WORK, MONEY, MACHINES

My twin brother is a poet. Usu­ally when I tell my adult Eng­lish stu­dents this they ask me how he is able to sur­vive eco­nom­i­cally.

They are al­ways sur­prised when I say that Aus­tralia has an un­em­ploy­ment ben­e­fit paid monthly by the gov­ern­ment and that this ben­e­fit does not stop after six months, as it does in Spain.

Of course, my brother, just like all the other re­cip­i­ents of ’the dole’, as it’s called there, have to jump through bu­reau­cratic hoops and many have re­cently been vic­tims of all sorts of hor­rific stuff-ups by a sys­tem that is being pri­va­tised.

Yes. Soon the pay­ments the poor­est live on will be con­trolled by busi­nesses that put mak­ing a profit from their ’clients’ as their biggest in­ter­est. In Aus­tralia, these un­em­ploy­ment ben­e­fits are only just enough to live on if they are com­bined with other gov­ern­ment pay­ments, such as rent as­sis­tance.

I have a friend liv­ing in Barcelona who is a very tal­ented graphic artist and is also a pho­tog­ra­pher with a unique eye. Like me, he teaches to pay the bills be­cause his cre­ative work does not get him and his fam­ily con­sis­tent in­come. Also like me, he en­joys his classes but would ide­ally like to be spend­ing more time on using his tal­ents to make new ’prod­ucts’, as our con­sumer so­ci­ety would in­sist on call­ing them.

But there is a wider ques­tion for every so­ci­ety here. Is a form of guar­an­teed basic in­come a good idea?

Some peo­ple argue that the pub­lic purse should not pay peo­ple to do what non-cre­atives be­lieve to be just hob­bies, but this is miss­ing a vital point. Prac­ti­cally every in­dus­try is now using greater num­bers of ro­bots and other types of au­toma­tion and mech­a­ni­sa­tion. When I was leav­ing uni­ver­sity in the early 1990s a guar­an­teed job for life was work­ing in a bank. We now know this rapidly ceased to be the case and branch clo­sures across the world have meant the loss of most bank­ing jobs.

Mainly, this has been be­cause ma­chines now do the jobs that peo­ple used to do, and the fi­nance sec­tor is only one place where this type of change is march­ing on. At Ama­zon for ex­am­ple, every job that can be done by a me­chan­i­cal de­vice is being done by one. The peo­ple who work there have to keep up with the pro­duc­tiv­ity of ma­chines (even if it costs them their ner­vous sys­tems) or they are sim­ply fired and re­placed with an­other very low paid worker who works long, long shifts al­most ex­actly as a robot does.

Not long ago, I my­self once worked in a full-time job for one of the world’s largest smart­phone com­pa­nies (sit­ting at a com­puter) until one day my right arm com­pletely froze-up after months of ten­dini­tis prob­lems caused by using a mouse at a high speed. I was sacked the same day I came back to the of­fice after being on med­ical leave for this prob­lem. My body just would not work as a ma­chine does.

The ques­tion that has to be asked and an­swered is what do our so­ci­eties do to deal with in­creas­ingly sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of peo­ple who don’t have enough paid work or even any paid work. Eco­nomic sur­vival can be close to im­pos­si­ble. In much of Mediter­ranean Eu­rope, the fam­ily unit has typ­i­cally helped out, as have char­i­ties, but this has cre­ated an un­even cov­er­age of the ba­sics of life for many peo­ple.

The ob­vi­ous so­lu­tion is a uni­ver­sal basic in­come for every in­di­vid­ual in so­ci­ety. Eu­rope’s newest pro­gres­sive po­lit­i­cal party, DiEM25, be­lieves that the fund­ing for this “should come from a div­i­dend, fi­nanced from the re­turns on all cap­i­tal; a ’pub­lic’ per­cent­age of com­pa­nies’ prof­its, es­pe­cially for com­pa­nies that com­mer­cialise tech­nol­ogy de­vel­oped from pub­lic fund­ing.” In other words, “Tech­no­log­i­cal progress should not sim­ply serve cap­i­tal­ism.”

The great ben­e­fit from this is that it would allow cre­ativ­ity to flour­ish and peo­ple who pre­fer paid work at a higher in­come can do that, too.