Low Skilled Humans Need Not Apply: Preventative Luddism

This last article looks at historic transitions and how we should learn from the mistakes of the past in dealing with disruption, I also explain the common misconceptions about the Luddites. I discuss policies and changes in culture which I believe will help us all more equally enjoy the abundance technology can bring.

Last of all I highlight the main reason for my current optimism for the future and why I believe the policy solutions I discuss can be put in place soon, to better prepare us and to ease the continuous disruption as we transition into a digital age.

Similarities to the Industrial Transition

We are about to transition to a new exponential digital age(which I discuss in the first article, Exponential Job Disruption) and we can see parallels to this with the transition from the agriculture to the industrial age.

Glenn Porter — “With the advent of industrialization, however, everything changed. The new enclosure laws — which required that all grazing grounds be fenced in at the owner’s expense — had left many poor farmers bankrupt and unemployed, and machines capable of huge outputs made small hand weavers redundant. As a result, there were many people who were forced to work at the new factories. This required them to move to towns and cities so that they could be close to their new jobs…”

We can envision many people having to move closer to cities to find work in the future as rural jobs get disrupted. An analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia found that technology is set to wipe out 60 per cent of rural jobs in the next 10 to 15 years. House prices will rise as even more people are forced into cities creating even higher demand for housing.

“…It also meant that they made less money for working longer hours…”

The U.S. is the most overworked developed nation in the world;

• According to the Center for American Progress on the topic of work and family life balance, “in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.”
• The U.S. is the only country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe. Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.
• At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not. In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.

The average hours worked has not been able to lower for 30 years because wages have not risen accordingly. The median American individual(green line) has had to keep working more to compensate for stagnant wages.

“…Add to this the higher living expenses due to urbanization, and one can easily see that many families’ resources would be extremely stretched.”

So we can see the similarities, people being overworked for stagnant pay, rising living costs and other essential costs such as healthcare and education leading to many people feeling stretched and falling into debt.

Income is not keeping up with house prices. Families are struggling, a single wage used to be able to provide for a family, now it needs two and even then it can still be a struggle to make ends meet. Raising children contributes to 43% of American Poverty.

Elderly care costs will rise soon too due to an ageing population, which will put even more stress on families and taxes as more of society will be dependent on a reducing labor force. The labor-participation rate in June was 62.6% which is the lowest since October of 1977. The ratio of workers to retirees is getting smaller, the amount is expected to drop to two workers per retiree by 2030.

How will a person be able to pay for a house, pay off student loans, child care, care for elderly parents, if their wages don't rise? How will they be able to put away anything for their pension?

The average savings account balance in the U.S. was $5,923 in 2011, according to a 2012 report by Pitney Bowes. Millennials currently have a savings rate of negative 2%, meaning they are burning through their assets or going into debt.

We can see similar trends occurring with the transition during the industrial age, yet presently any mention of being cautionary of the effects of automation disrupting jobs and workers is currently responded with accusation of “being a luddite”.

Peterloo — “In 1815, a brief boom in textile manufacture was followed by periods of chronic economic depression, particularly among textile weavers and spinners. Weavers who could have expected to earn 15 shillings for a six-day week in 1803, saw their wages cut to 5 shillings by 1818. The industrialists were cutting wages without offering relief.

According to David F. Noble the Luddites did not destroy machines because of technophobia, but because of necessity. They had to choose between starvation, violence against the capitalists, or property destruction. The last choice was the most moderate way to protest against unemployment and the lack of compassion of the factory owners.

The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth — The Luddite riots started in Nottingham where workers were more concerned with low wages and work practices, in general, rather than mechanization per se.

Indeed, the broad claim that Britain’s working-class leaders in the early decades of the 19th century resisted the machine because of the technological unemployment it caused is difficult to square with complaints about “long hours of alienated factory labour, and the smoking blight of rapidly expanding industrial towns”. The problem with the factories was not in the low quantity of work they offered, but the low quality of work in the mills.

Are the people in San Francisco protesting against Google, against technology? Or are they protesting against gentrification, inequality and worsening living/working conditions leading to low wages, just like textile workers were protesting in the industrial age? Using history, if this pattern and trend of worsening living and working conditions we can expect more protest and resentment to the people in power.

Ricardo Campo — “Moravec who is anything but a Luddite or a left-wing extremist — recalls first of all the painful transition from the agricultural society to the industrial society. The human cost of millions of workers forced to cram in the suburban areas of industrial districts and to compete for badly paid jobs that were never enough to satisfy demand. This period brought child labor, precarious employment, and inhumane working hours without any social security, health care, trade unions, or pension schemes.”

