Most discussions of jobs center on the numbers of employed
and unemployed, wage rates compared to cost of living, rates of poverty and the
skills/education required for the various types of employment. The conclusions are considered
satisfactory when unemployment is reduced, minimum wages limit the rate of
poverty and the social infrastructure is producing enough people with relevant
skills. But this is not even the
tip of the iceberg – not even a good drawing of the tip of the iceberg.
Part one of this essay pointed out that the numbers of job
and job-like activities done by humans has increased from about 50 or so in our
long formative evolution to about 10,000 or more today. These additional thousands are, for the
most part, actions never before taken on the world; this has to be
important. And what does it mean
for an animal species with its own behavioral evolutionary history and
expression to have made this kind of change?
The first step is to attempt to identify the salient issues
that arise from these changes. To
that end I present this humble offering as a first approximation. I hope that others take up the challenge,
modify and add to it.
What should be called work? Bertrand Russell’s definition
[1]: “What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of
matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second,
telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the
second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite
extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice
as to what orders should be given.”
It is important to make a clearer distinction between the
work that moves things around and the activity of ordering, advising and
directing that movement: This “work of a
second kind” is what creates, first, the possibility and then the necessity
that work of the first kind will increasingly stray from activities that meet
the primary needs of the workers to activities that will meet the needs of the
order-givers. Separating activity
from directly meeting primary needs requires the intermediary device of
recorded obligation, eventually codified into the various forms of money. This
has made work fungible – any work at all, regardless of its adaptive
consequences, can, therefore, meet basic needs by attaching real, need meeting
work to other sorts of activities.
Strongly associating work with money leads to the
ignoring of a significant part of the human experience: This further confuses the issues because there are
need satisfactions that cannot be acquired with money, even though mythology of
the present world implies otherwise. Prior to money as an intermediary form it
was clear that effort expended went for all the needs, there wasn’t a
distinction, at least not a clear one, between needs that could be purchased
and needs that could not, since there was no purchasing per se; all needs were
directly associated with their own socially and biologically based activities.
“Work” has come to mean doing something for someone else:
When work is hired, the focus is not
necessarily on the person hired, but on the work to be done (this is especially
so when the person who wants or “needs” the work done sees the contribution of
the person hired only as a detail in the completion of meeting a need). This allows a pretty rapid
disconnection between the needs of the person hired and the person doing the
hiring. When community needs
and social systems of obligation organize the need meeting activities,
whole-form relationships guide the exchanges – the exchanges are embedded in
the social milieu, which is really an adaptive system responding to the total
environment, biophysical and social.
Distinction between work and a job: A job is typically work that produces fungible
compensation. In some extreme cases people will do work, that can be called a
job, for direct need meeting (sign – “Will work for food”). More commonly, we “work” around the
house and go to our “job.” Jobs
that blur this distinction are the ones that the living organism generally
cannot do without.
Very few jobs, today, are directly need meeting: Of the thousands of different kinds of jobs that
people do in order to get the ‘money’ to purchase the material that meets
needs, only a tiny percentage are directly need meeting; the rest vary from
somewhat related to meeting needs to almost unrelated to any of the basic human
needs. What the jobs do is support
the activities of some other person or group of persons creating, today, an
almost impenetrable structure of interrelationships based on nothing more
substantial than its immediate present form [2].
Every activity of an organism has a hierarchy of
consequences: Jobs (activities of work)
have a hierarchy of consequences that are largely ignored. Jobs also exist in
hierarchical relationships to fundamental needs, with some jobs being
absolutely essential and others completely fungible. We, however, are discouraged from measuring jobs in this
way.
The design of our social structure and economics
distances and hides the consequences of our actions: Our food is on endless grocery store shelves, our
water flows from the many spigots that surround us. Autos, trains and planes, oh my, travel our bodies from
place to place. The doorman helps
us with our packages. The dirty work-sick Congolese miner didn’t personally
deliver the iPhone 5 and neither did the 14 year-old Chinese girl sent to the
factory by her hungry family. The landfill is out of sight. The sewage treatment plant is in the
poor part of town. Our complete
dependence on the millions of others who are dependent on us is denied in our
churches, on our media and by our politicians.
Assigning value to work, especially for fungible jobs: When activities (jobs) are directly need meeting
the value in performing them is easily derived. When activities are distantly related to need meeting, or if
completely fungible, then assigning value to them, that is, figuring out how
much to compensate them, is very unclear and largely depends on the ideology
one brings to the argument. In
general, those who have work to be done by others wish to compensate with as
little as possible and those whose available work-time is used up doing the
work wish to be compensated, at least, at a level that fully meets their basic
needs [3].
