Keith, as to your "Mismatches along the way will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments": That kind of welfare won't exist in the future. It barely exists now. The US has a 2-5 year lifetime limit on welfare eligibility since Clinton, and no way is any American President and Congress going to reverse that in the most anti-welfare-and-welfare-hating country in the Western world.
Welfare as social safety net is being eliminated. Workfare is used to force people to work for benefits without any of the rights that you have in a job or to deter them from applying for welfare in the first place by making it worse than the most shitty job you could find. And it is used to get rid of employees hired on normal labor market conditions. If not workfare, then job-related activity is used as mandatory requirements for eligibility. (What jobs? The ones we will have, when everything has turned back to normal just as in the past! I'm not expressing my opinion, I'm just saying how it is viewed everywhere.) This can here in Denmark include a course for people with years of job experience about how to write a job application or a resume, or it can be psychological bullshit about "finding your inner bird" i.e. figuring out which bird describes your psychological profile! You also have to be POOR first! You can't own a house or an apartment, you can't have any savings, and if you have a spouse that earns enough to support you, then that is enough to keep you off welfare. More than ever welfare has become another word for harshness, abuse, exploitation, punishments and no rights. You wouldn't have wanted to be on welfare here in Denmark instead of me 1988-97; *I* wouldn't want to be on welfare here back then and even less now! What was it I read about the UK recently on a Danish newspaper site, was it Gordon Brown that had told the unemployed that they had no rights, or that their "culture of entitlements" was over? I've completely forgotten the details, but I know that whoever it was he is up against a large number of groups of unemployed and social activists all over the UK. The first of them that I ever heard about in 1998 was Brighton Against Benefit Cuts. A Nottingham Claimants Action site has a lot of links to groups, events and info: http://www.afed.org.uk/nottingham/claimants/ - which continues at a "Notts Save Our Services" site: http://nottssos.org.uk/2010/11/08/nottingham-claimants-union-formed/ (I really ought to get something done about my own links page! It is horribly outdated by now.) Viggo. P.S. This is something I wrote yesterday. Here's an idea: Why don't we the government reduce welfare for young people with no other problems than unemployment to the level of SU (student benefits)? Yes, we know, SU is not meant to fully cover living expenses, which is why students have the right to supplement with work income. No, there is no such right on welfare, but we don't care! We don't care so much that we won't even say a word about it! (This idea was supported by the head of the Danish association of social workers, out of which many are employed as welfare caseworkers!) At the last count (2010) 126.000 Danish welfare recipients in a single year (4 times as many as in 2007) had been sanctioned with reduced benefits or none at all. 1/3 of these were unlawful, because the recipients had not received a forewarning and guidance such as the law prescribes! Actually the number of persons is lower, because some municipalities have had more sanctions than people on welfare! However, it is still equivalent to 50% of all recipients in the country being sanctioned. (In 2007 the percentage was 16.) The Ministry of Social Affairs has a webpage, where welfare recipients are divided into a long list of "social categories" with the exact amount it will cost people in each of these to be hit with a sanction. It goes like this: "Not married, handicapped, 2 children: xxxx DKK"! One municipality justifies it like this, and it is a translated exact quote: "We follow the law there is." [Yeah, right. How many lawbreaking sanctions can that asshole count to!] "In the law is stated that the unemployed has to have a sanction for not showing up for an appointment or an offer." [Yeah, right, an offer you can't refuse. That's not the definition of an offer!] "When you don't show up at a workplace it also has consequences. The same goes for activation." [You don't show up at work for an "appointment" or an "offer", but to do the work for which you are hired and paid, and to which you have CONSENTED! If you don't do it you are not SANCTIONED i.e. PUNISHED as a consequence, but FIRED! Or maybe you are not. That's at the discretion of the employer, he is not obliged to fire you, and there is no law about it!] A job you can quit or get fired from with the right to compensation for lack of work income, but this is turned into activation or work for the benefits from day one, and if you quit you have no income! In other words, and this asshole doesn't say so: The social safety net is gone, it's abolished, it doesn't exist anymore! Furthermore, if you are required to work for benefits you have none of the rights you have in a job: the right to union membership, to negotiate work conditions