Work and Pay

 Consider this: "For most of the Middle Ages and in most parts of Europe it was more common for lords to have land and lack men to work it than the reverse." - Bartlett, The Making of Europe.

 

This is why it is the "sturdy beggar" who is the villain of the Elizabethan Poor Law: prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and with limited exceptions for larger urban areas, there was always employment available.

 

It was true for almost all prior time as well, always excepting some of the great cities of the ancient world, going back to our hunter - gatherer days. "He who does not work will not eat" was driven into our spines as a moral precept by hundreds of thousands of years of selection, as regards the able bodied. 

 

However, that order of things has been only generally applicable for the past two or three generations, and is about to collapse entirely. It is not that eliminating some jobs by automation or the creation of greater efficiencies reduces the amount of work available as such: that is just another variant of the "lump of labour" fallacy. Replacing the number of people required to do, say, cleaning tasks in a small business does not necessarily lead to a reduction in employment: it may instead allow a reallocation of resources which increases the generation of revenue, for example, with no net decrease in employment numbers. And a general increase in productivity does not normally hit an overall ceiling: there is in practice no limit to the general market for "luxury" (not necessary) goods as productivity rises and prices decline, even though there is a ceiling for any given product. (This is the engine which drove the expansion of the European economies during the Industrial Revolution.) 

 

But the old work was heavily dominated by the requirement for a strong back and arms, or a willingness to perform simple tasks repetitively[1]. We have replaced farm-hands, navvies, and stevedores with operators of mechanized equipment, production-line workers with supervisors and maintainers of robots, and secretaries with the expectation that every employee will use a word processor; we are now on the way to displace truckers and taxi drivers with automated vehicles.

 

(There are some offsetting trends: someone who cannot do long-hand multiplication and division can now do a job requiring those calculations if that person can use a calculator. Bad handwriting is no longer a barrier to written communication.)

 

The trend is towards a significant subset of society - those, say, for whom just managing to get out of high school[2] would be an achievement and who lack the social "intelligence" to function well in a retail or personnel role[3] - who may never show up in employment statistics because they give up, soon after leaving school, even looking for work.

 

An interesting side glance may be spared here for the concept of "workfare", beloved of the Republicans and the Mike Harris Tories. A few minutes' consideration will reveal both why this is a bad idea, on a policy basis, and why it's almost a pure expression of the old ingrained attitude.

 

To begin with, if the work is deemed to be worth less than the minimum wage, then you've violated the idea of having a minimum wage - society does not value it enough to consider it worth doing. (And note that the costs to society of supervising such a programme probably make the costs above that of the minimum wage in any case, so it's not even a case of getting work done cheaply.) This is likely to be a simple case of Sisyphean make work.

 

If the work is worth doing, then it should be done at market levels of remuneration - otherwise workfare becomes just a way of stealing work from other workers.

 

If it's suited to the skills of the worker, then offering it as a job rather than offering welfare with enforced labour would make more sense. (This is where the underlying moral basis of the case becomes visible: in the assumption that you have to force people in this situation to work, presumably because they are lazy.)

 

If it's not suited to the skills of the worker, then it will probably be done badly. Furthermore, time spent performing the work takes away from the time people have available to look for work which does match their skills. (The same argument can be made against requiring people to take the first job they can do - Ph.D.s driving taxis - to receive benefits: it reduces the full benefit to society those people can make, even if they spend longer finding positions.) 

 

Workfare is fundamentally just a reflection of the view that people should be expending effort to get paid even if the effort is worthless (an attitude which is not deployed against rentiers). 

 

There is also a contrasting trend for important work to go unpaid. I'm not thinking, here, of unpaid interns; I'm thinking of the fact that local hospitals seem to have almost as many volunteers assisting with patients as they do paid staff. My parents' local city art gallery is largely staffed by volunteers; I believe the AGO relies on them as well, though to a lesser degree. These tend to be older people, retired but still active. 

 

The proclamation of the end of work turned out to be premature, or naive, or possibly both. But the mechanisms connecting performing a valuable role in society and having the wherewithal to subsist on are becoming disconnected.

 

Let's consider a few different examples:

 

First, those hospital volunteers. They don't mark the end of normal work in the sense of jobs being automated away: they represent it in the form of jobs which are wanted but society is unwilling to pay for. Luckily for hospitals, charitable volunteering is respectable, the skills involved - basically, standard people-skills of the ESFP variety - are common, and they can fill slots with older retirees rather than younger people who would want wages. This is not very different, in principle, from school systems which won't pay STEM teachers salaries competitive with other employers of competent STEM graduates, but instead get far less-qualified people to take crash courses and then teach poorly.

 

And there's no point in pointing out that this is in part because of an absence of a direct market. (For-profit hospitals for the rich would actually hire staff to make life easier for the patients.) That is, the indirect connection between paying (by way of taxes) and receiving services (when sick) is a poor motivator. The point is that we don't want a market relationship here - we want a decent hospital experience for the poor, just as we want decent math teachers, generally, in all the schools. But, as a society, we (or at least a politically critical subset of us) don't want them enough to pay higher taxes.

 

The same observation may be extended to things like a minimum guaranteed income: it's generally agreed to be a good idea, but all we ever see are pilots. (It should net out less costly than our current mishmash of welfare, EI, and other income support programmes, but getting there would be pricey, and it would combine into one programme what is currently a mix of federal and provincial programmes.)

 

At the other end of the scale, consider the impact on the trucking industry of self-driving long-haul trucks. Even if they're self-driving only on the long haul, with local drivers doing pick-up and delivery in urban areas, the displacement possibilities are massive - not just truckers, but the infrastructure in restaurants and other support that they make use of. 

 

Those affected are likely to be at the difficult end of the spectrum regarding effectiveness of retraining. Some will be retained for the more complex elements that are left; but skills in driving are transferable mainly to other driving jobs, and the same automation which would be eating into trucking would also be diminishing those other pools as well.

 

This goes well beyond issues with late-stage capitalism; a thoroughgoing public reassessment of the relation between work, productivity, and leisure is called for here. 

 

 

[1]Although this was exacerbated by the industrial revolution, it is also a fair description of much of the work of a farm hand or a spinner/weaver. In a home environment the worker had more freedom to vary tasks, but many of the tasks were simple, repetitive, and requiring as skills principally dexterity or strength.

 

[2]I note with regard to the OSSLT exams, designed to measure basic literacy, that 92% of "Academic" stream students pass on the first try; 44% of "Applied" programme students do do. This corresponds to the skills required to read instruction manuals.

 

[3]People who can present well socially fill a niche which cannot be automated, at least at the high end. Even if one imagines that it will be possible to walk into some clothing equivalent of Amazon Go eventually and be measured and fitted by a set of machines, it's inevitable that the equivalent shop in the West End will have attendants providing personal attention to the higher-end clientele.

ETA: On the matter of hospital volunteers, see this Guardian article on NHS volunteers