Work! Work! Work!

By August 1993, there were 17 million unemployed in the EC. According to EC Commissioners, the figure is expected to be 24million by the end of 1994. Since Eastern Europe has been opened up to the 'free market' forces, unemployment has escalated from 3.4 percent in 1989 to 20 percent this year. In sub-Saharan Africa it is expected to be 31 percent by the year 2000. Worldwide, 1 billion new jobs will have to be found by the turn of the century and it is not at all clear how this will be possible.

This problem is usually attributed to the recession and thereby the slow or negative growth rate of GNP. This is not realistic - 20 years ago, it was clear that economic growth could not provide jobs on anything like the scale required. An International Labour Organisation study in 1973 stressed that

"there is not the remotest hope that Western technology, with its capital intensive bias, can create the basis for ensuring employment to the over 184 million job seekers in India during the next 27 years leading up to 2000 AD."

It is now at last dawning on western politicians, that this is not just a problem for the Third World. Throughout Europe, economic growth, which itself is becoming ever more difficult to achieve, is also proving ever less capable of providing the necessary jobs. In France, for instance, even with a 2.4 percent rate of economic growth, unemployment will increase from 10 percent in 1993 to 12.6 percent by the year 2000.

The seriousness of the situation can only truly be appreciated if we consider that unemployment does not merely mean material deprivation. The atomised societies of industrialism have robbed people of extended family networks and cohesive communities. A job can provide a surrogate social environment and hence a feeling of security, an identity and a goal structure, all of which are psychologically difficult to dispense with. It is not surprising that prolonged unemployment - and some 50 percent of the unemployed in the EC today have been unemployed for over a year - leads to all sorts of social deviations: marital breakdowns, increased alcoholism, drug addiction, delinquency and crime, which provide a new outlet for the energies of those who have no place in the formal economy.

These trends are inherent in the drive towards further economic development. One reason is the increasing number of people seeking to enter the workforce. This is largely because salaries calculated in real terms are falling in spite of economic growth, which means that in view of the increasing cost of living, one salary per family no longer suffices.

Growth of Labour Force

According to the European Commission, 25 million new jobs will be required by the year 2000, just to cope with the growth of the EC's labour force. However, the availability of jobs is decreasing. This is because it is economic to substitute machines for people - one of the basic methods for assuring economic development, a process that has already gone so far in agriculture that the USA's massive agricultural output is now achieved with 2 percent of its workforce.

Not surprisingly, in recent years it is the service sector that has provided most new jobs. Unfortunately, these jobs too are now being automated due to developments in new fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, digital imagery and data storage. Already, the American postal service plans to sack 47,000 workers by 1995 because new computers will be able to take over the task of sorting mail, yet President Clinton has mistakenly decided to encourage these technologies as a means of revitalising the US economy.

Another problem is that in the service sector, large corporations with economic development are rapidly taking over from small ones. Thus supermarkets are rapidly replacing shops. Sainsbury's already controls one sixth of the UK's food in its 292 stores. On the patterns prevalent in the 1950s, this volume of business would have been serviced by 37,000 small shops of different sorts, employing 130,000 full time and 24,000 part time staff. Today, Sainsbury's stores employ only 38,089 full time and 61,972 part time staff. In other words, the replacement of so many small shops by Sainsbury's supermarkets has led to a threefold reduction in full time jobs, a nearly 3-fold increase in part time jobs and a third reduction in jobs in general.

The trend towards part time jobs, like the trend towards the replacement of jobs by machines, is justified as a means of increasing efficiency and competitiveness which as seen as a sine qua non for economic development. It is part of the same strategy to replace male with female employees, for the latter have been willing to work for lower wages, earning about 60 percent less than men in the UK and are less averse to working part time.

In the UK almost 90 percent of the new jobs created since 1970 have gone to women, so that half the labour force now consists of women, half of whom are working part time. Women are therefore no longer just supplementing their husbands' income but are now replacing men in a big way. This often gives rise to alienated unemployed men, kept by wives on a miserable part time salary. The effects on the already disintegrating family, the growing rate of crime, delinquency and alcoholism are obvious.

Free Trade deals

All these trends can only be exacerbated if all the planned Free Trade deals such as NATFA, Maastricht and the GATT Uruguay Round are implemented. These plans are largely justified on the bogus grounds that they will provide more jobs. Yet though world trade in both primary commodities and manufactured goods has increased by 11 times since 1950, unemployment rates have risen during this period. In reality, free trade is a tool for promoting further economic development, which it does in particular by promoting further growth of the transnational corporations, who already control world trade.

