[Campaignforrealdemocracy] [civilisation] Democracy & Full Employment

[Mark Barrett]

Thanks for this Anne, good points and I look forward to reading your
publication.Originally I was going to take some time to think through the
detail of what you've said before replying but by chance saw article and
report today (see below) and (along with your reponse) it got me thinking
about how it might be possible to link up community development, youth work,
real democracy and a sensible approach to benefits provision.

*One  in six young Britons jobless as unemployment hits 14-year high*
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/iarticle6794065.ece

*Just Rewards. It is hard to see any connection between merit and pain in
this recession. We need to do a lot better by the young unemployed.*
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6793974.ecewhich
includes reference to Amarta Sen's The Ideal of Justice.

As it happens, I'd already begun to modify the proposal, as I've posted
elsewhere this week, to include the citizen's income idea.

But after thinking (admittedly briefly, so shoot me down if this makes no
sense) a further developed set of proposals in the light of that (CI angle)
and today's revelations about youth unemployment could amount to:

(1) everyone, regardless of means, gets a citizen's income of (whatever it
is). In exchange for this, all citizens are expected to take part in a
weekly meeting in their neighbourhood governing assembly / public space
(every neighbour hood will have one, as of right). People who do not wish to
may find they change their minds when paving stones start getting pulled up
on their street with fruit trees getting planted and they didn't have a say
in what type of fruit is chosen (or, more grumpily, they'd have wanted to
block it altogether) or when a street stall presence starts up round the
corner without his or her input on its character. No such interest to get
people together than self - interest, the exercising of power.

(2) Benefit recipients would take this concept further, so that they would
be expected to take part in a certain number of hours, to do the work they
want, but with some provisos:

A Unlike the citizen's income component, the benefits work does not
necessarily need to be in the community in which they live
B what work they do, would be decided by them in collaboration with the
community in question
C the work would have to involve direct mentorship or collaboration ie
shared projects with unemployed young people. Again, decided democratically
according to the person, young people and community in question. Wouldn't
that (the reality of working with the young, unemployed) be a wee bit of a
disincentive? I'd suggest that each community along with other functions
identified so far (parliamentary, banking, beneifits
distribution/employment, creche and, ideally food share and grow, would be
an attached qualified youth work/teacher/mentor person. This part might
easily link to the creche function, and we are beginning to create a
community school :-)

And therefore, linked to this
(3) Unemployed young people will likewise be expected to do a job of their
choice, and thereby would be mentored. The length of time that young people
stay in this state would be fairly open but my guess is that being young
they would WANT to get off the benefits/community work system, either by
getting a free market job or growing their own business. The local bank
function mentioned elsewhere would help with this, as it could (especially
micro) lend to young, talented people who they've seen mentored and who are
helping to develop the new local democratic economy.

New proposals a step in the right direction?

Full Times article + comments from the public set out below.

Salam
Mark

In his book The Idea of Justice Amartya Sen points out that seeing a
connection between effort and reward is how people understand a process to
be fair... " This must seem a bewildering recession to most people. A
serious crisis of credit began with irresponsible lending from banks that
then had to demand balance sheet reparations from the taxpayer. After a
shapeless debate about whom to blame, the recession, deepened by the
drying-up of credit, is duly measured out in the job losses of the
blameless.

One in twelve people in Britain is now out of work. Most of these people are
suffering the consequences of mistakes made elsewhere. Bonus payments have
returned to the City of London while manufacturing in the city of Birmingham
is in trouble. The equity market is booming and, with the cost of money low,
this is a good time to be an investment banker — and a bad time, starved of
credit, to be running a small business.

There is very little merit in any of this. But, most conspicuously of all,
this recession is being especially cruel to the young. Nearly one million
people between the ages of 16 and 24 are now out of work. Unemployment among
people under 25 is a third higher than it was when Labour came to power.

One of the early boasts of the Labour Government was its claim, attributed,
rather dubiously, to the New Deal, to have abolished long-term youth
unemployment. Now, precisely to respond to the possibility of losing a
generation to unemployment, the Government has issued a guarantee of a job
or a place in education or training for anyone under 25 who has been
unemployed for at least a year. Ministers have set aside £1 billion for this
scheme and appealed to businesses, social entrepreneurs and councils to
create jobs to ensure that the guarantee can be met.

The heritage of such job schemes is far from auspicious. Most of them
provide cheap, temporary and disgruntled labour. It would be wonderful if
jobs of enduring value were the result and it is hard to fault the good
intentions that lie behind the idea. The Government is at least posing the
right question.

But even if the job guarantee does place a floor under the prospects of some
young people, the rise in youth employment points to a bigger problem. Why,
when the labour market tightens, has the employment rate among older, more
costly, workers risen while the young have lost out? It is because, in a
recession, the premium on skill is more marked than ever and we are not
offering adequate training to young people.

It is still necessary to walk down the academic path and stumble before a
practical course is tendered. The quality of training, subject to an
alphabet soup of qualifications, is mixed. Too much of it is too general and
there is too little emphasis on the indispensably transferable skills of
literacy and numeracy. But, more than anything else, the conversation
between government and the private sector is fractured. Employers regularly
complain that the supply of young people from the further education colleges
is inadequate. There is a big difference between learning the recipe book
and knowing how to cook. The solution is more learning by doing, which
requires the private sector to take on more responsibility to train — and
requires government, in turn, to provide relevant incentives for the young
to do so.

