By Michael Rafferty
The retail giant Coles Myer is pioneering a novel recruiting technique to deal with the flood of applicants for its new chain of toy stores. Job seekers will queue via their telephones, waiting on line for a preliminary screening by a bank of trained staff. A Coles Myer spokesperson said telephone screening was cheaper and would remove the unsightly street queues, which traditionally form in recessions when employers take on new staff.
But out of sight is not out of mind. Officially there are more than 1 million unemployed in Australia. Across the advanced capitalist countries alone, there are more than 50 million unemployed. There is little prospect of many of these people finding paid work in the foreseeable future.
The end of full employment has signalled the end of the arrangements that underpinned the postwar economic boom. It is difficult to predict when and how quickly economic recovery will occur. But it is clear that, short of an explosive period of economic growth, there will not be enough new jobs created to make any significant impact on the jobless rate.
Hidden behind the current economic crisis is a growing recognition that there is no capacity for capitalism, in Australia or elsewhere, to provide full employment. The "use by" date on the right to work has expired. Today no government, business leader or union official (or arrangement between them) is capable of restoring that right, even though they continue to talk as if they can.
Even after the current downturn ends, developments in technology and workplace organisation mean that production can continue without substantial requirements for more labour. The only possible path back to full employment then becomes job sharing — and income sharing.
Full employment in the years after World War II was a central platform of the labour movement. This was
hardly surprising, since mass unemployment was a continuing feature of the whole 1930s period. In the United States there were more than 10 million people unemployed in 1939 out of a work force of 40 million. Only the second world war ended mass unemployment.
Capital's project
But the right to work in the postwar period never existed absolutely. It was always conditional on workers creating more and more profits for employers.
The policy of full employment was both a recognition of the political power of workers as a class and of the importance of workers' wages as a source of demand. It was an attempt to reconcile the power of labour with the overriding drive of capital to accumulate.
Full employment also promised to reconcile class antagonisms by channelling struggles into those over the distribution of the national income, away from the point of production.
But there is no necessity for capitalism to function in a way that offers employment to all who want it. Full employment was always a concession, granted in terms of specific historical conditions.
Postwar full employment was in fact unique. A more or less permanent section of the population without paid work (which Marx termed the reserve army of labour) has been a characteristic feature of capitalist society. Unemployment is in fact necessary to capitalism.
Full employment was not a global experience anyway. It only existed in the advanced capitalist (and certain eastern bloc) countries.
A jobless recovery is therefore not a paradox. The conditions that permitted the policy of full employment after the second world war no longer exist. Those conditions have been crumbling for almost 20 years, ever since the oil crisis in the mid-1970s announced the end of the postwar boom. Since then economic growth has been insufficient to deliver both high profits and steady rises in real wages. It has
also been too slow to produce enough job growth, and so unemployment has been climbing steadily.
In the 1980s employers, unions and governments forced through wage cuts in an attempt to restore profits. It was said that only when profits increased would employers invest and take on more workers. Profits have been restored, but investment is running at record lows, and unemployment has increased further.
Downward pressure on wages has led to working-class households resorting to more than one member seeking paid employment. Partly as a result, the proportion of the adult population either in work or looking for it has increased and added further pressure to the already long dole queues.
Another response to wage cuts has been recourse to consumer credit. Personal debt is now equivalent to 35% of GDP (though this is much lower than in the UK and US). As the next expansion in employment gets under way, it will not lead to expanded consumption and demand, because new income will be diverted to repay consumer credit.
After a decade of wage cuts, mass unemployment continues. Globally, unemployment is not forecast to decline significantly before the end of the decade. This suggests very significant problems for any national strategy of full employment.
Enterprise bargaining
Enterprise bargaining acknowledges that full employment can no longer even be promised as a concession for further wage restraint. For the foreseeable future, enterprise bargaining means that more work will be done by even fewer people.
Those in work will be subject to greater insecurity of employment and much harder work. It also suggests that a decade of wage cuts will be followed by more of the same.
Moving wage bargaining back to the firm signals a growing confidence of individual employers against their workers. But enterprise bargaining is also a sign of capital's weakness. The collapse of
full employment signals that capital is no longer able to integrate the working class into its project. It will now be able to engage with labour only at the level of individual firms. Herein lies some potential for greater divisions within capital.
Enterprise bargaining may fragment the struggles of those in employment, but only by moving the terrain of struggle back to the arena where class antagonisms are most apparent — the point of production. Displacing class struggle from the factory was one of the main goals of postwar policy. Moving it back there is a very big risk for capital.
Enterprise bargaining risks igniting a new wave of struggles and producing a new generation of working-
class militancy.
So a successful socialist struggle cannot simply produce new jobs. Of course, resistance to job cuts remains a significant site of class politics and solidarity. Such resistance must remain a feature of any rearguard action against capital.
But a left politics limited to the rhetoric of full employment runs the danger of wresting from capital only the initiative of job creation, and continues to leave it with responsibility for income determination (thus conceding the primacy of profits). This would undermine many of the class initiatives of the last 50 years.
Poverty and abundance
The forces which have been driving capital to enterprise bargaining also highlight the very real potential for social change. Enterprise bargaining, driven by capital's pursuit of profits in the face of general overcapacity, is a strategy for reimposing scarcity on the working class in conditions of abundance.
Economic growth in the future is not likely to require large extra additions of labour. This points to the existence in our midst not of scarcity but of relative abundance. It signals that we have almost reached the point where the productive powers could support the population in a state of relative prosperity without
extra work.
Capitalist property relations, not our technical production capacities, prevent our needs being met. The challenge therefore is not to seek a re-run of the early postwar period but to add the demand for rights to consumption to the other rights of citizenship. It is a demand that challenges the common understanding of how the world works.
A guaranteed income would provide one way of uniting the interests of workers as a class — by linking the struggles of those with and those without paid work (not just the unemployed, but students, sole parents and drought-stricken small farmers as well). It would also give socialists the capacity to add new meaning to tired and debased notions of freedom, democracy and participation, as well as making material demands the basis for struggles for social change.
Of course, any proposition for "rights to income" is not within the current policy agenda — because it directly confronts capitalist property relations. But it is important for socialists to signal clearly that there is no long-term solution to the current crisis for everyone. The struggle for full employment on its own, laudable as it is, serves to retain the myth that there are such solutions.
Somehow, we must advance the cause of those who will never be part of the full employment agenda, as well as those who are conscripted to the agenda only by accepting increasingly oppressive employment conditions.
Unlike the Coles Myer employment manager, who can get his job-seekers off the streets, it is impossible to hide forever the fact that working people are living in enforced scarcity amidst abundance. And in the jobless recovery ahead, we'll have plenty of time to look into the shop windows of that abundance.