My appreciation and thanks to Arthur, Clift, Ed and Charles for your
thoughtful comments on my most recent posting proposing on the abolition of
"employment," i.e., of one person working "for" rather than "with" another.
I will study your comments carefully and look toward a second draft of the
proposal.
In the meantime though and without, I hope, over-trying your patience, I am
concerned that so much in your responses involved issues of "function" when
what I was talking about was "status."
For example, in raising a barn, the persons involved may be of equal status,
e.g., local farmers, but they will be pursuing different functions at each
stage of the task. Even though the team may be composed of the same members,
it will probably have a different leader in raising the beams from the one
who sets the foundations and from the one leads the roofers. In each case
the team may organize itself in a manner that is hierarchical, even steeply
hierarchical, for these functional tasks. They are nonetheless working
"with" each other as persons of equal status. No one is the "employer" or
"employee" of another. And so it often is today in the upper echelons of
corporations: the relationships are contractual and the persons of equal
status (self-employed executives -- indeed often functioning through their
own businesses) who have contracted to undertake specific functions with the
corporation.* Their relationships in these functions will quite likely be
hierarchical or whatever the task demands, but their status as self-employed
entrepreneurs, i.e., nobody's "employee," is the same.
A number of the critiques of my proposal seemed to lack this distinction
between status and function. Would you mind very much reviewing your
comments? Thank you.
*Perhaps someone has or would look for the statistics. I am told that
roughly a quarter of the persons in the US who participate in the market
economy do not do so as "employees" but already are working on contract, and
that among them are growing numbers of senior corporate executives.
The implications for labour laws, strikes, etc. in a world in which persons
work on contract will need to be thought about. The flexibility of working
arrangements, which can today be very great thanks to the data processing
capacities of computers, is not always in a Walmartian exploitive direction
but may on other occasions happily serve a worker's lifestyle choices. (And
it is important to remember that, by failing to encourage leisure and
overstating the importance of jobs, thus engaging in excessive production
and consumption, we risk undermining -- overdrawing upon -- the
environmental resource base and its evolved and interdependent processes
from which we draw our sustainance. It is as important not to over-create
work as it is not to undercreate it.)
Oh, there is so much more to be said about this idea of abolishing
employment! Have you been following the economists' studies of happiness
and how it isn't as closely correlated with income as our current
assumptions about well-being ("more economic growth") imply? It is becoming
a very interesting world as we grope our way toward new perceptions and
understandings about how best to work toward a sustainable, civil and
satisfying human future. But it does sometimes bend the mind as we try to
get it around new ideas -- the possible abolitiion of employment being one
such, as we consider its possible implications.
Again, my thanks.
Gail
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Gail Stewart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 8:39 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Modernizing the market economy
> Gail
>
> I don't think I can go as far as you have here and call for the abolition
> of
> employment. I certainly have called both for the abolition of unemployment
> and
> for a broadening of our understanding of work to place employment in its
> proper
> (not dominant) place.
>
> However, to abolish employment goes too far. I do think that heirarchies
> and
> power structures are inevitable, and that people can and will only play a
> partial role in these (which is for me the same thing as saying that they
> will
> work for someone else) - a bit like Ed's comment about Microsoft. I am
> sure
> many Microsoft employees feel like they are working with Microsoft (which
> reflects their enlightened approach to human relationships) but ultimately
> they
> are working for Microsoft.
>
> Where I believe we have gone wrong - which goes part of the way you go -
> is
> providing primacy to employment as the way in which people 'earn' the
> right to
> participate in the rest of society. That seems too much like slavery for
> my
> liking.
>
> However, if we create sufficient viable options for people that they never
> HAVE
> to work for someone if they don't want to, then we provide them with
> options to
> move whenever they feel the need and that doesn't feel like slavery.
>
>
> So, I am all for creating options for people - but I do believe that these
> options will include employment - hopefully more of the enlightened kind
> than
> the slavery kind, but ultimately I believe that the creation of sufficient
> viable options for everyone (based on abundance not on scarcity) will
> ensure
> enlightenment on behalf of those in employment power.
>
>
> regards
>
>
> Charles Brass
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Gail Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>> The Future of Work
>>
>> Modernizing the Market Economy
>>
>> 1. Human relations
>>
>> Draft 1.0. Comments would be appreciated.
