Work and contributing to society

Faced with a ballot paper asking whether I would support industrial action against compulsory redundancies, I thought again about employment in our current system.

It is the system that has decided that generally speaking, people should not have access to the necessities of life unless they have a paid job. It doesn't particularly  matter if the job is not technically necessary (ie it could be automated) or if it is not socially constructive (say a tobacconist, though, say, a drug dealer is illegal because drug taking is not deemed socially constructive in most cases).

Having decreed that people pretty much must have jobs, the system can then take the job away from you. This is usually because of money, of course. When we look objectively at an organisation, we want it to be efficient - to get the same things done with fewer people and for less money. But when it's the organisation that employs us, we want any efficiency savings to stop short of us being out of a job. Hence trade unions and collective action by people to stay in employment.

This is just another perspective on the problems of putting profit and money before human need. Once again, what we actually need to do is understand what resources we have to sustain the planet and humanity. Then we need to determine how we can most efficiently ensure that whatever work needs to be done to sustain the planet and humanity is done. No other work should be done by anyone/anything for any other reason.

Will people participate in the endeavour to ensure that all necessary work is done as efficiently as possible. Well, there will certainly be those who realise that what is done for the benefit of humanity benefits them as a human, even if the link between their work and their individual benefit is indirect or week. People do things for the benefit of their community all the time. In an RBE the world would be their community.

Then there are the people that give time/money to charity. They see that there are people starving, and they are motivated - perhaps by compassion - to do something.

Then there are those who, when they see a fairer system like an RBE in place or coming into place, will move from passive acceptance of the system they're in to either active or passive acceptance of an RBE.

The most feared category, though, is the 'something for nothing' category - people who are only out for what they can get, and have no intention of putting anything back. The whole current system gravitates towards this idea that people must be deprived of the means of survival to force them to "contribute to society".

Who knows how big this category is. Society already tries to educate them out of the something for nothing mind set, and I dare say society won't stop doing so the while they exist, but let's examine "contributing to society". In the current system, it means get a job - more or less any job, but not every job is genuinely contributing to society. Having a paid job is not necessarily contributing to society. It may also be that some people in this category do not have much ability and would not do well in the job market because of that, and therefore may as well take what they can get, at least from their point of view.

The dictum "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs" comes to mind here. Is it necessary for us to have a system that ensures, by coercion if necessary, that each person contributes to he full extent of his means - ie does what s/he can, or can society cope with people who simply won't contribute, whatever. It may be that in an RBE the work needed is less than the total "means" even of the willing, but it is also true that to some extent we already cope with those who can/will contribute little or nothing. I think in an RBE there will be fewer people and we will cope better even if there aren't.