[Campaignforrealdemocracy] [project2012] Re: [civilisation] Democracy & Full Employment

Thu Aug 13 20:09:49 BST 2009

Hi everyone..

I think a good way of linking up these issues, theoretically at least - is the through the concept of social responsibility. In that, citizens have a social responsibility to help empower and value one enough to develop sustainable ecological communities - this would obviously mean providing meaningful inclusion of the youth into the political, economic and social imagination of the community. Real democracy means providing a framework in which we can hold all citizens accountable for their actions or non-actions in relation to social responsibility.  And finally, benefits provides some means to enable citizens to survive during times of poverty but is to be given with some assurance from the citizen that they are fulfilling their duties of social responsibility towards that community.

Steve

________________________________
From: Mark Barrett <marknbarrett at googlemail.com>
To: A GRAY <gray.201 at btinternet.com>
Cc: project2012 at googlegroups.com; civilisation at lists.riseup.net; campaignforrealdemocracy at lists.aktivix.org; allgendergroup at lists.riseup.net
Sent: Thursday, 13 August, 2009 17:56:05
Subject: [project2012] Re: [civilisation] Democracy & Full Employment

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.ece which 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.
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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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