[Campaignforrealdemocracy] [civilisation] Democracy & Full Employment

[A GRAY]

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
 
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