The article I posted and Ray's response raise the question of what
work is. In Canada and the US work is officially viewed as the kinds
of activities that Statistics Canada or the Bureau of Labour
Statistics keep track of. It is what people who are paid to do
something in the formal work world do. But as I pointed out in a
previous posting, wasn't what Batu Khan's hoards did in charging
across the Mongolian and Russian plains work? And as Ray, points out,
isn't the long hours people spend in arts and culture for minimal
recompense work even if not counted? Our soldiers don't make Statscan
or BLS records, but are they just sitting around in Afghanistan?
Or consider what people have to do to find work in the poorer parts of
the world. In Costa Rica a few years ago I ran into a number of
people who had close relatives working in the US and supporting them
at home. Getting to the US took a lot of work raising some money,
hiring a coyote, and sneaking across the border to find a minimum wage
job. In Jamaica, you had to wonder how those thousands of people
living in shanty towns along Kingston harbour survived. My
conclusion: one thing they did was reprocess and repackage drugs
moving from places like Columbia to the US. Another was to protest
and demonstrate when the bosses living in those mansions on the
hillsides needed to make a point to the government. And what was
being grown in those lovely green fields way up in the hill country?
Blind eyes were turned of course . And in the slums of Sao Paulo, the
kites would go up. Hey, the shipments come in! Come get it and start
moving it around. It was work and it kept people going where there
was nothing else. Little capitalist empires arose, as in the movie
"City of God" about drug gangs in Rio.
My point is that work is whatever people have to do to survive,
whether officially measured or not. People who work at low paying
jobs in a factory are measured and therefore "official". People who
have high paying jobs and get bonuses working for investment banks are
measured and therefore "official". The little guy who walks down the
street on garbage day looking for bottles to cash in is not measured,
so he doesn't count. Nor does the guy who sings and plays his guitar
in front of the liquor store for whatever change people throw into his
hat.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Wednesday, September 08, 2010 4:32 PM
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble
Two things wrong with that:
1. Automation and Robotics will make factory work unsustainable as
an employer. Estimates on this ten years ago when we had good
discussions about this was 40% unemployment due to robotics. The
only answer that they came up with was a guaranteed minimum
government payment for those who were not employable.
Unfortunately the minimum payment is as self defeating as
unemployment is immoral for a society.
2. The whole concept of work is based in the assembly line. That
is a little more than one hundred years in human history. Before
that things were more sustainable because we thought differently
about work. Job was originally a temporary position. Skill
meant work. Competency, profession. One of a kind products
such as the Arts and culture, are considered play and not
sustainable as work even though they require long hours, are
extremely hard to do and have a limited physical life. If the
society simply redefined work to mean activity and decided what
activities it wanted to sustain to make for a happy, cultured and
intelligent population then a new national consensus would emerge
or have a chance to emerge.
Thus far, we are just digging the same old hole that is caving in
on us. That's what I take issue with Keith about. I don't for a
minute think that serious work is an issue of power. Serious
work is an issue of growth because of pleasure in competency and
discovery. Power is the war side. Growth, pleasure and
discovery is the peace side of existence. I choose peace. Our
introduction (hello) is Osiyo Dohidju. Which means "Are you at
peace?" if the answer is no, you walk away. You certainly
don't hang around for them to count coup on you.
REH
*From:* [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Ed Weick
*Sent:* Wednesday, September 08, 2010 3:12 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* [Futurework] Trouble, trouble and more trouble
From the Washington Post
Ed
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The bleak truth about unemployment
By Steven Pearlstein
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/steven+pearlstein/>
Tuesday, September 7, 2010; 9:04 PM
Somewhere between the rantings of the Republican right, which is
peddling the nonsense that excessive government spending is to
blame for high unemployment, and the Democratic left, which clings
to the false hope that another helping of fiscal stimulus is all
that is needed to get millions of Americans permanently back to
work, is this stubborn reality:
The loss of 8 million jobs reflects problems that are largely
structural, not cyclical, which means they won't be brought back
by fiddling with a magic dial in Washington that controls how much
the government spends.
When I say that the problems are structural, I mean something more
than what labor economists refer to when they talk about the
mismatch between the skills of the people who of are out of work
and the skills needed for the jobs that are being created -
although that certainly seems to be a factor.
