Forget about job creation

There is crippling unemployment in most western countries and of course it is worst amongst the younger generation. In many countries the unemployment rate for the 16-25s lies between 25 and 50%. In Sweden one party leader has said that employment for immigrants is the key to their integration, and calls for more jobs for immigrants.

Nobody seems to have realised that this isn’t going to happen. Jobs are emigrating to low-pay countries in eastern Europe, in Asia, particularly China, and many of the jobs that remain are turning into so-called zero-hour jobs, which hold a person tied and unable to take an alternative, but guarantee no pay at all unless the person is called in for an hour, or two, or twenty.

Forget the creation of new jobs in industry. Factories are automating. The mass job market is for robots. There may, of course, be short-term swings, but one can say that the days are over when the big manufacturing companies would keep countries in employment.

So, what to do about it? Well, the unemployment office is not going to solve anything. I don’t know about other countries, but the number of people finding long-term, worthwhile employment via the employment office in Sweden is vanishingly small, and in inverse proportion to the sums of money being allocated.

Allow me to suggest an alternative view of employment. To begin with, I’d like to refer to a video usually available on YouTube, which you will be able to find by searching for ‘all retch and no vomit’. It’s a short article by Alan Watts, a British philosopher who died in 1973, but whose lectures are still popular today – recordings of them, of course. The quotation I used as a search key is from the recording of a lecture called ‘What if Money Was no Object’, released in 2013, some forty years after Watts’ death.

In it he suggests doing what you enjoy, rather than something you hate which you do in order to survive and hopefully have some free time to do what you enjoy. Now, when this lecture was originally given, obviously enough before his death in 1973, it was still possible to get a job, not necessarily the job you really wanted to do, but a job, but even then Watts suggested that you take a decision to do what you enjoy. If you do that, he hypothesises, you will become something of an expert at it, and people less expert than yourself may be willing to pay you for it – as a trainer, as a producer of whatever it is, or as a documenter – books, articles, lectures. Or companies working in the same field may find it worthwhile to employ you. It will become a source of income.

But now, when jobs are for the lucky, Watts’ approach suggests a way out for the unlucky: do what you enjoy, become good at it, and possibly you will begin to make an income from it.

This approach to unemployment does, however, require a paradigm shift in our way of looking at what we do – work, if you like – and how we are rewarded for our work. It will not do to treat the out-of-work as pariahs and punish them by expecting them to live on alms so low that they allow of no luxuries, not even, say, going out for a pizza once a month.

Perhaps we need to revive the idea of a citizen’s salary, which was originally proposed so that housewives, and particularly mothers could have an independent income. I don’t think that a citizen’s salary needs to be so impossibly high. Someone with the drive of doing something they love can get by on much less than someone who screws bolt A into hole B eight hours a day for forty years or more.

Instead of all the useless courses in how to write a cv on a computer, and all the make-work idiocies which the employment exchange comes up with and requires their victims to undergo if they are to receive their weekly or monthly alms, the exchanges might be expected to maintain something resembling a company hotel, that is a facility for providing the people they serve with office facilities and equipment, and a place to do whatever it is they want to do. There could be one for those whose big aim in life is to paint, where those who are on their way to becoming experts can provide guidance to new starters. Another could be for those interested in writing or film-making or learning a language. There would need to be a different type of facility for those who would like to work with animals or plants. Imagine using some wasteland to grow vegetables, which would find a ready market amongst passers by or at a farmers’ market.

And how would one control that the citizen’s salary was not misused. Misused how? You’re a citizen, you’re entitled to your salary. But even if one in the beginning wished only to use the ‘salary’ to give the entrepreneur something to live off whilst (s)he is getting to the level of being able to earn a living, in our age of government surveillance some possible good could come from the government’s unforgivable penchant for examining our doings in minute detail by recording the income generated by doing what you love, and reducing the amount of the citizen’s salary by a similar amount.

Of course I have not done the sums of how much this would cost, but the bulk of it would be paid for from the present payments to unemployed in the form of the dole. And a good bit of the rest would be generated by scratching all the waste of cv courses and other time-wasting activities which are organised by the employment office.

© James Wilde 2015