Demand #7: Abolish the work programme, implement a wages programme
The Work Programme is a way of insisting that work-shy unemployed people are set to work, on pain of destitution. But we’re already working. We just need to be paid for it.
The stereotyped image of a worker is someone labouring in a factory,making goods on an assembly line. The increasing automation of factory work,and many other forms of work, is making employment increasingly precarious and, in many places, non-existent. Now, lots of us are supposedly ‘workless’ - viewed as ‘economically unproductive’ and in need of being cajoled into finding a job. But this is because what is recognised as work, and given a wage, is much too narrow: we are set in cut-throat competition with one another for jobs which, compared with everything else we have (or could have) on our plates, are a waste of our time.
Unemployed people are either:
- Carers (of children, elderly people, people who are unwell or otherwise in need of care). This skilful and vitally necessary socially reproductive work should be recognised, valued, paid and socialised where needed through collectively-run services;
- Not able to work - either at all or as much as other people - for one reason or another, including disability. People in this situation should be given the money and support they need to live as they wish - including to work, if they want to, and are excluded from work for reasons which could be addressed through better support and accessibility - or to pursue any other projects or activities they would like to;
- Engaged in other unrecognised forms of productive and socially reproductive work which should be made visible and paid;
- Not inclined to work for reasons other than (or additional to) being unable to work or engaged in other forms of as-yet unrecognised work. Unproductive time spent in leisure, consumption, and sheer enjoyment of the world and one another should not be economically pathologised as unemployment, but should be seen as a natural limitation to available work-hours and, particularly given the decreasing need for human labour in production, celebrated and facilitated through the social wage and other means such as a basic income;
- Unable to perform the work they would like to do because currently access to collective endeavour is mostly mediated by the employment relation. In order to stop repressing human creativity, sociability and imagination, social security should pay people who are not currently working but have an idea for a project they’d like to do, paid at the median income for a 21 hour week of whatever they wish to do. This is the most powerful and productive way to “foster innovation”: giving everyone the time and resources necessary to develop and implement their ideas, either on their own or in cooperatives with other people.
This is how JK Rowling used Jobseekers’ Allowance: not to seek work, but to support her in the work she already did as a mother, and to enable her to work as an author. Other projects which could be made possible through this scheme: forming a band, gardening, opening cocktail bars, wilderness trips for kids, fashion design, writing software, investigative journalism, personal training, archiving, running courses, home visits for elderly people, filmmaking, counselling …
Members of Plan C MCR
11th March 2015
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actuallyexistingbarbarism reblogged this from demandthefuture and added: anti-work flex
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