This essay is more my speed. It actually goes through and looks at the problems of bad work and how UBI liberates people from coercion.
I mean for all of the discussion about how work is so great and provides meaning, this really emphasizes how the lowest rungs of work are done by desperate people with no ability to say no, and that the work is very unpleasant and often harmful to one's health. By giving people a UBI, we ensure that people are able to resist the tyrannies of bad work.
Honestly, we need fewer people going on about how work is good for us and how it's so great and blah blah blah and we need to be forced to do it, and more real discussions like this that acknowledge the true nature of work.
Most work in modern society is not pleasant. Most jobs being created these days are precarious service jobs that pay poorly, are abusive and exploitative, and people have little actual options to say no to. Sure, some people do fulfilling work that makes them more lecture everyone else about work, but that mindset comes off to me as the pinnacle of privilege. Well off people telling not so well off people that work is good for them and they should be grateful for the opportunity.
And this essay discusses the various implications of how being able to opt out of work would change work. She notes how jobs that are dirty, dangerous and unpleasant would appreciate in value and have higher wages associated with them. She also notes that pleasant work people would do if not tied to a paycheck might depreciate in value. I know that Yang talked about the same thing. Dont tell the leftists who think all work should pay solid wages, which is a good philosophy in a world in which we're all forced to work but in a society where we aren't all forced to work, makes less sense.
She also notes how some work that isnt socially necessary but unpleasant might disappear. And we should value that as a society. She also notes something that I did myself, that eventually people might prefer the freedom that comes with gig work like working for Uber as opposed to working a traditional job. This would be more attractive to me in a "post work world" where I still might want some participation in the labor force for extra money, but i wouldnt want the obligation of a job. Gig work has an opportunity to put the control of work directly in control of the worker in an individualist sense. The worker can choose their hours, how much they work, and work on their own terms, rather than having a job thrown at them as a package of "you must work X amount of hours and be available for the shifts we schedule for you and blah blah blah". I mean, gig work is horrible in the current economy, because we are acclimated to surviving solely on work to survive, and having stuff like healthcare tied to work. But in a world with UBI and universal healthcare, I think I'd probably prefer gig work over a traditional job. Because i DO value freedom on my own terms.
And on the topic of bad work, I really think this is where markets become useful. r/antiwork doesn't wanna hear it since they've become fixated on socialism as the savior of all of our ills, but markets, with people actually able to refuse bad work, will refuse bad work. Which will, as I always say, allow work to either disappear, be automated, or have it paid what its worth.
But then there's the one issue that really is a problem, and that even I have to acknowledge. What if people just dont wanna do some jobs regardless of the wages or working conditions, etc? What if these are necessary for society, and non automatable, and we can't get rid of them?
First of all, I don't think there will be that many of those. At some price, someone will spring for them. They might be like the trades in a way. I know in the boomers' generation, the trades were lower middle class work that was deemed unpleasant and damaging to the body over time. But with millennials and gen Z, we're already having a shortage of people in the trades allegedly. Society is still getting by just fine, and the wages of those workers are going up to reflect the value of the labor. And that's fine.
But what if theres a lot of jobs no one will take, or the conditions of taking them are unsustainable by the economy?
Well, for me, that's where we recognize the limits of UBI. I know that's where the author talked about potentially having mandatory service projects like some European countries and Israel have, forcing people to do some level of public service to fill such jobs. But eh...I find that horribly authoritarian.
My own approach would just be to lower the UBI, or alternatively to let inflation take its course, which lowers the UBI via inflation. Then we just cap it at the highest sustainable rate. Admittedly a lower UBI reintroduces the more coercive elements of capitalism back into society, in which people will be more desperate and desire more to take on bad jobs just to make ends meet, but having at least a partial UBI would help. And it would make conditions better than they are now. I mean, I think this is where we need to go back to John Bentley's "Full Unemployment" and look at the value of "partial implementations" of ideas. We move in a direction: "no coerced labor". We dont get all the way there. So what we say is "well, we got as far as we can go, but we need to wait until technology can automate these highly unpleasant and dangerous jobs that we NEED for the functioning of society". So we just have a partial UBI, celebrate that, try to invest heavily into researching how to automate these jobs, and eventually, given enough technological improvements, we should be able to do so.
Then we can free those people from working.
But yeah. before we get to the point of lowering the UBI, I would ask, gee, should we really have these jobs in the first place? The essay mentioned the radium girls who used to use radium to make stuff glow in the dark in the 50s. That crap was toxic and caused them to get radiation related diseases and die. Could we have lived without the radium girls doing these jobs? OF COURSE WE COULD HAVE. We didnt need glow in the dark crap that required workers to be exposed to toxic conditions to make. Like to me those kinds of jobs are just...the kind of jobs better off not existing. They're not necessary, they're not pleasant, they;re dangerous. Let them not exist. Garbage collectors or something, yeah, that needs to be done. Although i do suspect throwing enough money at the problem would solve that. Most of the time garbage collectors go on strike its for better pay or working conditions. Honestly, we should probably just give people better pay and working conditions. Look at the railroad people. They make six figures but cant even have sick days and crap. Maybe they should be allowed to have sick days? Instead we just dont allow them to strike as they're a "critical industry". It's ridiculous.
I mean, UBI might radically transform work. We might see a society where workers are paid more, and treated much better, than they are now. And the more effort you put in, and the harder, and more unpleasant the work you do, the higher you're paid and the better you're treated. ANd that's fair. Heck, to me, that's what a JUST society should look like. If markets actually functioned with people being free to live as they want, yeah, that's what would happen. THe reason the lowest rung of jobs are also the nastiest and unpleasant is because of how coercive the system is. So we try to remove the coercion as much as humanly possible, while maintaining enough sustainability behind the system.
No comments:
Post a Comment