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. Our future is deeply uncertain: plausible possibilities --
>> environmental,
>> social, economic, cultural -- range widely.
>>
>>
>>
>> 2. In such circumstances, each of us, in preparing for future work, might
>> best engage also in risk containment by acquiring and sustaining
>> versatile
>> capabilities including skills in teamwork.
>>
>>
>>
>> 3. A major a society-wide initiative may be desirable however to address
>> an
>> existing risk -- the prevailing lag within the market economy in
>> modernizing
>> its structures of human relationships.
>>
>>
>>
>> 4. The structures of human relationships in the economy have not kept
>> pace
>> with the personal, social and political enfranchisement prevailing in the
>> surrounding society.
>>
>>
>>
>> 5. This failure not only affects the economy, heightening discontent
>> within
>> it, but adversely affects the broader matter of social and political
>> stability and flexibility
>>
>>
>>
>> 6. The lag also adversely affects the health and productivity of
>> participants
>> at all levels in the economy and the productivity of the economy itself.
>>
>>
>>
>> 7. A major step toward the modernization of human relations was taken two
>> hundred years ago by the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, thanks to
>> William Wilberforce and others who led the campaign against the slave
>> trade.
>>
>>
>>
>> 8. A similar major step toward a modernization of human relations is
>> currently overdue: the abolition of employment, i.e., of situations where
>> one
>> person works "for" rather than "with" another, each freely self-governing
>> as
>> they already are in their capacity as citizens.
>>
>>
>>
>> 9. Many participants in the current market economy, perhaps as many as
>> 25%,
>> already work as independent contractors including senior executives who,
>> almost universally, have already made this transition.
>>
>>
>>
>> 10. Such emancipation is however more difficult and costly to achieve at
>> the
>> individual personal or corporate level and might be more readily
>> accomplished
>> through mutual society-wide agreement that the employment of one person
>> by
>> another should end.
>>
>>
>>
>> 11. This suggests that a campaign against the employment trade, toward
>> universal emancipation from employment, might be timely.
>>
>>
>>
>> 12. The abolition of employment could usefully be accompanied by public
>> policies supportive of the new working conditions, increasing their
>> benefit
>> to the economy and to the participants involved.
>>
>>
>>
>> 13. The abolition of employment (and with it the roles of employer and
>> employee) and the resulting greater flexibility and dignity in the world
>> of
>> work may be expected, over time, to change the perception of "work."
>>
>>
>>
>> 14. Commonly perceived today as a functional disutility, work may become
>> a
>> social and personal practice, a developmental element in the lives of
>> each of
>> us as we more entrepreneurially allocate our personal resources of time
>> and
>> energy and skills.
>>
>>
>>
>> 15. Co-evolving within and among ourselves and with our social and
>> natural
>> environment with greater human dignity than is now involved in being
>> either
>> an "employer" or "employee" (both roles being now rather embarrassing, a
>> sure
>> sign of their passing, their growing decadence), we will also better
>> enabled
>> to develop our human capacities.
>>
>>
>>
>> 16. Similarly, our shared hopes may better prosper, for life, liberty and
>> happiness, peace, order and good government, etc., and our capacities to
>> function as citizens responsible for our own self-governance and for our
>> governments.
>>
>>
>>
>> 17. Who will step up to become today's Wilberforces: it will not be easy,
>> e.g., can the economy survive without employment, as it had to be argued
>> it
>> could survive without slavery?
>>
>>
>>
>> 19. The path will be strewn with misunderstandings but, as William James
>> said, "First a new theory is attached as absurd; then it is admitted to
>> be
>> true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so
>> important
>> that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it."
>>
>>
>>
>> 20. So it will be, I predict, with the notion of extending
>> enfranchisement
>> through abolishing the "employment trade," i.e., abolishing the
>> employment of
>> one person by another so that rather than being "worked for" or "working
>> for"
>> another person or persons, we may more consistently work "with" each
>> other
>> and have the personal and economic (and also environmental) benefits of
>> doing
>> so and of conceiving of our work in this way.
>>
>>
>>
>> Gail Stewart
>>
>> Ottawa
>>
>> August 20, 2007
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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