The jobs of a majority of our unemployed may have disappeared forever. This is due, in part, to globalism, which has induced us to export millions of jobs to the developing world. It is also due to technology, which has enabled us in the west to keep our economies running with a fraction of people available.
So what are millions of people to do if they are not needed?
Indebtedness is pre-occupying us at the moment because it requires immediate remedies. Similarly, unemployment is an election issue everywhere. The problem of surplus people is not an immediate problem. But if it is left festering, millions of them may rise up and cut our throats. This undesirable event can be prevented…
1. If we bring back manufacturing. This can only be done by massive government intervention, which is difficult, if not impossible, in countries that equate the free market and free trade with democracy.
2. If we pay for all the work that is now done by volunteers. This would require, among other things, a new vocabulary. “Volunteering” may be confined to charity work.
3. If all public and private investments are linked to the requirement to employ people. Social and political life would have to be based on a new set of priorities. A different value system may have to evolve.
4. If much of philanthropy is connected to the need to employ people.
5. If the public demands that governments and foundations find ways to support people who have opted out of the economy, under certain conditions. Obviously this can only be done if the growth rate is healthy enough to finance this.
6. If words other than “unemployed” – which has a stigma – are used to describe those who are being financially supported one way or another without having to work in the traditional sense – words without stigma – such as free-gentlemen and free-ladies. When there was still an aristocracy, one of its prime characteristics was that members did not perform traditional work. They left that to their inferiors. They had better things to do – such as do good works, play polo and support the arts.
7. If educators are taught to teach young people that adult lives devoted to good citizenship, to thinking, praying, learning, playing and creating beautiful and useful things are worth living, more so than lives devoted merely to the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. (We would not have a euro crisis at this time if hard-working Northern Europeans did not have disdain for the many Greeks and Italians who believe that some things are more important than hard work in the traditional sense.)
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Just because there’s no job for you or me, or anyone in the world, does not make us superfluous. That concept applied to human beings should be taboo. It would help if economists were to put a monetary value on “fulfillment”, and if governments were mandated to measure, encourage and facilitate “fulfillment” in the population. Fulfilled citizens (no matter what they do, or how productive they are in conventional terms) will be healthier and more compliant (perhaps even more engaged). The benefits of producing fulfillment would far outweigh the costs. And those who believe that most people would choose to do nothing would be proven wrong. Most individuals want and need structure and would choose conventional paid work over “idleness”. And those who follow their interests rather than taking on a career or becoming part of the traditional work force would take the pressure off the (scarce) job market.
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What we are also seeing is a new form of de-industrialization and most clearly in media. CNN has announced they are laying off hundreds. So is the Toronto Star. The reasons are not clear, but the tendency to rely on unpaid or low paid contributors seems to be the direction that all organizations (media or otherwise) are heading toward. The pressure from shareholders is deforming the concept of work (paid and unpaid). Until governments and the people demand that this has no civic value and that media organizations are satisfied with a lower but more reliable rate of return on their investments, we will see this trend continue.
Well put Eric!
Is it only a remote possibility that, if the trend continues and grows significantly, a consequence may be civil unrest?
If generational unemployment leads to the loss of hope, then civil unrest is a real prospect. But with real youth unemployment at or above 25% in many European countries, with many failing to find meaningful employment after a decade out of school, why has the “Occupy” movement not consumed Europe? They are the boomerang generation. According to a doc on CBC’s DocZone a few days back, 80% of thirty year old Italian males still live with their parents!
Chattering classes fear the digitization and transformation to net-based dissemination as job “distruction” (churning) is taking place. However, answer is not trying to claw back manufacturing. Canada has a world leading record in knowledge-based services job creation. We are great content creators.
Fear not the future… But Keep your skills versatile.
Cheers
Mike Sky
Wages in China are now 43% of wages in the United States. That means some manufacturing jobs will come back to the United States. The Internet is killing newspapers; I used to write two to three newspaper pieces a week, now I write one or two a month, if I’m lucky. So I do other things. No one will have the same jobs forever and governments can’t pick winners.
I once visited the town of Trepassy (sp?) in Newfoundland. Before the fish plant closed most high school students dropped out in grade 10 to get jobs that would give them clothes and a used car. Now almost no one drops out. People will learn unskilled dumb jobs are disappearing.
Bless Fred Langan for getting the point: what this is about is that we either make or grow some physical thing that someone will pay for, or we exercise some art or skill for which they will pay us. Other than that, we are of “those who are being financially supported one way or another without having to work in the traditional sense” and things may (deservedly) get pretty thin for us.
What do we DO if we are Superfluous? Starve.
Perhaps we need a new definition of “productivity”. It has always interested me that economists use the term to connote the least possible human involvement in production. Are there other ways of thinking about what productivity and efficiency might mean. Could we ever think that the most efficient society is the one that sees the most people “usefully” rather than “productivly” employed?
Could we ever think that the best society is the one which honours fulfilled people (David Schatzky’s point) as much as useful people?
There is no shortage of work only a shortage of paid work because we only invest to produce a profit not to create employment. That is why government, which is the only institution that can invest for reasons other than profit, is attacked as it attempts to do so. Everyone knew that globalization would wipe out North America’s industrial base and that it would produce larger profits for the companies that switch their production abroad. To now argue that we didn’t need those jobs and have to change our lifestyles to accommodate an unprecedented situation is fanciful dreaming and cruel in the present context.