Why we need to plan for a future without jobs

[yallerdawg]

Andy Stern spent his career organizing workers. Here’s why he thinks work is doomed.

Andy Stern is the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Vox Conversations, with Sean Illing


A vision supported by universal basic income (UBI):

Women have always worked historically raising families, which everyone sees as a great value, but it was not paid work. UBI will solve this problem.

People have always taken care of their parents, which in some cases is a paid job and in other cases it’s not paid work. The same thing is true about tutoring your child, or volunteering at a hospital or as a Little League coach or with any other service organization.

We need to decide that creative activity, such as learning a language, painting, writing plays or books, is work. Or that trying to build a business or solve a problem or learn new skills is work, even if you’re not being compensated.

We’re also going to need to appreciate that there are many other things that people can do to self-actualize, which may be the most important adventure that people can travel to make life fulfilling, and it may not be what we now call work.

[Nay]

1. This country will never allow this conversation. The "values" of the US enforce the

notion that unless you work like a fucking dog from the teens to your seventies, you are a lazy bastard who doesn't deserve a goddamn thing. Oh, and if you can't shell out tens of thousands of dollars to get a $15 an hour job, you should just go somewhere and die from uselessness.

Parenting? Volunteerism? Art? Book learnin'? Don't you know that's all shit women mostly do, so it's totally worthless?

[yallerdawg]

2. When the jobs are gone, what's left?

Stern says:

Certainly our concept of work is problematic. This is a country in which people have not figured out what to do if they don't work for money. I think there are many other ways that people potentially can work but, psychologically, the Protestant work ethic is embedded in the psyche of our country. The idea that someone would get something for nothing is anathema here. People that work feel like those who don’t shouldn’t be rewarded. It’s just an alien concept.

So there’s a tsunami of change on its way, and the question is twofold. One is how does America go through a transition to what will be I think an economy with far fewer jobs — particularly middle-class jobs? What policies will guide us through this transition? And second, what do we want this to look like on the other end?

[Nay]

3. NOTHING'S LEFT, that's the point! We refuse to look at problems as if they are a

societal concern! It is all the individual's fault that he can't get ahead. And when that individual acts out, or riots, or forms tent cities, the police and army will fill up the for-profit prisons and morgues.

And, as I've said, all work done mostly or wholly by women or minorities has historically been considered worthless (as in "getting paid well for it&quot , so you have this society not only despising those who don't work, they despise whole swathes of people who DO work, but because of their sex or race, the work is considered valueless. You even see it in schools -- once women started to do well in classes in high school and college, boys and men became less interested in doing that work because it had become 'tainted' as women's work.

I could go on and on. But this has been beaten to death as a topic for the past 10 years and not one damn thing will be done about it.

Here's what George Monbiot has to say:
A complete reframing of economic life is needed not just to suppress the existential risk that climate change presents (a risk marked by a 20°C anomaly reported in the Arctic Ocean while I was writing this article), but other existential threats as well – including war. Today’s governments, whether they are run by Trump or Obama or May or Merkel, lack the courage and imagination even to open this conversation. It is left to others to conceive of a more plausible vision than trying to magic back the good old days. The task for all those who love this world and fear for our children is to imagine a different future rather than another past.