(or: The Left is broken, someone should do something)
No-one talks about work.
Or, more accurately, no-one talks about the absence of work.
For more than a century, the role of the left has been to protect the worker against his employer. Workplace rights, workplace safety universal healthcare and education, the minimum wage, universal pensions and out-of-work benefits.
All these things exist because employers would not provide them if left to their own devices. The state has historically acted as a counterbalance to the interests of employers on behalf of the workers. Employers want to get the maximum value out of workers, the state intervenes in order that workers are protected.
It turned out that for a long time, improving the conditions of workers helped increase profit (though as Marx wryly notes in Capital every positive change for workers was bitterly fought against by business owners.)
Then came the productivity crisis.
Productivity is defined by economists as the ratio of units of outputs per unit of input. It is the value added by a production process – if you took wages and raw material costs and structural costs and suchlike, how much greater in worth is what you end up with?
In the early 21st century the gradual year-on-year productivity increase faltered and stopped. This builds on the productivity paradox that accompanied the first wave of computerisation. Not only did improving worker conditions not improve productivity, not only did technology not improve productivity, nothing else appeared to improve productivity either.
Serious people like the Bank of England, NIESR and the IMF are “puzzled” by the way that productivity has stayed flat throughout the sub-prime loan crisis, across multiple national economies and employment sectors.
In a parallel trend, we see the increasing potential for automation in the workplace and beyond. Machines can lift more, crunch more and iterate more than people can – they are the likely source of the next wave of productivity. So why, in the medium-to-long term, pay people?
This is what a convincing offer from a left-wing party should be based on. The technology I have hinted at already exists and is already beginning to be used in a whole range of sectors. Fundamentally, the current growth in employment is where people are (still) cheaper to use than machines. The service sector will likely last longer than most, but this would not a long term bet I’d want to be making.
The best possible future involves an alternative to waged work – most likely to be something along the lines of the universal citizen’s income. The alternative is pretty much starvation as a route to depopulation.
Left-wing parties are more likely to have the ideological scaffold to support a managed retreat from waged work. The Green Party in the UK already has this as a worked-out policy. But any politician talking about growth, jobs or state support without mentioning this oncoming storm is not to be trusted.
And educators? Educators are currently teaching children that will live as adults under this system (or will die off, if you’d rather). What are they teaching them and what value will this be after the end of waged work?
These are the discussions I’d like to be having.
[Update: some other useful resources and commentary coming in via twitter….
Tony Hirst pointed me to “Humans Need Not Apply” – a short documentary produced by The New Aesthetic.
Mike Caulfield has written extensively on this topic, and linked to a very interesting graph in a post nearly a year ago. (I don’t take it personally – we’re *all* a year behind Mike Caulfield…)
Graham Atwell, writing in the superb Pontddysgu, suggests that an increase in automation will lead to a need for higher skills in the workforce.
Anya Kamenetz linked to Ben Schiller’s marvellously headlined survey of advances in job automation: “Yes, robots really are going to take your job and end the american dream“]
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