A new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office is a startling statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers — that is, people who don’t have what we traditionally consider secure jobs. In contrast, in 2005, 30.6% of workers were contingent.

Contingent workers had median hourly earnings in 2012 of $11.95, compared to $17 for workers with standard full-time jobs, their median annual earnings were $14,963 vs. $35,000 for full-time workers. They have higher poverty rates, greater job instability, less access to to private health insurance and higher reliance on public assistance.

The emerging increase in contingent workers and models of employment such as Uber where employees are turned into independent contractors and are excluded from receiving any employment benefits are a cause for concern due to the possibility of exploitation.

Companies using this model can exploit workers, they don't pay at least minimum wage or offer health insurance, unemployment insurance, guarantee of stability, worker’s compensation, pensions, sick pay, holiday pay, wage rises with inflation, maternity leave, overtime restriction, bonuses, sociable hours and so on compared to the better working conditions, pay and benefits that full time employees in companies with good worker representation receive.

Frances Zlotnick — “The unskilled nature of tasks fulfilled by today’s this new breed of atomized, unprotected by the law, and easily replaced contract workers gives these people virtually no bargaining power: behind them stand masses of un- and underemployed, casualties of the jobless recovery, ready and willing to take any work available. Exempt from all federal labor regulation, including minimum wage and maximum hours, occupational health and safety, and anti-discrimination laws, unskilled contractors are in a race to the bottom.”

A 2013 report estimates that roughly a third of the US workforce, more than 40 million, consists of temps, part-timers, contractors, contingent workers, freelancers/independent workers and those who are under-employed or work without employer-sponsored health insurance, 401Ks or FLEX accounts” according to a report by the Harvard Business Review.

We are seeing a return to precarious employment, without any social security, health care, trade unions, or pension schemes. I discuss more on The Growth, Quality and Polarization Of New Jobs in the 2nd article.

Ricardo Campo — “We exited this 19th century ‘savage capitalism’ because of trade unionization, revolutions and reforms, to finally arrive at the welfare state. In particular, the system has been saved thanks to the recurring reduction of working hours, aimed at counteracting technological unemployment and reducing exploitation.”

Any suggestion of a welfare state is stubbornly opposed, in fact there are many who would like to see welfare cuts. Cutting work hours is not possible due to worker exploitation, less money is being distributed to the majority but instead concentrating at the very top. Unionisation is difficult due to government policies to cut down on them, leading to workers having less collective bargaining power.

There is a sense of things getting worse for subsequent generations, only 13% of American adults believe their children will be better off financially than they were when their career reached its peak and just over half (52%) believe their children will have less disposable income than they did in the future, according to a survey of more than 1,100 American adults. What’s more, just 20% of Americans believe their children will have a better quality of life when they reach their age. I discuss more on the prospects of young people in the 3rd article, The Employment Future Of A Child Born Today.

Yet we don't need to carry on this downwards trajectory, we can reverse these trends by changing government policies.

Preventative Solutions?

The Second Machine Age — Over time, the people of England and other countries concluded that some aspects of the Industrial Revolution were unacceptable and took steps to end them (democratic government and techno-logical progress both helped with this). Child labor no longer exists in the UK, and London air contains less smoke and sulfur dioxide now than at any time since at least the late 1500s.

The challenges of the digital revolution can also be met, but first we have to be clear on what they are. It’s important to discuss the likely negative consequences of the second machine age and start a dialogue about how to mitigate them — we are confident that they’re not insurmountable. But they won’t fix themselves, either.

The transition from agriculture to manufacturing and services gave us much more prosperity in the long run but was terrible for many people experiencing the transition. The government, as evident in the past in England, has shown it can be slow to react to suffering during a great transition.

Today's Government may struggle to prepare or even anticipate the technology changes and effects in this new computer driven exponential digital age, where the pace of change is going to be so fast, our linear minds will struggle to comprehend compared to previous change. The changes in the digital age will not slow down but speeds up.

We have never experienced a technology like computers or AI before in human history, that is why this time it is different. Many vulnerable people can end up unnecessarily suffering in a fast and chaotic changing work environment if no adequate safety nets or solutions are in place for a person to adapt and retrain their skills. If income and wealth inequality is not reduced many will find their conditions worsen.

So even if enough new jobs are created it is irrelevant if the transition for people displaced is not governed well. So this upcoming rise of the robots premise must not be dismissed just as luddism, but valid concern for a society which is undeniably about to find many of its major occupations quickly and continuously disrupted by technological change.

