On "antiwork" and necessary labor

Great Debates
61

Probably a mixture of both. If jobs pay more in general, we can all pay more for things; the increase in pay will tend to be higher than the increase in price, so we’ll still come out ahead. Increase in price will let jobs pay more. And vastly lowering the profit of owners is another key factor.

Another thing is making sure that the unpleasant jobs are as pleasant as reasonably possible. Right now a lot of comfort that could be accomplished - at relatively low cost - isn’t done because it’s not cost effective; because of people needing the work, they can find people to do the work even in unpleasant conditions. But if people could opt out, employers would be forced to consider ‘do we spend some money to make conditions more palatable, or do we pay employees more?’ Most likely a combination of both would be done in a lot of jobs. It might be more cost-effective, for instance, to air condition a warehouse than to increase the pay enough to get employees willing to work in a sweltering heat-box. Maybe large scale sun shades would become commonplace for outdoor work, so those doing it aren’t laboring in the searing sunlight. There are a lot of things that could be done to make unpleasant jobs a lot less onerous.

The neat thing is this would all happen somewhat organically; as workers opt out of working at terrible jobs, compensation or conditions would have to go up in order to keep those jobs going. Some stubborn businesses that refuse to adapt will go out of business and be replaced by those who are willing to actually consider making improvements to their workers.

And free market actually does work pretty well when it’s not horribly distorted, so I have reasonable confidence that if we could get the distortion of out of the labor market, it would find its balance point. Might take a bit, because it would require creativity and thinking about things differently…and even so, it would undoubtedly be abused and need new ways of thinking about how to properly regulate it…but it would work itself out. Because fundamentally, we have the technology to keep things running with far less hours worked than used to be necessary, and people are willing to do the work if they’re both adequately compensated and have time to enjoy that compensation.

62

Uh, ISTM that you’re kind of conflating the choice to have a child in the first place (which is frequently a shared decision by both parents even if they don’t share the childcare responsibilities) with the work of “being a full-time carer” once said children have come into being.

As a non-parent myself, I’m fully cognizant of all the social and environmental reasons to choose non-parenthood. But that doesn’t mean that the actual work of caring for children once they’re here isn’t extremely socially important.

63

This is the best argument I’ve seen against UBI, and I’ve seen similar problems with school vouchers.

I’m underwhelmed with the class warfare, owners vs. workers argument. I suppose that’s because I’m both. I work, and I own mutual funds. But really, we aren’t a society of peasants and lords, nor even of factory workers and factory owners. Yes, we have some people in each of those groups. But we have a lot of people in neither, or both. The gal who owns a bakery works her butt off to keep it in business. The CEO of a large corporation is a “worker”, but may be paid 100 times what some of the other employees are paid. And he probably only works 50% more hours.

I’m also underwhelmed with the “people need to contribute” line.

First, not everyone CAN contribute to the extent that they can support themselves. As a society we recognize that children can’t (although in poorer societies, 12 year olds often DO contribute meaningfully to the production of their group, and even 7 year olds sometimes do) and that many of the elderly can’t. But there are a lot of people in between who have one or another disabilities, and can’t support themselves, either.

So, why not just have disability benefits? First, “cliff benefits” are generally bad. If you can work at all (or over some arbitrary threshold), you lose your disability benefits. That discourages those who could contribute some from doing so, Second, there’s the whole dignity thing. We don’t look down on children and retired people for being dependent. But as a society, we DO look down on disabled people, especially those with less visible disabilities.

The tax code is a fine way to claw back UBI from those who really don’t need it, in a very gradual way, so no one is incented to avoid work.

What about the argument that people will just sit on their butts and society won’t function? I don’t think that’s a serious concern. I think most people want more than a “basic” lifestyle, and even those whose physical desires are modest want the social appreciation that comes from making something of use to someone else. Yes, that means that some people will perform magic tricks at children’s birthday parties “for free”, rather than perform paid employment. But that’s okay, they are still contributing to society. We have too much emphasis on your cash worth anyway. And most people will choose to work so they can live in a nicer house and eat better food and buy nicer toys.

Does it mean a cup of coffee will cost more, as it takes more money to convince someone to work as a barista? Maybe. That wouldn’t be a terrible thing.

It would also provide a safety net that I think would facilitate the creation of new enterprises. Want to see if you CAN make it as a bakery owner? Right now, you risk a roof over your children’s head if you fail. With UBI, you wouldn’t.

64

Moderating:

This is a little personal for GD. Please try not to do this. Thanks.

Not a warning.