and pay, to strike, collective bargaining wages, safety regulations and equipment as needed, earning worktime to qualify for unemployment benefits, pension fund savings and more. In other words, activation or workfare whatever they call it is not acknowledged as work, it is social policy, it has nothing to do with the labor market or labor policy. But then what is it? It is work as punishment, and when you refuse you are punished again. It is understandable that rough states and murderous dictators around the world are sanctioned, but people on welfare in a welfare state?? Then it is not a welfare state anymore, it's a social politically rough state with the mentality of a dictatorship itself! "We don't shoot people here, we just try to starve them into submission, what's the problem? It's their own fault, they're not obeying us, so if they will just do that there won't be a problem!" At 06:59 20-08-2012 +0100, you wrote: >The article that Sally referred us to ("Skilled Work, Without the Worker", >John Markoff, NYT, 19 August 12) was eloquent on job destruction but only >hinted at another, equally significant by-product of the increasing use of >robotics. This is that robots are becoming increasingly versatile. If suitably >programmed, they can be instantly switched from one job to another. (Mention >was made of one robot which could switch between four distinctly different >operations.) Items can be custom-made. The mass consumer goods and services >market will also be destroyed in due course. > >Which, from the point of view of the very rich and the supportive specialisms >around them (what I call the 20-class), is just as well. Mass production of >standard goods and services is becoming increasingly risky. Competition >between ever-larger corporations in every field is not only becoming fiercer, >profit margins (the future source of investment finance) are becoming >narrower. The Apple iPhone4S might well have a profit margin of 50% or so at >the present time but, within five years or so, we can be certain that >competition from Samsung, Matsushita, Google and others will drive it well >below 10%, perhaps nearer to the 1-2% profit margins of most personal computer >manufacturers. Given an innovative tweak by another manufacturer to its own >smartphone and Apple could easily go out of existence, much as threatens Nokia >at the present time. > >Being a more mature industry, what's happening to cars at the present time is >an even more instructive pointer to the future. On the one hand, we have the >mass production of cars by no more than about a dozen large manufacturers in >the world with, at best, only modest profit margins of around 5-7%, more >usually 2-3%, and sometimes 0% (being kept alive by government subsidies). On >the other hand, we have the recent burgeoning of many luxury types of cars >(for the 20-class) which are either brand new in design (e.g. Tesla, McLaren) >or are revivals of some of the hand-made brands of the past (e.g. Porsche, >Aston Martin). They are made in surgically clean workshops with robots dancing >up and down the line and with hardly a worker to be seen. There are more than >20 luxury car-makers already and undoubtedly there'll be many more. But they >won't be competing on price, only on customers' personal tastes. Later, >they'll be competing on the basis of how versatile their robots can be ! programmed, even down to making customers' own designs as well as their own brand. > >One question will be raised immediately: "If robots are to take over, and >there's to be no future for mass production then there'll be no future for >jobs for most of the population." Exactly! But most of the populations of >advanced countries are declining anyway. For the past two generations, ever >since the post-WWII baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than >replacement sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be >halved; within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter; >within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, the >bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline pari passu with >the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way will have to be made up >with welfare payments from governments. > >The other questions will be: "If there's no labour (80-class) for the 20-class >to exploit where will profits (for future investment) come from? How will an >economy exist at all?" The answer is that economic development has never come >from labour as such. Slave labour never gave way to paid labour solely because >of the sentiments of William Wilberforce or the Quakers, but because the >energy of paid labour was more efficient than slave labour. Paid labour is >giving way to robotics because the energy of robots is more efficiently >expended than the muscular (or mental) energy of the routine jobs of humans. >The future economy of a 20-class is perfectly viable so long as efficiency >savings are made between one generation of robots and the next. > >Keith > >Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com > >_______________________________________________ >Futurework mailing list >[email protected] >https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