I want Preventative Luddism, I want to make it so we never get to a situation where living and working conditions deteriorate so far that people have to suffer and feel the need to break machines as the only means of protest as the Luddites did, we can prepare early, avoid unnecessary suffering and navigate away from repeating history. Robots are not the problem, it’s government policies. I suggest improvements below

Worker Cooperatives

The governments needs to educate, incentives and promote people to organise their place of work and the means of production, which may increasingly be “the robots”, into more equal, fairer and democratic arrangements such as Worker Cooperatives. Mondragon is one example of a self directed worker enterprise(Worker Coop).

The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain, It is the world’s biggest workers co-operative with annual sales over £13 billion ($19.44 billion). At the end of 2013, it employed 74,061 people in 257 companies and organizations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.At the end of 2013, it employed 74,061 in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.

At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in his/her cooperative.

They are a Democratic organisation, Its worker members own Mondragon collectively and make all its basic decisions, no private or individual ownership of Mondragon exists. In the MCC, the worker-members exercise the final power over capital (machines, technology, cash, investments). They are not just, as in capitalism, “the workers.” The managers each have one share, like the workers; because the workers outnumber the managers and democratic votes settle all matter, the workers can fire the managers, not the other way around.

The maximum wage ratio would help to reduce income inequality before it even occurs.

Richard L. Trumka — American workers will continue to become more productive as the digital revolution advances. But United States labor law must be reconstructed to recognize changes in work and the employment relationship and to once again effectively permit workers to organize and designate representatives to bargain with their employers. Otherwise, workers will not share the increased income generated by their productivity, ultimately threatening economic growth.

Since 2008, the UK’s co-op sector has grown a whopping 19.6 per cent while the economy as a whole contracted by 1.7 per cent. In 2011, the cooperative economy grew by 1.5 percent, more than double the rate of the overall economy (0.7 percent). Even judged against narrow capitalist criteria of economic efficiency, many cooperatives are outperforming the rest of the private sector.

Another example of a successful worker co-op is Suma Wholefoods. Suma started in 1975 and is currently the UK’s largest independent wholefood wholesaler/distributor, specialising in vegetarian, fairly traded, organic, ethical and natural products.

“We have a triple bottom line — that’s people, planet and profit,” Collins says. Put simply, Suma is an organisation that is run on ethical lines, which values its customers (mainly small independent retailers) and its members first, rather than faceless shareholders or a small number of rich owners.

This means that staff enjoy seven weeks of holiday a year (rising to 38 days over the next three years), 364-day sabbaticals and incredibly flexible working. There is unlimited paid overtime available and a generous final salary pension. Three-quarters of the profits go towards the aforementioned bonus. Little wonder that when the company advertised for new members recently, 600 people applied.

Another key feature of our structure and working practice is multi-skilling. At Suma we encourage members to get involved in more than one area of business, so individuals will always perform more than one role within the cooperative. This helps to broaden our skills base and give every member an invaluable insight into the bigger picture. It also helps us to play to each member’s various different strengths while enabling us to think ‘outside the box’ when it comes to creativity and problem solving.

The democratic nature of worker coops(each employee own the company so employees each have a democratic voice in how the company is run) would allow workers to vote on decisions that affect them, unlike the way work is currently organised where a board of directors or shareholders can simply uproot at a moments notice and outsource the work to other countries.

Because the worker-members exercise the final power over capital (machines, technology, cash, investments) if the company wishes to automate jobs, then it must be agreed upon. They can find a compromise where workers can be retrained to other roles in the company so they stay employed, they can even pay for education cost. Whereas in the current system you can simply be let go.

Worker Co-ops will help to ease workers transition through the disruption technology can bring. The government should take steps to incentive creation of more self directed worker enterprises to bring democracy to the workplace to stop worker exploitation and reduce wealth and income inequality.

Richard D Wolff — Every society chooses — consciously or not, democratically or not — among alternative ways to organize the production and distribution of the goods and services that make individual and social life possible.

Modern societies have mostly chosen a capitalist organization of production. In capitalism, private owners establish enterprises and select their directors who decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the net revenues from selling the output. This small handful of people makes all those economic decisions for the majority of people — who do most of the actual productive work. The majority must accept and live with the results of all the directorial decisions made by the major shareholders and the boards of directors they select. This latter also select their own replacements.

Capitalism thus entails and reproduces a highly undemocratic organization of production inside enterprises.

Stronger Unions

These emerging precarious models of employment as discussed above, where all the financial risks go to the employee and they receive no employee benefits(pensions, paid holidays, overtime pay etc.), regulations, stability, and where they can be fired easily without warning, can not be the future of employment for the next generation.