Consumption of what we do not need is the key to human
economic growth: and as a corollary, the
jobs that produce what we do not need become a necessity so that people can obtain
their primary needs, and then to obtain what it seems we must have, but
actually do not need. And then, once almost no one is producing what is
essential and almost all jobs are fungible, only increasing consumption of
non-essentials can supply the jobs that allow for the purchase of essentials.
Job fungibility is ultimately an illusion: while it is useful to recognize that we treat jobs
as fungible, jobs are allowed to be thought of as essentially the same because
one acquires the money to meet needs from them, but they are very different in the fullest expression of their
consequences. One job may increase
greenhouse gases, put bio-toxins into the environment and be sustained by the
rejection of eco-reality and another may make negligible exchanges with the
environment, function to increase the awareness of children for the issues that
they must prepare for as they grow up and be enhanced by a scientific and
philosophical perspective. Yet,
both jobs can have the same rate of pay and, therefore, be valued the same in a
one-dimensional economy.
The absolute necessity that
all human activities be reconnected directly to biophysical reality such that feedback is continuous and responded to. The work that we do in the form of our
jobs offers the greatest difficulties.
The vast majority of the jobs being done, worldwide, at this moment are
destructive of both the biophysical systems that sustain life and the mental,
emotional and physical health of human beings.
What is the market?
People often speak of the market as if it were an assignable entity, but it is
the summed collection of desires that people are willing to act on in any given
moment. Within a society and
economic system there is some stability to this broad statement, but that the
summed actionable desires of a social/economic community may be relatively
stable within a several year period does not in any way mean that the desires
are sensible, reasonable or even possible. ‘Letting the market decide’ would be fine if the market had
some meaningful connection with biophysical reality, but it does not.
What kinds of work should people be doing? This is not a silly question – it is the only
question? When the only option for
a job is any work that someone wants done, and is willing to compensate, then
the adaptive process is driven by those few people who are almost completely
disconnected from any but the immediate artifactual reality.
* * *
To me the most important generally unrealized issue is that
humans are driven to make more and more changes to the world, to alter the
position of more and more matter. The habits were established with the
transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, a process without precedent
or guidance. The most basic structure of our underlying economic relationships
is the misapplication of biological and social patterns evolved and adapted to
the Paleolithic way of life; it is essential that our best thinkers begin to
apply our newest most complex capacities to help bring the species back into
the most basic adaptive relationships with biophysical reality. The consequences of our human work is
the subject of Part three of this essay.
[1] From “In
Praise of Idleness.”(pdf)
Being thoroughly accomplished is a marvelous springboard from which to
dive in almost any direction one wishes.
Case in point is Bertrand Russell who can say almost anything he wants
and it will be understood to be coming from some deeper well with more pure
water than most. Let me say at
this moment that you should read his essay on idleness. I was only reminded of it (his story of
the manufacture of pins is unforgettable, but, of course, I had forgotten it)
after conceiving and writing most of this one and am somewhat peeved to have
been proceeded by so many years, superior talent and depth of thought; I can’t
even claim to be writing in a more modern idiom. Woe is me; oh woe is me.
A note to the reader who intents to read Russell’s essay:
What he doesn’t point out when talking about work hours, because it was
unrealized at the time – though it was available for the seeing should anyone
have looked – is that materially simple communities living undisturbed in their
original fecund regions and without the “helpful” intervention of “civilized
man” only worked an average of 3 to 5 hours a day to sustain themselves with
the degree of comfort with which they were, well, comfortable. Their lives were not routinely brutish
and short, though they were certainly more physical than typical today.
[2] Think of an interstate highway exchange where 3 major
roads come together along with important ‘surface’ roads. While you might be
only a half mile from some place once easy to get to, now on the other side of
the exchange; today the immediate form of the roads can almost completely deny
you access. The roads are totally
artifacts of human creation – and once in existence undeniable in their
consequences.
[3] It should be noted: social structures that depended on
‘owned’ and kept slaves often caused the ‘owners’ to see that they were best
served when the slaves were compensated sufficiently to remain healthy enough
for the work demanded and not so dissatisfied that they were not too much of
problem to control. This is not
the case with capitalist structures engineering unemployment percentages that
let the capitalists treat workers like any other cost.
