Comment by majewsky
10 years ago
> The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I think most of the problem with "one-euro jobs" is more that they're (a) "one-euro" than anything else and (b) treated as a temporary thing for people who are unable to find anything else.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
The article is here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (click 'here' to remove the purple overlay).
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
Graeber is an avowed anarchist, so I don't think he's very keen on planned economies. People are forced into labor market participation because they can't meet their basic needs other ways, the police will squash these alternatives with violence.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".