it, engaged in mitigation. "Cities with crumbling infrastructure" -- which has become a set phrase -- ought to be getting the lead out, getting renovated, getting planted and fitted with solar and fiber and stormwater facilities. Instead of closing schools and privatising education, we ought to be hiring enough teachers, aides, and support staff -- yes, janitors and cooks and bus drivers -- to bring the quality up past the paltry standards of before. There's more, so much more.
We should be hiring all these people at good wages -- forty-five thousand a year -- with good benefits and generous time off. Because with those good wages and generous time off they're going to inspire the kind of goods and services that will support a healthy blue-collar population. The whole economy will benefit.
"But we have no money" -- this is entirely untrue. We have lots and lots of money. Collectively we are ridiculously wealthy. But we've chosen to rob our people and funnel all the wealth to a few corrupt, selfish, visionless criminals, who simnply pile the money up like Scrooge McDuck so they can play in it. They don't spend the money on projects that create jobs: they don't even spend most of it. They "invest it" in elaborate scams that don't create anything. That money is the fruit of generations of unpaid and underpaid labor (a lot of it got its birth in the profits of institutionalized slavery, which is not something most people want to think about): it belongs to the people.
That's why I say taxing the rich is not sufficient (though it is probably more than we can do in the present climate): we should be confiscating that money and folding it into the economy at large by funding the real work of this world which ought to be done, which our people are more than capable of doing.
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