Some Thoughts for the Coming Year (and Beyond)
Posted by Kevin Carson on Feb 9, 2010 in Commentary • 7 commentsAlthough I’m late getting around to it, I’d like to follow the widespread New Year’s custom, among people lucky enough to get paid for blathering about their opinions, of taking a shot at some concrete predictions.
The free fall in employment seems to have pretty much stopped, with the possibility of even a little reduction in unemployment, if we manage to avoid the second leg of a double-dip in 2010. In a best case scenario, I still expect continued quiet declines in total employment as a percentage of the population, and in average work-weeks, that don’t really show up very well in the kinds of macroeconomic indicators you see in the newspaper every day.
My hope is that the growing surplus of industrial capacity and labor power will continue to be reflected in such quiet stagnation, and not in sudden or catastrophic mass unemployment.
I expect a long-term trend toward reindustrialization, as the model of using container ships to import stuff made on contract for Western TNCs in Chinese job shops becomes prohibitively expensive. But I also expect continued stagnation and idle capacity in what’s left of traditional mass-production industry. Put the two together, and you get exponential growth of flexible manufacturing networks made up of small shops and garage factories. Since the old model of enforcing “intellectual property” on industrial designs was only cost effective in an environment where a handful of giant manufacturers produced millions of the same goods and sold them through a handful of giant retailers, we can also expect the transaction costs of enforcing IP against hardware hackers to become prohibitive. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility that the old manufacturing companies wind up in an Argentina-style situation, where they’re too busy boarding up factories and fleeing creditors to worry about enforcing their patents.
It would be good, in a society where traditional full-time employment with benefits becomes increasingly marginalized, if artificial scarcities in benefits like healthcare were removed so that it would be easily affordable outside the traditional model of full-time employers as the primary institutional base for the social safety net.
It would also be good if some sort of job-sharing catches on, with or without public fanfare as an Official Trend, and gradually chips away at the average work week; this would be far preferable to a sharp dichotomy between the still-employed and a growing class of long-term unemployed. Over the next generation I expect we will gradually transition to a society in which a shrinking percentage of people have full-time jobs, and more and more are part-time workers living in extended families, cohousing, and other income-pooling arrangements.
At the same time, it would help for social safety net functions to be decoupled from the employer-based welfare state and gradually shift to primary social units like the income-pooling arrangements mentioned above. For example, membership in one of Tom Greco’s credit-clearing networks might entail a modest monthly payment (assessed as a percentage of one’s total transactions within the system) that would go toward sick benefits, unemployment and disability, old age pension, etc., so that those who became incapacitated would be able to obtain necessities from members of the network.
One of our most vital needs is to flush all forms of artificial scarcity and attendant price markup from the system, so that the reduced work hours and capital required to produce a comfortable standard of living also translate directly into a reduction in the number of hours of labor to buy that standard of living. A top priority for libertarians, toward this end, should be to make artificial property rights unenforceable (for example, by developing and promoting the technical means of circumventing copyright law, for organizing barter and credit-clearing systems in darknets that are opaque to the government, for evading regulatory restrictions on self-employment in the informal economy, etc.).
What’s needed, in sum, is 1) a “cramdown” or “mark to market” of most of the inflated asset values that impose high fixed costs on the average person, and 2) an end to the artificial scarcities that enable owners of fake property rights to prevent the benefits of increased productivity from being passed on to workers and consumers, so that it takes fewer hours of work to live comfortably.
If the full-time work week today were reduced to 32 hours in lieu of 10% (or 20%) unemployment, but the price of housing were allowed to fall to normal historic levels (i.e. 20% of the average monthly income, rather than 40-50%), and per capital healthcare expenditures were reduced to European or even Canadian levels, we’d all be a hell of a lot better off.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
We're still seeing layoffs and hours reductions in the service sector, particularly in retail. I'm working for a company with some real problems, but they're not exactly rare these days — and my hours just dropped to about 10 per week. Everything I'm reading about new jobs, at least in that sector, suggests continuing, even increasing precarity. Last I saw the national U-6 "underutilization" numbers were at 17.3%, and reports of "underemployment" locally as high as 22% recently. I suspect those numbers are sort of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to employment reduction, but, as you say, it's hard to get a clear sense.
One comforting bit of information I came across recently is that retiring baby boomers are leaving the labor market in considerably larger numbers than young folks are entering it, so the shrinking labor market should cushion long-term trends toward reduced employment. Of course the downside is increased payroll taxes.
This baby boomer has left the job market twice. The first time as a result of redundancy, the second was also involuntary after illness stopped me keeping 'in the loop' with my consultancy work. I'm now ticking over a third time as an artist/photographer, but there is no way I would go back to being an employee ever again.
I don't think I'm unusual in since many of my former school friends and later work colleagues have gone down similar paths – most of us are picking up enough pieces of work to keep the brain alive, even if we can't say we have a 'career' – but who wants a career?
Iain, my sister's in something of a predicament trying to find another job in her 50s after the business that employed her for four years closed down. And all too many people seem to be in that predicament. But I'm glad the boomers who are choosing to retire in their 60s outnumber the young people coming into the labor force. That seems like about the most pain-free way to shrink the labor force, at least until workers snap out of the "get eaten last" mentality and start asking for job-sharing as an alternative to unemployment.
Kevin, I'm just not certain that asking for job-sharing is going to be anywhere near enough. A lot of us are suffering from forced job-sharing as it is, and the new jobs being created seem, as I said, to be of the shared-by-top-down-design variety. I see that the IWW is taking some measures to make the participation of cooperatives in the union easier, but it's hard to see how we're going to avoid fairly extreme precarity as the new normal for many of us, if labor doesn't take a more active hand in job- and economy-creation. "Within the shell of the old" may mean within the reserve army of the un- and underemployed. It certainly seems like our solidarity and self-management need to gain a bit more proactive character.
Shawn: I certainly agree that a lot of people have suffered from the two-tier workforce model. By "job-sharing," I simply mean that in the event employment levels trend toward what they were in the 1930s, shorter workweeks–as the norm, not just for a lower tier of temps and part-timers–are a less catastrophic alternative to 25% unemployment. And I see it only as a way of cushioning and spreading the harm from the negatgive side of things. By itself, without positive measures from the other side (i.e., rapid developments in low-cost technologies for producing a growing share of needs outside the wage economy, and new networked institutional frameworks like local currency systems for doing so), it will only be the difference between a disaster and a catastrophe.
Do double dips have legs?