Unemployment

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Define employment as goal oriented actions for pay. It involves accepting the directives and discipline of the other. Work has a psychic return: the pleasure or discomfort in the doing, the breaking of  isolation in the co-operating work group, the emotional high in confronting a challenge, and the like. But even more basically the wage  is a constant element in the free labor contract. With it the worker makes an essential connect with the society-wide exchange system. This is a fundamental step for all of us—to find a way to make a living, a way to get money.

We have to be very clear about something we all know–our animal nature which permeates and impels all of our activities. We have to satisfy our subsistence needs first and continuously.

Through technology and science and the evolved and constructed social order that provides the means for using them, we exploit the natural world using only a small percentage of our work force for fundamental production while the majority of us work at more abstract and derived culturally defined tasks.

The shift in the way we organize our societies and work groups from the smaller and simpler forms of all of our ancestors is startling. They were, we suspect, in hunting and gathering bands like the one Richard A. Gould and his wife lived with in the Australian outback some forty years ago (“Yiwara. Foragers of the Australian Desert” Scribner’s, 1969). The distinction between employer and employee does not exist. Everyone who can, works. The connect between work and sustaining of life is direct. The idea of the involuntary unemployment of a healthy adult  is still to be discovered.

Involuntary unemployment is only a reasonable concept in an economy based on a complex division of labor. We risk it, individually and as a society, when we enter the  world  of the ethos of the free market and the free worker.

If one working for another for a wage loses his job he stops earning money and can no longer demand the basics he needs. If he is in an urban place alternative subsistence work is not available. He can not revert to a garden plot or to hunting and fishing. Loss of the urban job implies a loss of absolutely necessary and essential resources.

There are other alternatives in practice. Hustle—part-time jobs, assistance from kin and friends, debt through borrowing, selling off possessions, return to a rural setting, illegal trades and actions, and historically the development of a welfare apparatus of unemployment payments and alms.There are other forms of security based on extra-employment ways of getting money—like savings and investments, entitlements from government, insurance, trade union support, sinecures. Any of these values is a cushion against the final reality of the unemployment experience. A pocket full of independent income improves one’s chances of riding out the down side of the economic cycle.

Moments of large scale unemployment associated with distress in the financial markets define special crises called recessions and depressions. But there is a continuing unemployment through the entire economic cycle. In part it is normal turn-over in a free market. Workers are fired for cause. Companies and even industries expire from lack of consumer support or from the inept or criminal acts of managers and workers, factories desert their local workers  and the communities who had grown to depend upon them and move to cheap wage foreign lands

The unemployment crisis and the attention generated is a consequence of a larger  scale. Our society appears to tolerate around five percent (one in twenty) turn-over unemployment overall. Geographic sections, communities and individuals face these mini-crises with only local attention. Large parts of our industrial and even our service sectors have migrated overseas—shoes, clothes, ships, steel, computers, customer service–and we seem to hardly notice. The noise of the jobs leaving is not so much a whoosh as a small hardly noticed but constantly sounding whistle. Left behind, the rust belt, and empty factory buildings in the local landscape.

Full-employment where the workers come into their own–for them it feels like good times with higher wages and benefits–is another type of crisis for business executives and the cadres in charge of patching the system. The rising coasts of labor cut into the profit margins. So paradoxically the managers do not want everyone  employed. The concept of full-employment is almost taboo unless accompanied with imprecations and warnings. Still most recognize that involuntary unemployment is also a communal loss of the productivity of capable citizens. All the useful goods and services (the real wealth) they could have produced are lost forever.

There is a tension between the economic definition of labor as a factor of production (like raw materials and machinery) and the moral equivalence of worker, executive and academic theorist.  The plight of the displaced is recognized.  See full employment as a shared  social purpose and the economic equation changes.

Near total mobilization for war around 1940 coming after the vast and persistent unemployment of the prior decade was a startling though slowly revving up change.  The traditional work force first back to work, then parts of the society that had been excluded because considered unemployable by custom and prejudice—women, minorities, the unskilled, the disabled and such were searched out and recruited. The fact that more than ten million men had been drafted into the military set the mark. It was backed by a managed economy with rationing, fixed wages, pressure for people to save with government bonds. The patriotic motive supporting the discipline required was prominent and accepted by the vast majority.

At the center is the large scale productive enterprises of our era which can not be replicated by independent, self-employed workers no matter how skilled and energetic. The problem of the involuntarily unemployed worker who wants to turn to independent work for self turns on this initial moment in the social order—the development of the coordinated productive enterprise itself. The job only makes sense in the context of the organization.

For example take space cadets—workers who train for and travel to tasks and projects in outer space. These are very prepared workers with recognized skills and talents yet if they are laid-off  they lose the specific quality of the job as well as the wage.  Without the space agency and its equipment and resources the job does not exist. Cadets can only convert their skills  by gliding over to associated work and into a newly invented working self. The same kind of  difficulty in shifting  job skills can occur for all workers unless they find a parallel work setting.  The unemployed journalist needs another newspaper if he is to reproduce fully his original situation or else he has to change and adapt. Searching out the new job can be an act of discovery and invention.

I am trying to establish here why the involuntarily unemployed workers do not become independent, free lance, autonomous and aggressively for self.  The key is the difficulty in improvising the tool—the necessary machinery and social organization. And beyond that to meaningfully connect with the society’s on-going division of labor. This includes the external relations with suppliers and customers, credit from banks and so on. For the line worker and his mates it seems a case of you can’t get there from here.

This situation is even more complex when we consider the stratified and sectored and specialized order of the work force as a whole. This is C. Wright Mills territory. Let’s sum it up this way: The job niches below the mass of skilled and semi-skilled blue and white collar jobs (we think of us as a vital part of the middle class) are already filled by arising sectors of newly mobile workers (made up of newly entrant youths, illegals, and what have been called the lumpenproletariat—family lines of the economically and culturally undeveloped). The cascading down  unemployed middle class meets the bubbling up declasse. To make things worse this bottom grouping also is being squeezed into idleness. People are laid-off and their alternate options are limited and contracting. There is no place to go. The up escalator is going down.

The contracting economic pace of production and consumption is seem as the context and the cause.  Turmoil is muted, confined to stock market floor, the reports to investors of declining deposits, the discharge slips issued to workers, the statements of politicians and bankers.  A lot of facing the troubles privately. The unemployed pondering the mysterious option of the second job.