Re: Work and the economy

[G. Stewart]

Hi Brian,   You wrote:   "It is good to have you contributing to this list again. ... I work very hard to help my beginning teachers of English wrestle with what you believe. Paulo Freire has written extensively on this topic."   Thanks very much for the welcome but you have made an assumption about "what I believe" that is not accurate. I'm not talking about what Paulo Freire is taking about. He starts by assuming alienation: "My suggestion is that we capture our daily alienation, the alienation of our routine,..."   I don't assume alienation and hope I didn't give this impression. I think studies show that many people are happy in their employment. In drawing a distinction between work and employment, I'm not trying, as Friere seems to doing, to "that" is bad and "this" will be good. (There's a deep political distinction between the two approaches - his is structured as an adversarial approach, mine is not.) I'm trying to say that "this," i.e. making a distinction between work and employment (not necessarily even to the point where they are mutually exclusive) is perhaps a way to make a given situation better. It opens the possibility of a realm of discourse about work that is not available when all work is assumed to take the form of employment. When we fail to make such a distinction we miss (and dis) the foundational work of society, the self-care, the caring for family and friends (such as shopping for food and cooking meals and a thousand other things we do in the context of "caring for"), the entrepreneurship, the getting of an education plus all the self-directed learning that we do, the voluntary action in communities and in all sectors, the self-expression in the arts, and all sorts of work activity on which the market economy depends for its existence. It is usually best, in my experience, to think of the market economy and the paid work that goes on within it as superstructure. Just as in introductory economics classes "trust" is pointed to as essential to the functioning of a market economy, so too is all this foundational work that goes on. When we expand employment (which is currently understood as paid jobs) we need to be careful not to weaken this foundation. In fact, much of our concern about jobs is as a channel for distributing income and we are often not very imaginative about what is produced. We would probably do far better to find ways of letting more people pursue self-defined work (as we do through the pension schemes, arts grants, college bursaries, honoraria, loans for business creation, etc. that we have invented) than by trying to expand jobs. In fact I've always wondered why we seek to train disadvantaged youth solely for jobs rather than give at least as much attention to showing them how to become entrepreneurs. The latter is just one of the anomalies that is associated with conflating work and employment.   Yours, trying to remember one is "ever newer" (thanks for that)   Gail                   Gail Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]