In the past manufacturing jobs didn't pay well until workers banded together and demanded something more for their labor than barely enough to eat. Workers in service job need to do the same. Service jobs shouldn’t command dramatically less in the marketplace than those that produce tangible goods.

The union wage premium — the percentage-higher wage earned by those covered by a collective bargain­ing contract — is 13.6 percent over­all (17.3 percent for men and 9.1 percent for women). Unionized workers are 28.2 percent more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance and 53.9 percent more likely to have employer-provided pensions.

Without collective bargaining power and democracy in the workplace employees will continue to be exploited by employers. Salaried workers, contingent workers, temps, part-timers, contractors, freelancers, independent workers, interns, self employed, everyone who works needs to unionise to have more democratic power in the workplace. The government needs to incentivize this by encouraging workers and enforce laws making it easier to unionise.

The Government made a positive step forward recently. The National Labor Relations Board, in a long-awaited ruling, made it easier on for unions to negotiate on behalf of workers at fast-food chains and other companies relying on contractors and franchisees.

Labor Board Ruling Eases Way for Fast-Food Unions’ Efforts — The labor board, which is charged with protecting workers’ rights to organize, changed the definition of a crucial employer-employee relationship that had held in some form since the Reagan era of the 1980s.

Now, a company that hires a contractor to staff its facilities may be considered a so-called joint employer of the workers at that facility, even if it does not actively supervise them. A union representing those workers would be legally entitled to bargain with the parent company, not just the contractor, under federal labor law.

Different Approaches To Labor Law — A number of countries also require substantial employee representation on the corporate board of directors. This is often accomplished by mandating two-tiers board: a large supervisory board and a management board. The supervisory board is responsible for representing shareholder interests while the management board manages the firm from day to day.

In Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Luxembourg, employees have direct representation in the supervisory board. Indeed, in Germany, companies that employ more than 2,000 workers must establish supervisory board representation that is 50 percent labor and 50 percent shareholders. In companies with more than 500 workers, one-third of the supervisory board must be composed of workers.

More laws to facilitate unions must be put in place. Worker Democracy in the form of Worker Unions and Worker Coops will reduce income inequality and see the majority of peoples pay and employment benefits increase. With the majority of people earning more and spending it, not stashing money away like the minority do in tax havens abroad or foreign property, the local economy will grow, which can be taxed to improve things like infrastructure, schools and healthcare for the ageing population.

This will help us move to a more sustainable and egalitarian society, where we can provide more public services and aid for anyone who may fall into trouble.

Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages — “The last decade has produced no improvement in real wages of a broad range of workers, including those with either a high school or college degree. It has also produced a widening divergence between overall productivity and the wages or compensation of the typical worker. In addition, wage inequality has continued to grow between those at the top and those in the middle.

Declining unionization has played a key role in these trends. Today, about 13 percent of workers are in unions — roughly half the share of the early 1970s. This reduction has limited the number of jobs with union wage and benefit premiums; weakened workers’ power to bargain for higher wages, more comprehensive benefits, and better working conditions; and limited the “spillover effect” wherein non-unionized firms raise wages and benefits to compete with unionized firms for workers. Together with other laissez-faire policies such as globalization, deregulation, and lower labor standards such as a weaker minimum wage, deunionization has strengthened the hands of employers and undercut the ability of low- and middle-wage workers to have good jobs and economic security.

If we want the fruits of economic growth to benefit the vast majority, we will have to adopt a different set of guideposts for setting economic policy, as the ones in place over the last several decades have served those with the most income, wealth, and political power. Given unions’ important role in setting standards for both union and nonunion workers, we must ensure that every worker has access to collective bargaining.

Reduce Working Hours

With the majority of incomes raised and spread out more evenly due to increase in worker coops and unions, a shorter work week is now possible as people earn more per hour for their work. As people cut down on hours then more available hours are created for unemployed people to work.

This sustains economic growth, increases productivity and alleviates unemployment, increases leisure time. This will help if technological unemployment does start to occur which I think it will, particularly for low skilled people.

I don't believe people need work 40+ hours a week to feel fulfilled and any less would people lives meaningless and they will be bored with the extra luxury time, for proof just look how many people have retired and are content. So many of us look forward to the weekend or to holidays.

Would a 4 day work week on a 5 day work week wage be disastrous to our mental health? Would 7 weeks of paid vacation time cause severe depression, are teachers complaining about all the holiday time they get? Would both parents being given long paid maternity leave to spend time with their newborn child find themselves in agonizing pain over not being at work instead? Would better pension contributions allowing old people to retire earlier be met with cries of outrage and on the street protests?

Riccardo Campa — Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year — 175 days — for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their work time, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.”