Since 2007, the manufacturing and construction sectors have each
lost 2 million jobs, with finance, hospitality and retailing
accounting for 2 million more. Those categories alone account for
three-quarters of the nation's job losses, and while a fraction of
those jobs might return as the economy recovers, it will be a long
time before automakers or home builders or investment banks or
retailers see the sales numbers they had at the height of the
biggest credit bubble the world has ever seen. Some of those
laid-off workers may have been in this country illegally and have
now returned home, but most will be looking not only for new jobs
but also new careers.
In other cases, the mismatch has more to do with geography than
skill - the businesses with jobs are in one place, and the people
with the necessary skills in another. But with many Americans
living in homes they cannot sell, or can sell only at a price less
than the value of the mortgages they took out to buy them, the
willingness and ability of workers to move to a new city have been
noticeably diminished.
One telltale sign of this mismatch is the number of job openings
and the length of time it takes to fill them. As Narayana
Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis, noted in a recent speech
<http://www.minneapolisfed.org/news_events/pres/speech_display.cfm?id=4525>,
those numbers have been going up over the last year, not down, as
you would expect. Another sign, he said, was the widening gap in
unemployment rates between the states with the highest rates and
those with the lowest. Before the recession, it was just over four
percentage points; now it is more than six.
The structural problems, however, go well beyond these mismatches.
The reason there were 8 million additional jobs back in 2007 is
that demand for goods and services was artificially - and
unsustainably - inflated by cheap, plentiful credit. Between 2002
and 2007, household debt was increasing at the torrid pace of more
than 10 percent annually, while business debt and the debt of
state and local governments was growing at an average of 9
percent. Much of that money was used to finance present consumption.
Now all that has reversed. Household debt is shrinking at a rate
of 2.4 percent per year as the savings rate has risen from nearly
zero to more than 5 percent. Meanwhile, business debt declined 2.5
percent last year and is now flat, as is the case for state and
local governments.
All that deleveraging and living within our means is obviously a
good thing in the long run. But what it means for the economy in
the short run is that neither the excess consumption nor the jobs
it supported are coming back. During the past two years, the
federal government has been actively trying to take up some of the
slack by going on a borrowing-and-spending binge of its own. But
continuing on that path is also unsustainable - certainly
politically, and probably economically as well. And once federal
deficits begin to decline next year, we'll have yet another drag
on economic growth and employment.
At this point, there is only one clear path out of the
unemployment box we have created for ourselves.
Right now, the United States is running a trade deficit that is
likely to reach $450 billion this year. That's down considerably
from the $750 billion at the height of the economic bubble, but
still more than a wealthy advanced economy should have. Bringing
it down - either by producing more of what we consume (fewer
imports) or more of what other countries consume (more exports) -
represents the path toward sustainable, long-term job creation.
The problem with that strategy is that for the past two decades we
have allowed our industrial and technological base to deteriorate
as talent and capital were grossly misallocated toward other
sectors of the economy, even as other countries were able to
attract the investment, the technology and the know-how to serve
the U.S. and global markets.
For a time, none of this seemed to matter because we were
consuming so much that we were able to support job creation at
home as well as overseas. But now that the debt-fueled consumption
binge is over, we find that we don't have the companies, the
workers or the competitive products to replace the stuff we now
import or expand our share of export markets. Even when we do, our
companies are disadvantaged by an overvalued currency or unfair
trading practices.
As Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy
Studies, wrote this month for Project Syndicate
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/>, a wonderful new economics Web
site: "It is relatively easy to manage a structural shift out of
manufacturing during a real-estate boom, but it is much more
difficult to re-establish a competitive manufacturing sector once
it has been lost."
A structural shift toward exports and import substitution," Gros
warns, "will be difficult and time consuming." He might have added
that it will also be expensive, requiring sustained investment by
government and industry, and internationally disruptive, requiring
a much tougher line with trading partners that consistently tilt
the playing field in their favor.
In this election season, the politicians who are really serious
about creating jobs and bringing down unemployment
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090301979.html>
won't be the ones screaming about tax cuts, or stimulus or some
imagined government takeover of the economy. They'll be the ones
talking about how to make the American economy competitive again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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