Professor Sen has also pointed out that the value of work is by no means
entirely found in the income it provides. The nobility of labour is
contained in the sense of agency and self-respect that comes through work
and which is missing even in a system with generous income replacement. It
is better to protect people than jobs and the best protection is to make
young people more capable workers.
-------------

Comments

Although school ends at 18 and masses do a degree until 21, so many of these
still don't have skills that are useful for skilled jobs, and don't want the
unskilled ones as exchanging 40 hours of work for the difference in pay and
unemployment benefit is so low.
August 13, 2009 11:23 AM BST on UK-TimesOnline
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Adam Darowski wrote:
Because the immigrants do jobs the natives refuse to do.
August 13, 2009 8:03 AM BST on UK-TimesOnline
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Boudicca Icenii wrote:
Time to resurrect that old poster - "Labour isn't working" and hope that
this time the numpties who vote for them really get the message that
socialism doesn't create jobs.
August 13, 2009 8:00 AM BST on UK-TimesOnline
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john bonny wrote:
With millions of young people out of work, can anyone explain to me why we
need so many immigrants?


2009/8/12 A GRAY <gray.201 at btinternet.com>
>
> Trouble is if you offer people a good wage for doing a few hours' work per
week to replace their pathetic level of benefit, two problems will still
remain.  Firstly, anyone who is content with that amount of work/income will
do precisely that for as long as they are allowed, rather than take 'open
market' jobs for less money per hours. The employers will complain that the
scheme takes away potential recruits to low paid jobs and the neo-liberal
economists will say that the scheme keeps wages up so prevents people going
into the jobs that employers can 'afford' to pay for. Secondly, if you limit
the no. of months someone can spend in the 4-hours-at-good pay system what
happens to them after that ?  Are you suggesting no benefits ?  or an even
lower level than at present ?  or what ?
>
> There is a VAST literature on different ways of dealing with unemployment
and benefits  which I have touched on in my own writing - see Unsocial
Europe (Pluto 2004) and an article in the International Social Security
Review in 1993.
>
> best
>
> Anne Gray
>
> --- On Tue, 4/8/09, Mark Barrett <marknbarrett at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> From: Mark Barrett <marknbarrett at googlemail.com>
> Subject: [civilisation] Democracy & Full Employment
> To: project2012 at googlegroups.com, civilisation at lists.riseup.net,
campaignforrealdemocracy at lists.aktivix.org, allgendergroup at lists.riseup.net
> Date: Tuesday, 4 August, 2009, 10:32 AM
>
> Hi everyone
>
> As it's been reported in the press this week that a quarter of the UK
budget is now being spent on benefits, could we please have some list
discussions about how this money might be harnessed to create a really
democratic society, or to use the phrase previously embraced, greater local
sovereignty (LS)?
>
> I've sent this message to the three lists above as I've found them to be
the most fruitful in terms of discussions on the topic of building a just
society. If anyone has any other lists they can recommend for this end, pls
let me know. On this subject please can people hit reply to all so that all
three lists can take part in any debate that ensues?
>
> Benefits & Productivity
>
> For me this is the next stage of productivity in the industrial economy,
the pursuit of a really democratic culture with full employment, freely
chosen. So I had this idea that people could do a few hours work each week -
what one colleague has dubbed a 'mini-job' - in return for payments. Say,
an hour for every £10-15 they receive. Key thing is that this work should be
chosen BY the recipient, in collaboration with a local community of their
choice, so that the work allows the individual to do what they would rea;y
like to do rather than have the state force something on them as is the case
with neo-liberal workfare programmes now being experimented with. Obviously
these kinds of decisions would need different, decentralised benefits
'purse-string' structures - essentially a breakdown of the currently
unwieldy and wasteful nationalised benefits programme into a really
democratic, ie each local community owned, public service. Of course there
will be lots of questions about how this will work in practice, which is why
I am posting about it now, but for me the huge benefit (sic) in this is that
it will allow state expenditure to be directed towards the development of
locally based creativity, community fabric building, green jobs, real
democracy, individual and collective entrepreneurialship, and a re-embrace
of the dignity of work. It will also allow people to wean themselves
off benefits as they develop new skills, improved CVs, greater self
assertion and confidence, not to mention the huge health benefits in terms
of tackling isolation, depression, social breakdown at the root. It will get
people off their backsides but not Tebbit "On Yer Bike" style, rather Rumi
"Let the beauty that we love be what we do"..
>
> The way I see it, alongside the present economy, communities should be
able to compete with one another for labour, by simply embracing a cultural
stance. A mixed economy, two parallel economies inteplaying with one
another rather than this monoculture of labour everywhere competing for
capital, or else the indignity of the dole.
>
> Here's the story about 186 billion benefits.
>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/5962510/Unsustainable-social-security-spending-equal-to-a-quarter-of-goverments-budget.html
>
> Thoughts anyone?
>
> Love
> Mark
>


--
"We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet /Yet is there no
man speaketh as we speak in the street.”
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