More luxury time will give workers more free time to see friends, work on projects, hobbies, learn new skills, volunteer, take care of their children, the elderly and the disabled. It could also allow more time for people to exercise or play sports to help lower obesity rates. Cutting the work week has been done before in the past to create jobs for the unemployed.

Jeremy Rifkin — On July 20, 1932, the AFL Executive Council, meeting in Atlantic City, drafted a statement calling on President Hoover to convene a conference of business and labor leaders for the purpose of implementing a thirty-hour workweek to “create work opportunities for millions of idle men and women.”

Anxious to stimulate consumer purchasing power, and seeing no other viable solution on the horizon, many business leaders reluctantly joined the campaign for a shorter workweek. Major employers, including Kellogg’s of Battle Creek, Sears, Roebuck, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Hudson Motors voluntarily cut their workweeks to thirty hours to keep people employed.

The Kellogg’s decision was the most ambitious and innovative of the plans. W. K. Kellogg, the owner, reasoned that “if we put in four six-hour shifts, instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

To insure the adequate purchasing power of its employees, the company raised the minimum wage of its male workers to $4.00 per day, and increased hourly wages by 12.5 percent, which offset the loss of two hours of work each day.

The company produced reports showing that reduced work schedules improved enthusiasm and efficiency on the job. In 1935 the company published a detailed study showing that after “five years under the six hour day, burden or overhead unit cost was reduced by 25 per cent, labor unit costs reduced by 10 per cent, accidents reduced 41 percent and 39 per cent more people were working at Kellogg’s than in 1929.

The company was proud of its accomplishments and eager to share its insights with others in the business community: “This isn’t just a theory with us. We have proved it with five years actual experience. We have found that, with the shorter working day, the efficiency and morale of our employees is increased, the accident and insurance rates are so improved, and the unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”

To help many of the youth find work if less low skilled jobs are available the government can create jobs for them. For people not so academically gifted(particularly men) many jobs could be created in rebuilding and improving infrastructure such as turning the US into a country where all energy sources come from renewable sources or defenses against natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the supposedly huge Earthquake which could hit California someday in the near future.

These investments will pay off in the future in many ways, it’s better than having so many people and tools be unproductive. The capacity utilisation(the extent to which an enterprise or a nation actually uses its installed productive capacity) is currently around 78%, we have millions of people looking for work and so much extra work that needs doing isn't being done, it’s illogical.

The government needs to step in and create millions of jobs and allocate the idle unemployed with the idle tools, and provide the education, training, apprenticeships and other investments they may need to become productive members of society and increase the country's economic output.

Many young people who are unemployed could be put to use by the above method to improve the country's wealth, it will make them feel like productive members of society and improve their mental health compared just to sitting at home unable to find work. I believe there is some fundamental human social satisfaction that comes from making a contribution. People want to provide for their families, friends, partners, elderly and be part of a community, I think there is dignity in meaningful work.

Governments should help to create more meaningful work and divide work more equally. I think all capable people should still work but just less. There are positive economic aspects to full employment.

Causes of Wage Stagnation — When job opportunities are as weak as they have been in the current recovery, it is not just job seekers who suffer; workers with jobs see their paycheck and benefits falter. That there are far more jobless workers than available jobs means employers can get and retain workers without offering significant wage increases.

The importance of unemployment to wage stagnation and inequality is demonstrated by the trends in the 1995–2000 period: The last time we saw persistently low unemployment (the late 1990s) was also the last episode of across-the-board wage growth and a time when low-wage workers’ wages fared better than those in the middle.

Maybe too much luxury time becomes a problem for people, in any case, solving boredom is a much easier challenge to solve compared to the social divisive issues of many people not working while many people do. A way for low skilled people to gain higher skills so everyone can equally share the remaining work is discussed below.

The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth — At least in the time of Keynes (as compared to the earlier generations of economists), this future of radically reduced work hours would have followed naturally from simple extrapolation of ongoing trends. Whaples noted that the work week in US manufacturing declined from 59.6 hours in 1900 to 50.6 in 1930. At that rate of decline, the work week would have fallen to 25.4 hours by 2015.

AI powered education

The most useful skill for this fast changing world is to be adaptable .and motivated to learn new things. Technological growth and the accompanying changes in business models, make the continuous adaptation of skill sets absolutely fundamental for successful participation in the labour market.

This is why the current system where people are deterred from gaining higher skills which will be valuable to society by charging extortionate fees is so illogical, nonsensical and devastatingly foolish that it seriously questions the education credentials of the people who allow it to happen. You need the best educated and most skilled people if you want to compete in a globally competitive market.

