Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs

As you may know if you read this blog often enough, I am completely anti jobs and growth. So many jobs are ‘bullshit jobs’ these days, and so much automation is coming on board – like Amazon opening a store with almost no staff as one prime example – that the future of work is hardly well defined, especially as we head into a low energy future. Just this week, I was pointed to a book and an article on these issues that I thought I’d shara and comment on, and as always, your comments are more than welcome…..

The book I was pointed to is one Geoff Lawton is currently reading, or so he tells me…..  it’s called “Utopia for Realists”. It certainly looks interesting to me, and I might just buy it, even if the Guardian gives it a caning…

This is a book with one compelling proposition for which you can forgive the rest. It is utopian visions that have driven humanity forwards. It was the hope we could fly, conquer disease, motorise transport, build communities of the faithful, discover virgin land or live in permanent peace that has propelled men and women to take the risks and obsess about the new that, while not creating the utopia of which they dreamed, has at least got us some of the way. Celebrate the grip that utopia has on our imagination. It is the author of progress.

But if this is the book’s big insight, much of the rest fluctuates from the genuinely challenging to politically correct tosh. My biggest beef is the idea that increasingly grips liberal thinkers desperate for anything radical – the concept of a universal income for all. Financially, behaviourally and organisationally bonkers, this idea is gaining traction on the bien pensant left. The proposition is that because a rogue capitalism is going to automate away most of our jobs, human wellbeing can only be assured by everyone receiving a universal basic income.

I don’t know what this book critic thinks people with no jobs will spend to keep the economy going……  maybe he’ll find out when he loses his job, as journalism is one of the trades under serious threat this century.

Apart from the fact that human needs are infinite, so that today’s predictions of the end of work will prove as awry as those of previous centuries, a universal basic income is no more likely to succeed than communism.

That’s where he really lost me…….  using that word infinite. On a finite planet. Whose tosh are we reading now Will Hutton?

Fortunately, there are some realist journos at the Guardian, like Andy Beckett, who are able to produce much more interesting and open views……

Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – [the rest of the world don’t count it seems…] more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.

As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient for whole social classes. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty – around 8 million people – are in working households. In the US, the average wage has stagnated for half a century.

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.)

The young French wwoofer working with me at the moment tells me that most of his peers are fast becoming totally cynical of the work ethic, and, interestingly, also seem to be very much aware of the possibilities and consequences of collapse…. I have to say, this has been the case with most of the French wwoofers who’ve been here over the past couple of years, unlike the American ones who have no idea..!  He even tells me there is a growing movement of young people in France leaving cities and going back to the land….

As a source of sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. For many people, not just the very wealthy, work has become less important financially than inheriting money or owning a home.

Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” in a famous 2013 article. Among others, Graeber condemned “private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers … telemarketers, bailiffs”, and the “ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone is spending so much of their time working”.

Precisely…….  could not agree more. Of course, the collapse of the ERoEI of our energy sources – ALL of them – does not get a mention when he writes “The argument seemed subjective and crude, but economic data increasingly supports it. The growth of productivity, or the value of what is produced per hour worked, is slowing across the rich world – despite the constant measurement of employee performance and intensification of work routines that makes more and more jobs barely tolerable.” Of course, like most people, he may not be aware, let alone know of, the energy cliff…… human

I have to say, this bit was rather interesting…

In Britain in 1974, Edward Heath’s Conservative government, faced with a chronic energy shortage caused by an international oil crisis and a miners’ strike, imposed a national three-day working week. For the two months it lasted, people’s non-work lives expanded. Golf courses were busier, and fishing-tackle shops reported large sales increases. Audiences trebled for late-night BBC radio DJs such as John Peel. Some men did more housework: the Colchester Evening Gazette interviewed a young married printer who had taken over the hoovering. Even the Daily Mail loosened up, with one columnist suggesting that parents “experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school”.

The economic consequences were mixed. Most people’s earnings fell. Working days became longer. Yet a national survey of companies for the government by the management consultants Inbucon-AIC found that productivity improved by about 5%: a huge increase by Britain’s usual sluggish standards. “Thinking was stimulated” inside Whitehall and some companies, the consultants noted, “on the possibility of arranging a permanent four-day week.”

Of course…… nothing came of it as the North Sea oil was discovered and exploited, everyone back to work, we have a planet to pillage. But it certainly makes you think about what will happen when the oil crisis finally becomes permanent. This article, which I consider a gem and well worth the read, ends with..:

Creating a more benign post-work world will be more difficult now than it would have been in the 70s. In today’s lower-wage economy, suggesting people do less work for less pay is a hard sell. As with free-market capitalism in general, the worse work gets, the harder it is to imagine actually escaping it, so enormous are the steps required.

But for those who think work will just carry on as it is, there is a warning from history. On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”. The end of work as we know it will seem unthinkable – until it has happened.

All I can say is that the orthodoxies of the next era will be full of surprises, that’s for sure.