65

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes thought by 2000, we’d be working 15 hours a day with an improved standard of living. Heck, Richard Nixon said the Republicans were looking at a 4 day workweek in the near future–in 1959. We are about 3 times more productive than we were in the 1950s–but wages have sagged and we haven’t had a reduction in working hours. All that surplus is going somewhere, and as I keep saying, Tony Soprano outlined it: "This thing’s a pyramid, since time immemorial. Shit runs down hill, money goes up. It’s that simple.” And until we do something about it, it will continue. Happy day after 1 May, International Workers’ Day! (Which, ironically, owes its origin to American workers’ fight for the 8 hour day, though the day is not much celebrated in America any more)

66

Harsh. Did you perhaps mean to type “15 hours a week”?

67

Godammit! Yes, 15 hour week. Luckily JMK was better at numbers.

68

In fairness that is what my mother told me would happen if I didn’t finish my math homework.

69

Yep, he’d probably have been right, IF the productivity increases from improving technology had been allocated toward allowing people to do other things with their time.

It’s our backasswards way of thinking about the whole ‘work’ situation that caused it. We look at employers as paying us $X for TIME, rather than paying us $X for OUTPUT. If there are improvements in efficiency that result in greater output per unit of time, that means we should work less, maintaining output rather than increasing it while maintaining the same amount of work time.

70

I’ve been mulling some “how to do disability insurance better” thread because our current operation seems not great for reasons you mention.

71

That’s one of those answers that is both incredibly easy, and yet, almost impossible.

Pay them more.

That’s it, really. I know a few people who live on disability here in Canada, and they have many of the same problems as in the US. Just about all of their problems could be solved if disability just paid more.

But try and get that approved in law, and watch the whining begin.

This is by and large why I discount the people who say, “Well, I’d be willing to support someone who isn’t capable of working, but I don’t want to support some lazy freeloader!”, because when push comes to shove, most of them don’t want to support anyone. They just know they can’t say that our loud.

72

I think the cost of maintenance is something that is often ignored by the “no freeloaders” side. I’m reminded by the likely apocryphal concept of a school lowering the cost of providing lunch by no longer accepting payment of any kind.

The amount we “spend” to separate out the freeloaders from the genuinely unable may very well far exceed the “savings” we get. I put those in quotes because it isn’t just money we spend, and money we save.

We deliberately make joblessness a misery to generate an incentive to work. We make people jump through hoops for any type of support, food stamps, rent assistance, and the like are made difficult to prevent the undeserving from accessing it. That difficulty isn’t just for the undeserving, the deserving suffer through it too, and we all have to pay to administer it.

73

No need to “may very well” it; I’ve yet to see the math work out even though administrative costs for SSI and SSDI are certainly higher than for OASI as a percentage of expenditures.

74

Isn’t ‘anti-work’ what 80-90% of people are doing while the rest of us get everything done?

75

Agreed!

76

I support that mulling, if by “disability insurance” you mean also “disability benefits”. As puzzlegal said, the “cliff benefits” structure is really stupid and counterproductive, ensuring that disabled people who might be able to do some work will be deterred by the prospect of losing benefits.

It seems self-evident to me that what we ought to have is a system where people who receive individual financial government benefits of any kind should also be able to earn income to the extent that they’re able to, with the consequence that their benefits amount will decrease by, say, 50% of their earnings.

So if you get disability benefits of, I don’t know, $20K per year, but you are able to do part-time or gig work that brings you in $10K, your benefits get cut to $15K but your total income is now $25K. The government saves some money, you get more money, it’s a win-win.

If you become able to earn more than twice the amount of your benefits, the benefits go away altogether, but by that point it doesn’t matter to you because you’re doing so much better from earnings alone.

With this setup, benefits recipients are incentivized to work to whatever extent they can comfortably manage, which is better for their mental and physical health, better for their income and their future prospects, and better for the economy. I don’t understand why such a system isn’t already in place. The mindless binary of “either you are not disabled and entitled to zero benefits or you are disabled and cannot work at all if you don’t want to lose all your benefits” seems idiotically unrealistic.

77

It’s been in the mulling stage rather than the writing stage in large part due to ignorance that extends to what the correct terms are. But I could probably codge something together and just hope people correct any misunderstandings.

78

Don’t ignore the “it’s not just money” aspect of the comment. The desire to exclude the undeserving changes everything about the relationship between worker and employer.

Workers are made desperate, deliberately so, in order to ensure that they don’t dare enter the ranks of the willingly unemployed. We don’t want universal health care because we want to make sure people work and pay for the health care they get. So, workers stay in jobs they hate just for health care.

These impacts are not cost free, we just don’t put an easy dollar amount to them.

79

Let’s be honest. If there wasn’t some mechanism to keep people in jobs they hated, a lot of essential but less than exciting or glamorous work wouldn’t get done.

And if some people have to work at jobs they hate, why should they have to pay for perfectly able-bodied people to not have to work at all just because they don’t feel like it?

Although I suspect the reason most people hate their jobs has little to do with the actual tasks they are performing.

80

Maybe we should all be paying more to get that work done. For enough money, a lot of people would haul garbage or make lattes rather than live on a “basic income”