Social Secuity

What if we were really rewarded for efficiency, or safeguarded from its ill-effects?

Rewards for efficiency are expressed in the form of targets, but we all know they encourage game-playing, because anyone who's in work has to struggle to stay there, and therefore puts across a persona that's working hard in the face of reduced resources.

Efficiency means more output per unit of input, and the "units of input" include jobs. Those without jobs are not hailed as harbingers of efficiency and the vanguard of the new age of freedom from work, but as scroungers, spongers, good-for-nothings and so on. Better to play the game of staying in work than to face that ignominy. Perform only as well as you have to to keep your job. Keep your head down, stay under the radar.

Thus we dwindle away our lives - assuming we're mainly paid for the amount of time we give over to work, but what if we were assured of real social security. What if everyone could work to reduce work, safe in he knowlege that they wouldn't at worst starve and at best be stigmatised for indolence or sloth?

This is the challenge we face as technological unemployment and enviromental catastrophe face us. We have to stop consuming our planet's resources just to make work to get money to spend on consuming our planet's resources (cyclic consumption).

Let's abandon this mutually assured destruction now.

Micawber

As many will know, Dickens' character Mr Micawber has a maxim about his income being greater than his expenditure. This is of course impossible at a global level where the only thing that is possible overall is that income equals expenditure.

For the vast majority of people, expenditure is greater than income, because money is created as debt. Many people of course have to sell their labour for money to pay back this debt.

The constant struggle to minimise outlay and maximise income that most people face is so destructive, even of the better off who fare well compared to those who face starvation day by day.

In an RBE the emphasis would be on maximum efficiency, not taking resources off each other. If an RBE doesn't work there's nothing to stop us reverting to our current system, so it's difficult to accept the assertion that it won't work. Those that believe it won't work ought perhaps be willing for this to be shown experimentally.

Do you want me to have a job or not?

The public sector faces strikes, basically over jobs, terms and conditions. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, and will join the band of people who are told "you must get a job", yet when they tried to keep the job they already had (perhaps through strike action) are told they can't: Money must be saved, efficiency must be gained.
 

Again, there's nothing wrong with efficiency. Do what needs doing (and only that) as efficiemtly as possible, using machines / technology to [help] achieve it. Interlocking survival with work drives in ineficiency by forcing people to get a job that doesn't need doing, or could be eradicated, or could be done by a machine.

Efficiency vs cutbacks

Really efficiency is desirable. Anything we pay for we want to be efficient, so that we get the most benefit possible for each £1 we pay. Where we work, though, it's different. We have to keep our jobs and while we will agree that we should be efficient, if efficient means doing the same with fewer people, we're not so keen as we may be one of those looking for a new job.

The current public sector cutbacks are clearly an attempt to force public sector bodies to look for efficiency savings, hence for instance plans to share services with neighbouring boroughs, but all the while there are people thinking "be efficient, but keep me on", separating efficiency gains (doing the same for less) from cuts in services (doing less to save money) is going to be an issue.

In a culture where we think it is OK for people to be in any old paid employment, irrespective of whether it is socially constructive, and even if it is socially destructive, we will never get true efficiency. True efficiency can only come from focussing human effort on those things that technology cannot do and more to the point directing that human effort so that skills are matched to the work that needs doing. How can this happen with people grimly holding on to jobs for survival purposes?

Unless everybody can have free access to the necessities of life without being bonded to an employer, we will never free up creativity and motivation.

Efficiency and employment are opposing each other

"In some parts of the country ... the public sector accounts for a third of the workforce. An urgent rebalancing was vital", wrote Damian Reece in The Daily Telegraph.

How much of the workforce should be in the public sector, then? We have to start from the premise that the public sector is a Bad Thing, which Reece only hints at by suggesting imbalance between the private and public sectors (presumably).

Here's the point. The only work that should be done is work that is directly relevant to social progress. Having a job to get money does not count as 'relevant to social progress', unless the work being done is in itself relevant to social progress. The work that needs to be done should be done in the most efficient way possible relative to the actual (ie not money) resources available. In many cases this means machines. Humans should only be doing socially relevant work that cannot be done by machines.

People in he public and private sectors all want/need to keep their jobs and there's a tendency to not be as efficient as possible in order that people may stay in work. The public sector gets criticised for that because it's tax funded and most people have no choice but to pay taxes, whereas in the private sector you allegedly have choice. This is a false dichotommy. The obvious essential service that the private sector predominates is food production and distribution. But food isn't produced and distributed as efficiently as possible, because people would lose their jobs - so it's the same thing as the public sector being inefficient to save jobs.

Until we decouple the need for access to the necessities of life from work and money, we are always going to have this problem. If we were so efficient that few if any people had jobs and therefore money to buy the efficiently produced goods/services, they would have to be given away. In our current system we create a cycle of consumption whereby jobs are made for people so that they can get money to buy the goods that are made for the large part to keep people in work.

Efficiency vs employment

With the public sector required to make massive cuts in expenditure, "efficiency" is on the agenda. One suggestion is outsourcing and a typical outsourced job is the call centre. But how should call centres be paid? By the number of calls they take? By their speed of handling calls. Both have problems.

People calling a public sector organisation have a problem. Therefore if the call centre is paid per call, it is in their interest for there to be more problems. And if operators are measured on call handling times, will this lead them to sort out the problem? It won't, because there's a powerful incentive to keep the call short and if the problem's not solved, the customer will call again and the call centre will get paid more, which is inefficient and annoys the customer, but keeps people in work.

Another example of an efficiency I heard was combining the various welfare offices so the customer has a one stop shop. Yes, but if the system is more streamlined and efficient people will lose their jobs as we'll need fewer to do the same work. Again turkeys voting for Christmas.

Needless to say, the more people are unemployed the more people are needed in the "unemployment industry" to deal with them, paradoxically.