http://www.truth-out.org/jobs-mirage-how-much-more-work-do-humans-really-need/1314284068
The Jobs Mirage: How Much More Work Do Humans Really Need?
Monday 5 September 2011
by: Jeffery J. Smith, Truthout | Op-Ed
While honest toil is honorable, a day to honor labor does make it
easy to overlook certain realities, such as: Why do both left and
right clamor for more jobs? Would those who get to opine for a living
be willing to perform the jobs they'd impose upon others? And why
jobs? If work is the only way one can be worthy of an income, why not
also clamor for self-employment and start-ups? Must the jobless look
forward to having a boss their entire lives? And are more jobs
needed, or even possible?
Instead of clamor for jobs, why not clamor for a shorter workweek and
divide the necessary work among more people? How'd 40 hours a week
get to be some sort of magic number? Why aren't automation and
globalization whittling that down to 30, 20, 10, going, going, gone?
Juliet Schor in her Overworked American (1991) calculated that if
increases in productivity (more output from less labor input) over
the course of a baby boomer's career were applied not to things like
fatter CEO salaries, but to shrinking the workweek, it'd now be 6.5
hours. Why isn't it?
It has been drastically shorter in the past. In his Stone Age
Economics (1974), Marshall Sahlins calculated some aborigines worked
15 hours per week. In his Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1884),
James E. Thorold Rogers, member of Parliament, calculated that after
a plague, peasants worked 14 hours per week. (Those were the Dark
Ages, and now at 40 hours we're the enlightened ones?) What happened
was plagues left fewer people to work prime land so, for a while,
surviving aristocrats could not exploit farmers. The key in both
instances was access to bountiful land which let humans choose to
work as much or as little as they liked.
Now, days with billions of humans on the globe, land is not quite as
accessible, but it could be made more affordable. When that happens,
jobs sprout and wages climb, as has happened several times: In the
1960s and 1970s, New Zealand's employment rate averaged 99 percent
for ten years. In the late 1950s, Danish workers received the biggest
one-time raise in wages in Dansk history. And in the 1920s, New York
City spurred the construction of numerous apartment buildings that
provided jobs and slashed unemployment to negligible.
What was the one thing those places did in common? Their governments
levied land. Whenever landowners must pay a heavier land tax, they
eschew speculation and put their parcels to good use. The new
construction puts people to work as do the resultant shops, offices
and factories, as does the spending of wages by the gratefully
employed workers.
Why is such a powerful tool for useful employment at decent wages
left on the shelf by jobists? Perhaps because today there's a huge
disconnect between labor, which has a voice, and its Day and land,
which lacks a voice and needs a Day. At college, economics students
still learn Ricardo's Law and how wasting prime sites, where wages
are high and falling back on marginal sites, where wages are low,
forces down overall wages, but they're required to forget that by the
time they become the practicing economists whose opinions you see in
the media.
Ironically, what economists have forgotten labor organizers used to
know. About a century and a quarter ago, the most popular American in
any union was a self-taught reformer, Henry George, advocate of the
single tax on land and the Labor Party's 1886 candidate for mayor of
New York, a race which he won, defeating Teddy Roosevelt in the
process, but was denied office by the machinations of Tammany Hall.
Samuel Gompers of the AFL-CIO proclaimed himself proud to be a friend
of ol' Henry, who even had a cigar named after him. George's campaign
manager, Louis Post, who went on to become assistant secretary of
labor under Woodrow Wilson, pushed to make Labor Day, which some
unions were already celebrating, an official holiday on the first
Monday in September, which would some years coincide with the
birthday of Henry George, September 2, and honor him, too.
It hasn't quite worked out that way. But forgetting the laws of
economics does not make them go away. Idle land still makes idle
hands, as the old reformers used to say. Drive around your city's
slums; vacant lots - invisible to contemporary urbanites - are still
the best indicator of joblessness, poverty and crime. And shifting
the property tax off buildings and improvements, onto land and
locations, is still the most effective way to harness both prime land
and willing labor. A close second must be detaxing wages. If you want
jobs so badly, why make them so costly?
This shift of taxes, this powerful reform, awaits implementation even
as the left begs for jobs - anything to get money into the pockets of
the