We need to facilitate, encourage and want more people to gain skills and re-skill themselves, at any age. We need to invest and improve education at all levels. This is a solution for now but the future solution is to create the worlds best teacher which is freely accessible to anyone.

Michael Osborne, associate professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford — “Each student will have a device at their desk which will be delivering their content tailored to their interest and expertise, rather than everyone receiving the same material from the teacher in front of the class. Robots could replace teachers as the primary source of information in classrooms around the world. Technology allows superior delivery of information.”

AI driven MOOCS will start to make some university’s obsolete as they prove to be better at teaching and assessing skill levels. They can add gamified elements, use the best teachers, materials, animations, visual effects, biggest budget. etc. They can incorporate new technology such as virtual reality to have an interactive, instead of the current passive, learning experience.

Their credentials will start to speak for themselves and be favoured by employers as an AI can perform one to one knowledge transfer much more optimally than today’s one to many passive lecture format.

I discuss how to improve education in much more detail on my article The Disruption Of Mental Work.

Disruption of Mental Work

Maria Echaveste — “We need to strengthen the importance and relevance of the common good; that communities are strong when individuals see and act on their common interests. The trend of disinvestment in public education, of weak physical infrastructure, because people are unwilling to tax themselves for the future must be reversed. I say this is perhaps the hardest to do because we are an increasingly diverse society. That diversity makes it very easy for other forces to weaken and divide us.

Politics Of Division

Politicians trying to get into power will capitalise on a vulnerable populace and try and split and divide the population. They will try to divide the working against the unemployed and poor as the cause for their financial suffering.

Richard D Wolff — I’m going to call this Romney-esque — after that great man who almost became president. I gonna show you that Mitt Romney is playing the same game that Angela Merkel is playing in Europe, its the same thing. Here’s how it goes…

“Yes there’s a decline, we’re all experiencing a decline. but here’s what’s really going on. This decline has to do with fact that there are two kinds of working people in this community...” Remember Mr Romney got caught during the campaign, saying something like the following: “…47% of americans will never vote for Republicans or for me. Why? Because they don’t work. They don’t care. They’re the people who mooch off of everybody else. They think they’re entitled to food stamps and welfare and to a housing allowance, and to this, and to that. While the other half,” in his case 53%, he knew what he needed to win, “are hard working Americans, who go to work each day, play by the rules, are disciplined, and they work, and they pay you”, Listen now, very important, “they pay the taxes that allow the moochers to do nothing!”

You know how we do it in this country, right? We give it a nice little racial game? We make one group black the other ones white, that works nicely in parts of our country, fits nicely into stereotypes that have been there a long time. But it’s not about that. In Europe the same game is played, only there it’s Germans, and the Greeks. “The lazy bums! They got pensions! They don’t do anything, they drink Ouzo on the beach all day long!”

Its crazy, its a caricature, nothing to do with reality, but it’s a wonderful story. It’s the story you need to tell to keep these two groups from being together against the system which is screwing them, and to be angry and hostile towards one another, divided from one another, telling themselves a story that allows a process that neither of them has anything to do with, other than suffering from it, to continue.

Indeed, 60 percent of Americans say that the poor are lazy, and only 29 percent say those living in poverty are trapped in poverty by factors beyond their control.

“It’s as if middle-class and wealthy Americans think poor people live under the poverty line by choice, as if a sensible person would choose to subsist on so little.”- Jeanine Lister.

You see outrage when people mention raising the minimum wage, they are dumbfounded at the thought of giving a fast food workers $15 a hour yet don’t blink an eyelid when a Nabisco CEO who makes $21 million per year ships 600 jobs out of Chicago to Mexico to make more money.

The same voices repeat “Everyone must earn a Living!” but when you suggest raising the minimum wage to actually allow someone to live on it, it’s met with doublethink screams of fury or horror.

EPI: Raising the Minimum Wage to $12 — A $12 minimum wage in 2020 would undo the erosion in value of the minimum wage that took place largely in the 1980s. It would also reverse the growth in wage inequality between low- and middle-wage workers over the past generation. Raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would directly or indirectly lift wages for 35.1 million workers — more than one in four U.S. workers.

The average age of affected workers is 36 years old. A larger share of affected workers are age 55 and older (15.3 percent) than are teens (10.7 percent). About two-thirds of affected workers are 25 years old or older.The majority of affected workers (55.9 percent) are women.Workers of color would disproportionately be affected, with more than one-third of black and Hispanic workers receiving a raise.

