I am throwing this out there at you half-baked, but come on folks, I can't do ALL the thinking!
I have been looking at the idea of Alternative Work, as in, something different from what we have now.
This all started for me with the idea that Factory Work as done by Machines was supposed to give the Average Joe or Jane more "leisure time" and spare them the drudgery of boring, repetitive work, save them from the injury of dangerous or toxic work (like coal mining, just as one example), and even heavy physical labor.
Machines REPLACED us, alright, but that created unskilled unemployment instead of leisure time - for two reasons. It did not lend itself to "re-distribution of wealth" (owners did not re-invest saved labor costs into the neighborhoods, etc.) and we did not invent Next Level Work or Alternative Work.
Please understand me - I am not saying Machines are "bad" or that technology is to blame. Getting human beings out of the worst types of labor was/is a GOOD THING. But the Ethics of Ownership did not change, and the idea of WORK did not change. Ripping the machines out and going back to more manual forms of the same old labor will not work - and really, no one would DO it.
Factories produce cheap (as in low-cost to you) mass-produced products, that, you will notice, have become CHEAP the other way - as in made poorly and not lasting. We have become a Disposable Society. And this is a waste of resources. (And causes land-fills and garbage heaps.) We could, and should, demand BETTER PRODUCTS, and make the machine-worked factories better quality.
Also, we might take our new-found leisure time/unemployment, to learn to be craftsmen/women again - to become truly good at hand-making items of the HIGHEST quality, which might be sold to the rich and/or bartered for among the poor.
We might (those of us who are intellectually capable) return to school for higher and higher levels of education, which would include the Arts and Sciences more than it does now.
We might learn a better level of Customer Service psychology as well.
And the Business Owners would want to INVEST in this - provide stipends, living wages, while people are learning a Trade - because ultimately it would benefit them as well.
Certainly the Governments could do more - instead of spending 70 cents out of every tax dollar on the Military, they could re-invest in their PEOPLE and in the Infrastructure.
What kinds of work could I mean?
What does Society need? We have a terrible level of Homelessness in all countries now. Can we make relatively inexpensive homes? Provided to the most poor for free (paid for by Govt.), and available in ever-improving units to the people who could afford it. Perhaps they could be homes that re-cycled "grey water" (soapy bath water, dish water). Perhaps they could be fire-proof, flood-proof homes, run "off the grid" by alternative energy. Perhaps food could be grown on the roofs, and vehicles could be parked underneath, freeing up more dirt for food growing.
We need cleaner, safer transportation methods - for people and for goods. Something that might have no emissions. Some way that could eliminate accidents. Perhaps small "pods" with seats in them that run along rails... Perhaps transportation underground, to free up living and growing space ABOVE ground.
And what about that Infrastructure? Re-surfacing roads with gravel and half-melted asphalt chips lasts about one Winter. How about a better road surface? or at least replaced road surfaces? We have SEEN what is happening to our overpasses and bridges. (God bless the people of Minnesota recently, with the collapse of that I-35W bridge...) How about replacing the entire Electrical Grid, and placing the wires UNDERGROUND like they do in Europe, eliminating exposure of people to the harm caused by them, and protecting the wires themselves from the weather, car accidents, and sabotage? (And getting rid of those unsightly tar-painted poles...)
I would not be interested in inventing new toys for the rich or for the military. I would want to see products and services that make the lives of ALL people better - like vitamins did, for instance.
Inventors! I KNOW you are out there! Come on!
What would these types of work do for people? Well, right now, Society is "carrying" non-working people (and doing it poorly, I might add). We expect to provide for infants and school-age children. We are learning to expect to pay for elderly, retired people (we could do this better). We will have a whole new generation of disabled and ill people from the Wars. We do not much at all help the mentally ill. And we tolerate and barely help pregnant women and new parents, who have to drop in and out of work for the baby's health and education needs.
