By Sarah Stephen [This article is a response to Tasmanian Greens MHA Mike Foley's article "3 steps to job growth" in the Daily Planet.] Debate and discussion on the issue of unemployment and job creation rarely get much of a public hearing beyond the empty promises made by the two major parties before elections. It's important that left and progressive groups take up the discussion. How do we propose to solve the enormous problem of unemployment? It's clear that those in power aren't doing as much as they could, but what is the solution? What should our demands on the government be? Let's start to elaborate on the sort of society that we want to see. What is it going to look like? How do we make the transition to a society where everyone is able to contribute their skills in a meaningful and productive way? Mike Foley sets out a number of changes that he thinks are going to have to happen if we are to adapt to "the seeds of the new economic environment into the next millennium" — changes that will allow us to "not only create more jobs, but also make our existing jobs better". The first of these is job sharing. With the huge advances in technology — over the past 50 years in particular — we could have expected to have reduced our working hours significantly, thus allowing the average worker more leisure time to pursue other activities. But that hasn't been the case. In fact, average working hours have increased in the past 10-15 years. And still we have record numbers of people unemployed. How does Foley interpret this anomaly? He goes on to say: "We have forced 30% of our young people into forced leisure, as each of us continues somewhat selfishly, to work up to 50 hours per week, to the detriment of our health and lifestyle". Firstly I want to take issue with the label "selfish". The average worker would disagree that they work a 50-hour week for selfish reasons. The majority of working people aren't lucky enough to have a job that's so satisfying they want to work even a 40-hour week. On the whole, jobs tend to be boring, repetitive, sometimes quite dangerous and usually very tiring. They leave little time to spend with friends, family or children, very little opportunity to spend meaningful time engaging in other activities. Whilst job sharing is a great idea and, if organised effectively, could easily halve the length of the working week, the reason it's not happening is not that workers are selfish. Prolonged struggles earlier this century fought for a shorter working week, and won the right to an eight-hour day. Demands for a shorter work week have been central to the workers' movement ever since it formed. But a lot of gains have been eroded as the workers' movement has been weakened. Now you can find examples such as the miners working in the tin mines on the west coast of Tasmania working back to back 12 hour shifts, often for weeks at a stretch — examples you might expect to find only in Third World countries. This is not because of choices made by these workers. It's called increasing productivity, or "getting as much out of them as you can", and it's been forced upon them by their employers. Under the current set-up, free time is not really leisure time, but time spent getting rid of fatigue. In spite of free weekends and extended annual leave, physical and mental fatigue have probably increased because we are forced to work harder. Conscious, creative leisure is possible only with a new and radical shortening of the time spent at work. Unless we can be free of relentless fatigue, leisure simply does not exist. More free time can enrich our involvement in life by facilitating an active and creative participation in the management of society. Ultimately we need to break down the artificial boundaries between what we conceive of as "work" and "leisure". What sort of society do we live in? Picking out two other aspects of Foley's solutions to unemployment, I want to illustrate what I see as a real confusion about the nature of our society. The first is a suggestion that "those who are financially secure would readily accept the option of reducing their working hours with a corresponding reduction in pay". The second is, "Instead of asking employers to create new jobs, employees can share their existing work. A single workplace or a community of workers could contribute a small amount of their wages each week to the employment of an apprentice or trainee." The suggestion is that workers themselves pay to employ the unemployed, that it's up to individuals to fix the social problem of unemployment, and not up to society as a whole — or rather, those who have created the problem. Employers collectively benefit from unemployment. It's in their interests to maintain it, because it helps to keep their workers' wages low. It's not possible for individual workers to solve unemployment. We need to demand that the government create more jobs. We need to challenge the rights of employers to make huge profits at the expense of those who work for them, and at the expense of our environment. Our strategy for change needs to challenge the power relations of this society, rather than accepting them and trying to do what we can within their limits. We need to have a clear set of principles that we campaign for:
- Large companies which destroy jobs should be nationalised and placed under the control of workers and the community.
- To shore the work around, immediately implement a 30-hour working week with no loss in pay.
- Embark on a massive program of job creation.
- Put in place a progressive taxation system that taxes those who can afford to pay, including an increase in the corporate tax.
[Sarah Stephen is the Democratic Socialist candidate for Denison in the federal election.]