Of workers who would receive a raise, the majority (57.4 percent) work full time, nearly half (45.1 percent) have at least some college experience, and more than a quarter (27.7 percent) have children. More than one-third (36.5 percent) of single parents who work would receive higher pay, including nearly 40 percent of working single mothers.The workers who would benefit are, on average, the primary breadwinners for their family, earning more than half (54.3 percent) of their family’s total income.

They say “young workers in fast food jobs don’t deserve more than the current minimum wage”, that they are “stepping stone jobs” etc.

Yet half of minimum-wage workers nationally are under 25, which means that half are 25 or older. The average age of fast-food workers is 29, more than 26% are parents raising children.

Minimum-wage jobs have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can’t save up enough to move on and can become stuck in poverty traps.

The Atlantic: It is expensive to be poor — “Most private-sector employers offer no sick days, and many will fire a person who misses a day of work, even to stay home with a sick child. A nonfunctioning car can also mean lost pay and sudden expenses. A broken headlight invites a ticket, plus a fine greater than the cost of a new headlight, and possible court costs. If a creditor decides to get nasty, a court summons may be issued, often leading to an arrest warrant.

No amount of training in financial literacy can prepare someone for such exigencies — or make up for an income that is impossibly low to start with. Instead of treating low-wage mothers as the struggling heroines they are, our political culture still tends to view them as miscreants and contributors to the “cycle of poverty.”

The fast-food industry costs American taxpayers nearly $7 billion annually. The jobs pay so little that 52 percent of fast-food workers are forced to enroll their families in public assistance programs, according to a report at the University of California at Berkeley.

Steven Greenhouse — According to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California–Berkeley, the top one percent of American households captured 95 percent of the income gains between 2009 and 2012. Wages for the typical worker are up just 1.6 percent over the past six years, and, believe it or not, after-inflation wages remain below where they were in 1973. Median household income — $52,250 — remains 8.6 percent or nearly $5,000 below its peak back in 2000. Forty-two percent of American workers earn less than $15 an hour — that translates to just $31,200 a year for a full-time worker.

Congress could more than double the federal minimum wage without doing serious harm to the fast-food industry, according to a report from economists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the report found that fast-food companies would be able to “fully absorb” the increase without limiting its profit margin.

It’s poor-paying jobs, not unemployment, that strains the welfare system, a key finding from a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that showed the majority of households receiving government assistance are headed by a working adult.

What Families Need to Get By — It is clear that even in the best of economic times, many parents in low-wage jobs will not earn enough through work to meet basic family needs. Even when accounting for higher minimum wages in states and localities, a full-time, full-year minimum-wage worker is paid below what is necessary for one adult to meet her local family budget — and far below what it takes for an adult with even just one child to make ends meet anywhere.

The people against a rise in minimum wage then retort they are just going to get replaced by machines if they get a raise, yet moan when they have to claim welfare as an outcome when they are unemployed, moan when you suggest getting rid of tuition fees to allow unemployed people to gain new skills, moan when food stamps are being spent on cookies like they are naughty children who need to be taught a lesson and punished until they finally take one of the jobs that are so common in every state…This moan, blame, victimising mentality is poisonous to society.

Unfortunately a very large portion of society have these unsympathetic attitudes drilled in by the media, it has gone to great lengths to demonise the poor. Many people have been raised and indoctrinated with a sick, twisted, sadistic attitude to victim blame the poor.

They truly want to criminalize poverty. They are content to make the most vulnerable members of society(more than half of US public school students live in poverty) unnecessarily suffer. They irrationally demand each unemployed person(8,549,000 in April 2015) to somehow each get one of the 5.38 million job openings.

Instead of trying to make their own situation better by unionising they take the easy scapegoat path to feel good about their own deteriorating economic situation. They push people who are suffering even further down in some form of crab mentality, they don’t realise the top 1% is doing the same to them.

The same disregard for anyone else but themselves mentality can be seen by people who acknowledge there will be a huge disruption but it’s fine for them as they have a good secure job. These “smart” people may have picked a career or degree they think is safe from being automated or outsourced or disrupted, show no pity to the people that were unfortunate enough not too and criticise/victim blame their decisions like it’s their own fault.

I do wonder about their empathy to their parents, siblings, relatives, friends, partner, children etc? Just because you think your situation is going to be OK for you, doesn’t mean you can be oblivious to everyone else who could struggle.

A personal solution is not enough, a solution for all of society is needed because suppose if you do manage to pick a career that appears safe from direct disruption it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s immune from disruption by external forces. The market system is dependent on customers, and if large numbers of consumers (perhaps even a majority) are without any means to purchase goods and services, the market economy cannot succeed. Your taxes may go up as a consequence, public services be reduced and in the worst case scenario it could cause another recession and possibly even a revolution.