If there were light, clean, safe work that anyone in these groups COULD or WOULD WANT to do, that would make them employable again; it would make them re-enfranchised. I am not talking about BORING BUSY WORK. But the re-tooling of NEEDED work, that cannot be done by machines, and MIGHT be done by people who were not intellectually capable of higher level work, as well as the people I have mentioned in these other groups (leaving out infants).
Before you start screaming "exploitation!", ASK PEOPLE if they wouldn't rather earn their own money and do something productive, rather than feel "tolerated and carried".
If more of us worked - we might ALL work less hours, at better work - we'd make better products and give better service. And we could create a level of living that is HIGHER for all, a level of material wealth that we have not yet seen - for EVERYONE. If we had to, we could STILL "carry" folks that could not work, and even they would live at a standard that is better than what they have now.
Please imagine a time when even the poorest person could live in a clean, lit, warm/cooled home with clean water and a basic diet and clean, fitted clothing. He or she might have the Health Care they lack now, there would be a community to which they would belong... They could travel anywhere safely as they needed to...
HELP ME. Think of ways we might DO this. Why should we not? At other times in History, success was measured in how well even the poorest person lived and was treated. As part of our Vice-Gerency on the Planet, we owe some thought and work time to the People too. When you have everything that you NEED, and can work to get the things that you WANT, when you can be CREATIVE and productive at all stages of your life, when you can SEE the help that you are being - you become GENEROUS. It's EASY to want to give back...
So let's DO it.
2 comments:
This all sounds very New Deal. The problem is, our brief forays into socialized work like this run into huge social problems. You essentially tax people who were able to find work in the private sector to pay people to work in these government programs, which is something people tend to resist.
Even if these programs ARE self-sustaining (a construction effort that builds houses, which are then sold to pay for the construction effort, for instance) they would soon become either privatized (and thus not a social safety-net but a corporation and thus part of The Man) or so deeply bogged down in beurocracy that they can no longer function.
Like all similar efforts, I feel this fails to account for simple human greed. Foremen will always steal from their workers. Owner/operators will always steal from their foremen. We're a kleptocratic people by nature, or at least by indoctrination, and it's a rare thing to find enough people who are similarly good-hearted with similar skills to get anything useful done.
If you want to see people who would like to be re-enfranchised, start with the young. How much better off would people be if they could pursue apprenticeships, and learn this vaunted craft and trade skills earlier, rather than being shoehorned into the american pseduo-academic machine where they are not even tolerated, and in fact little better than warehoused well into their natural adult lives?
(Mind you I say their natural adult lives specifically, as this is a period that begins far earlier than the social recognition of adulthood, especially in the USA.)
These young people, freed from the shackles of mediocre forced education, might then be able to learn MORE skills, and learn them more thoroughly, since they have more time to focus on those groups of skills where their aptitude and interest meet.
With twelve years of one's life free to learn as one will, a man might become both a seafarer and a violinist (Lucky Jack Aubrey), both a doctor and a poet (William Carlos Williams), General and President and self-taught architect (George Washington).
And before ANYONE starts screaming Child Labor or Exploitation, consider this: Only in the last 100 years have we called people 'children' well past puberty. Only in the last 80 have we restricted them from work. Only since industrialization. In non-industrial societies, the young and the old labor together happily. With dignity. There is no period of storm and stress like our Western "adolescence" - only a smooth continuum from youth to adulthood that results in happier, better adjusted people more prone to productive work and less prone to violence, greed, and addictive/self-destructive behavior.
So who really has it better?
john, I like your take on adolescent aggression. There was a shooting in England of an 11 year old boy recently which had the whole country in an uproar. Everyone was at their wits' end trying to explain it, and the best they could come up with was a lack of discipline and the break up of traditional communities. These may be valid causes, but they're all part of the general disenfranchisement of the youth who may feel powerless in society because they're stuck in forced education and dependency.
And max, there was an architect in America who set up an institute for afforadable architecture made from recycled materials. The homes he designed were cheap, durable and beautiful too!. I'll give you his name when I find it.
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