By Joe Mancini
Published in September 1993
It is not surprising that governments are rethinking job creation. They are realizing that the cupboard is bare. This article looks at three reasons why standard job creation paradoxically results in more unemployment.
A History of Unemployment
Unemployment is one of the most misunderstood words that we use in our daily language. The division of citizens into those who are employed, those who are unemployed and those who are neither is a relatively new way of looking at people that has only become accepted in the last fifty years.
Two centuries ago, citizens of the western world would not recognize what we call “work”. A job was composed of multiple roles within the extended family for meeting the needs of the household economy. The household grew most of its food, preserved its food, and crafted many of its necessities. You could not be unemployed because whether rich, poor or destitute, your work was bound in providing not only your subsistence but that of the village community.
It has been the period of the last two hundred years that has transformed what was once one’s daily work into ‘unemployment- that is the inability to produce other than by working for someone else”[1].
When people gradually gave up producing to become consumers the category of unemployment was created. It is the same process that embraced individualism while breaking down the mutual aid of village and town life. During this period, elites saw individualism as a way to break the bonds of village life. But by the 1920’s writer’s like John Dewey were questioning the long term implications of individualism. “The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well nigh disappeared.[2]”
Today individualism has degenerated into a society of autonomous individuals all attempting to plan their way to the illusive top. Work has become synonymous with a job. In our search for jobs for all, we have lost sight of its impossibility and have converted job seeking into a virtuous competition. Individualist society glorifies the winning candidate while ignoring the frustration and isolation this competition creates for the families of those who are the “losers” in the game.
The competition makes us forget the reason why we work! Work has strayed so far from its natural purpose that we need to question why governments should create more jobs. Recent solutions like starting your own business and retraining often mask the problem.
There are three important reasons why we need to reconsider job creation. Firstly, for most people work is suffered rather than accomplished. Most people find minimal joy in the work they do and end up only working for the pay cheque. Secondly, many jobs are structured so that they degrade the environment. Thirdly, most job creation is taking place in the service sector, and many of these jobs are a poor substitute for meaningful work.
The goal of job creation should be to ensure people can work at basic jobs to meet the needs of their family while adding value to the city or town. In an age of scarce resources, we can no longer waste precious dollars creating frivolous jobs.
Working For Tools – Work That is Suffered Not Accomplished
Our economic landscape is fundamentally changing. The post-war boom ended in the 1970’s. We are in the age of dwindling resources, but the appetites of our centralized institutions keep growing. They are devouring money while shedding jobs.
The centralized structure of work results in over 1.6 million Canadians without work while creating many contradictions. For example, Canadian farmers hire labourers from Mexico to do farm labour. But who among the Canadian unemployed will do this work? It is hard work structured in the manner of slave labour. There is no connection between small scale farming of the nineteenth century where village families helped each other with sowing and harvesting, and modern mega farms that need dozens of farm hands to pick hundreds of acres of produce. Small scale agriculture where neighbours help neighbours is an example of decentralized work that enhances personal autonomy.
The opposite is the situation of work today. The tools of all trades from professional to labourer have been shaped so that the tools do not free people, but rather enslave them to more and more work. This is work that is characterized by unrealized human potential, work that downgrades skills, work that acts like social control and work that is really bureaucracy. Work becomes joy when tools are used to expand autonomous production with efficiency.
Work and the Environment
In our present mode of thinking no one cares about the environment when it comes to job creation. It does not matter that the job created will require endless car driving, consume endless paper or peddle numberless trivial packaged consumer goods. The fact that Western countries are consuming the world’s resources at an ever-accelerating rate while burning more and more fossil fuel is also seen as irrelevant.
Our present job creation mentality cannot deal with the environmental crisis. It is time to start considering how wasteful many jobs really are. Individuals must look at their own jobs and decide for themselves which jobs are necessary. The only way to put an end to sloth and wastefulness is for people to make the changes in the places where they do have some control.
Work and the Service Industry
Interrelated to jobs that are wasteful of resources is the proliferation of service industry jobs. 75% of all job growth in the past 20 years has been in the service sector. Many require few skills, do not pay well, and merely service the consumer family. Meanwhile the consuming family becomes ever more fragile under the weight of its planned obsolescence. This is because the consuming family has abdicated its ability to produce anything of worthwhile value. The majority of its time and labour is directed at earning money to purchase more and more services.
The growth of the service sector is a multi-edged sword. The wages paid by the service industry have nowhere to go but down. Businesses are under pressure to cut costs or relocate to low waged areas, leaving less money for wage increases.
At the same time, our centralized institutions continue to pass on to the consumer the increased costs resulting from debt and technological investment. There are many examples of this from cars, packaged food, hydro, houses, petroleum, insurance, and packaged entertainment. Government is by far the worst offender. Since January 1989 payroll taxes and supplementary labour benefits have gone up 42% while regulated prices, controlled by government have climbed 23%.
We have seen government services and costs skyrocket during the last ten years. A growing labour force creates demand for government services – daycare, health care, roads, education, policing, family services and welfare (for those pushed out of the labour market). The consuming family, dependent on the services of government and industry, has no choice but to submit to passes on increases. A service job income that continues to decline, in relative terms, makes a double income family necessary to pay the cost of our over-serviced economy.
Self-Fulfilling Needs
Neighbourhoods become less and less places for friendly conversation, helpfulness and family production but rather places where exhausted double income families and non-working families alike recoup in front of the T.V. – learning about new services to buy. Households thus increasingly become tied to expensive industrial production or services.
The thrift skills from cooking, sewing, preserving, gardening etc. of past generations are abandoned for lack of time and now lack of knowledge. The bonds that can hold families together – mutually working on daily projects to meet the needs of the household – inevitably become trivialized (like cleaning) while real skills for production are abandoned and left to the service industry.
The final result is that the service industry is a form of colonization that is creating “a labour-intensive, highly disciplined and growing subsector of production that controls people by giving them jobs”[4]. The service sector is merely the cutting edge that is dulling our creativity, while many of the jobs created are of questionable value when considered against the depletion of the earth’s resources.
Job creation has become a self-perpetuating cycle of dependence. As more service jobs are created, people believe that they have more and more needs to be serviced. Work that is socially frustrating only generates a diminished self-worth that demands ever newer services. But this makes work even more oppressive as there is no choice but to work more to afford the new services or demand more government financial support. It is an endless cycle that is proving harmful to the environment and human dignity. We need to look elsewhere for work and tools that enhance creativity and pleasure.
1 Gorz, Ecology as Politics. 1975 p35
2 Lasch, The True and Only Heaven. 1991, p368
3 Globe and Mail, Aug 30, 1993
4 Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1974, p108