The mantra “My jobs safe, I don’t care about anyone else” else is unbelievably short-sighted. Even Billionaire CEO’s are worrying about this. Technology will disrupt almost all sectors of the economy, it not only threatens lower skilled jobs but also has the potential to replace higher skilled jobs and open those jobs to more global competition, no person, business or country is immune from the effects of the coming disruption.

This leads in to my last solution. The culture, attitude and treatment of the most vulnerable needs to change before it could be enforced.

How will we treat the unemployed truck driver?

Will we blame them, demonize them in the media, pull away as much assistance as possible just to make them suffer?

Or will we as a society, decide to finally take care of one another, help people who go through difficulty as a social responsibility, will we after thousands of years of civilisation actually become civilised and treat one another like human beings with respect and not let them starve, be homeless and allow other depravity such as child poverty.

Basic Income

Scott Santens — Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

We have a system to give money to people but we have to disguise it as payments in a series of ways to make them socially acceptable, we don't have a flat rate that says this is least you can get and if you want anymore you have to work.

What we do instead is invent a hundred different politically correct ways to send people money, you can get it if you are sick, a child, a veteran, old, disabled— and you can’t just get money, the government has to specify its for certain things like buying food with food stamps, because that's more palatable to the general public as they see food as a necessity.

Any time someone gets money you have to invent some cover for why they get it, can it not just be because they are a human being?

We need to accept that it isn’t immoral to be unemployed as we enter a time of continuous disruption. We can’t continue with our attitude everyone must earn a living or victim blaming the poor or unemployed when they are obviously suffering and most vulnerable and need the most help.

We have to agree as a society to support the unfortunate people who are disrupted, not vilify them. Once this is achieved and reductions in wealth/income inequality it will be easier to create and fund an Unconditional Basic Income. A Basic Income is a guarantee that every citizen has a right to a minimum level of subsistence.

This will eliminate poverty and will allow safety nets for people who are disrupted so they can safely be able to retrain and find new meaningful work and even create new work. A Basic Income has been shown to increase economic activity.

I think society benefits if all the human race is empowered and aspiring to do great things. The barriers to entrepreneurship are falling. Giving people the education, skill sets, financial safety will unleash many people's creativity to innovate and will see entrepreneurship at levels never seen before creating many new business and jobs. A basic income will free many of us to do the great things we have always dreamed about doing but never had the confidence or support.

Louis Hyman — “We should use this coming crisis as an opportunity to return to our core American values. While we often discuss the American Dream in terms of consumption, there is another American Dream that is more visceral: control over one’s work. The longing many Americans feel for owning their own business, the celebration of entrepreneurship in our culture, and our homesteading heritage are not just about money — or buying houses.

Flexible workers should have a safety net to allow them to pursue their ambitions. Freed of some of their fear, people could find out what they can do. Even today, only a third of Americans go to college. Most of us haven’t had the chance to truly find out what we are capable of.

Many will find they can do nothing particularly impressive, but my suspicion is that there is far more untapped talent than we can imagine.Not all will succeed. Yet a safety net that allows someone to try to find rewarding work — this matters much more than, say, helping that person mortgage a house. It can help assure not just material comfort but spiritual success, something that our 19th-century ancestors fought unsuccessfully to preserve as they moved into dehumanizing factories and offices.

Let’s re-balance the lending incentives to make it as easy for Americans to own their work as to own their own houses, using private capital for small business just as we did with houses. Channeling capital into business, rather than housing, will create an unprecedented boom, not only in economic growth but in quality of life.

Whatever the path forward, we need to stop fixating on propping up a world of security that is tied to a job. Embracing the new reality of flexible work, rather than fighting it, we can find a way to provide a new American Dream that is, in essence, the oldest one of all: independence.”

If the previous solutions are put in place I don't think many people would choose to live on such a basic amount. I think if there is good paying work available with reduced hours plus a free, quicker way to gain skills, then many people will choose to improve their quality of life. Maybe people will be content with this basic lifestyle but I believe human wants and desires will incentivize people to want better in life than the basic minimum.

BERNIE SANDERS

This is the reason I am optimistic, I believe the majority of Americans want a better America which provides for them, not just the billionaire class. This can set an example for the world and other countries can follow this model to deal with and ease the transition into the digital age.

Bernie Sanders’s Agenda for America is as follows;

1. Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure
2. Reversing Climate Change
3. Creating Worker Co-ops
4. Growing the Trade Union Movement
5. Raising the Minimum Wage
6. Pay Equity for Women Workers
7. Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers
8. Making College Affordable for All
9. Taking on Wall Street
10. Health Care as a Right for All
11. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans
12. Real Tax Reform