To remove all trade barriers is to condemn to extinction, all the small farmers, artisans, small shop keepers and small companies in general. The NAFTA treaty alone would drive 5 - 15 million Mexican peasants off their land and into the labour market in their own country or across the border in the USA. In the USA, NAFTA would give rise to still more unemployment, as US corporations relocate their factories over the border to take advantage, among other things, of incredibly low Mexican wages.

The search for competitive efficiencies in advanced countries during the 1980s and early 1990s has tuned into a competition in creating unemployment and lowering labour and welfare standards. What makes this situation even more alarming, however, is that the state is becoming ever less capable of meeting the costs of the resulting unemployment and associated social disorders. In the UK in 1992, the Government spent £71 billion on social security (33 percent of all government spending), while unemployment cost £25 billion in terms of benefits and foregone tax receipts.

But unemployment is only part of the problem. A country undergoing economic development must incur all sorts of biological, social and ecological costs - and eventually, these must, in one way or another, be translated into economic costs. This becomes clear if one considers what economic development really involves.

For millennia, ecosystems were largely self regulating. Traditional peoples 'managed' but a minute proportion of ecological processes. The fertility of the soil, the control of potential pests, the replenishment of water supplies, the prevention of floods, the elimination of wastes, like the regulation of the climate itself, were and still are, largely assured by the normal functioning of ecological processes. However, under the economic development process, corporations and state institutions have increasingly sought to 'manage' these processes, which, among other things, means that they have become monetarised.

In the same way, in traditional societies, people lived largely as members of external families and in small cohesive communities. Between them, the family and the community were largely self sufficient: they produced their own food and artefacts, distributed them, brought up and educated their children, looked after the old and infirm, maintained law and order and, in effect, governed themselves with little of no interference from central authorities. Most of the necessary work was done for free, with distribution of services and resources carried out on the principle of reciprocity.

Now, economic development has shattered such family and community structures at enormous social costs and their functions taken over by ever bigger corporations and state institutions. This takeover encourages ever more capital intensive and more environmentally destructive technologies. There is also an escalation in the scale on which economic activities are conducted, with a further increase in environmental destruction.

Clearly, only radical social changes can cope with these problems. A really sustainable society would provide employment for all; or at least each family would be able to earn its livelihood. It would be one in which social problems are reduced to a minimum; state expenditure is at a level that it can afford; and where the impact of its economic activities on its natural environment is reduced to that which the latter can afford.

Employment intensive economy

To assure a necessary level of employment means a reduction in the capital intensity of employment. EC Commissioners have admitted that it requires a "more employment intensive pattern of growth". If agriculture, for example, is to become work intensive, there would be a corresponding reduction in the farm machinery and the agrochemical industries. Clearly then, the move to a more employment intensive economy would be opposed by many industrial interests, but if our society is not to break down under the weight of growing unemployment and other associated social costs, this opposition must be overcome.

A second essential means of increasing employment is to diversify our economy. Of course, in rejecting 'comparative advantage' and speculation, we are further depriving our government and corporations of key instruments of economic growth, so again, such a policy would be bitterly opposed.

By making our economy less capital intensive by correspondingly diversifying it, and by reducing the scale on which the very much increased range of economic activities are conducted, we will reduce per capital productivity - and hence purchasing power, if we were to adopt proposals for a shorter working week, a sort of human 'set aside' - purchasing power would be reduced still further. The only solution would be to create conditions in which people can lead a fulfilling life with correspondingly less money.

Such conditions can only occur in a society based on extended families with cohesive communities and access to an appropriate land base. In such conditions, families can produce much of their own food, clothes and artefacts, bring up their children and look after their aged and infirm relatives for free, as they have always done, until very recently in the history of human affairs. Most of the goods and services which cannot be provided by the family can be provided by the community be barter or purchase at a price that is determined more by social factors than by market forces.

The localised economy is probably the only one in which economic activities can be work intensive, highly diversified and provide a satisfying livelihood for all. It is also the only one in which the symptoms of social deprivation are largely absent - as can be verified empirically by all those who have visited traditional communities in those areas that have succeeded in remaining largely outside the industrial economy. It is in small, largely self sufficient communities that state intervention is least required, and it is this type of society, whose economic activities have the smallest environmental impact.

Can we create such a society? Even if our government and leading industrialists do everything they can to avoid doing so, it will create itself. As the state and global economy disintegrate, people will only survive by creating such a society themselves. They are already doing so in just about all sub-Saharan Africa and South American cities, where without the informal economy with all its obvious defects, the bulk of people today would not survive. The informal economy is also developing rapidly in many Asian cities and increasingly in the Western industrial world. The question is only whether the transition is to be orderly or chaotic and whether it will be fast enough to avoid serious social and ecological discontinuities.