SHORT VERSION:
- We believe that, for the past 40 odd years Unemployment has been planned and deliberately maintained by most governments, certainly by the government here in the UK and also by the US government from which it takes its cues. (detailed evidence below)
- We believe this is done to maintain and increase the power employers have over those in work, to limit the freedom, bargaining power and security of working people.
- We believe the current attacks on Benefits and the Unemployed are not about saving money, nor are the Unemployed the main target. The main targets of 'Welfare Reform' are Working People not currently in receipt of Benefits. The worse Unemployment is for the Unemployed, the more powerful the threat of Unemployment is against Working people.
- We Believe that Generous Welfare, without strings and conditions on the recipients, Benefits us all.
- We work to defend and expand the welfare state – to increase the amount claimants receive, to remove obligations and conditions placed on them and to enable more people to claim. Our defence and advocacy on behalf of unemployed claimants is not mainly for their sake, but to improve the security, freedom and bargaining power of working people.
- Long Term we campaign for an Unconditional Basic Income.
- We are not merely interested in changing policy, but in changing attitudes and building a culture of entitlement. We believe that encouraging people to feel good about claiming, and to chose to claim when otherwise they might not is as important as defending and increasing benefits themselves.
- We are not alone in our beliefs. We have plenty of reliable evidence for them, discussed in depth below:
LONG VERSION (with evidence):
Joan
Robinson, who held a professorship of economics at Cambridge
University and was a close associate of the legendary J.M. Keynes,
tells us:
"The first function of unemployment (which has always existed in open or disguised forms) is that it maintains the authority of master over man. The master has normally been in a position to say: 'If you don't want the job, there are plenty of others who do.' When the man can say: 'If you don't want to employ me, there are plenty of others who will', the situation is radically altered. One effect of such a change might be to remove a number of abuses to which the workers have been compelled to submit in the past . . . [Another that] the absence of fear of unemployment might go further and have a disruptive effect upon factory discipline . . . [he may use] his newly-found freedom from fear to snatch every advantage that he can . .”1
Professor
Robinson was echoing the views of economist Michael Kalecki
who argued that the main cause of unemployment was the fact that
governments work to deliberately maintain it in order to keep wages
low and maintain the power of boss over worker. The UK and US
governments openly admit that they maintain unemployment as a matter
of policy. Journalist Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer
tells us:
"there's supporting testimony from Alan Greenspan. Several times during the late 1990s, Greenspan worried publicly that, as unemployment drifted steadily lower the 'pool of available workers' was running dry. The dryer it ran, the greater risk of 'wage inflation,' meaning anything more than minimal increases.”2
Business Week confirms the story.
A detailed and empirical discussion of the deliberate maintenance of unemployment by governments, and how it is done, can be found in Prof Dean Bakers The Conservative Nanny State. See especially Chapter Two. Dean Baker is a co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research and was professor of economics ad Bucknell University.
In
2013, The Bank of England declared that 7% Unemployment was the
'optimal rate' and announced its intentions to raise interest rates -
thus ensuring that Unemployment would not fall any further – if
Unemployment fell below that figure. Since then, the Bank of England
target has oscillated between 7% and 6.5%. That is about two million
people, capable of working, not working. This is something they aim
for.
The
way they justify this, is by saying mass unemployment is needed to
keep inflation under control. The theory is known as the NAIRU. We will discuss the arguments they use
at length in a later article. However, this is an introduction to
our beliefs and we don't want to bore you. Suffice to
say the arguments in defence of deliberately maintaining unemployment
have no basis in empirical research. They have been thoroughly
discredited by numerous economists Robinson and Baker (see link)
among them. There are much less destructive ways to control
inflation, but these are not used as they involve stepping on the
toes of businesses, who have political clout, rather than ordinary
people, who do not. Economist Prof Edward Herman explains:
“[this approach] has a huge built-in bias. It takes as granted all the other institutional factors that influence the price level-unemployment trade-off (market structures and independent pricing power, business investment policies at home and abroad, the distribution of income, the fiscal and monetary mix, etc.) and focuses solely on the tightness of the labour market as the controllable variable. Inflation is the main threat, the labour market (i.e. wage rates and unemployment levels) is the locus of the solution to the problem."3The deliberate maintenance of unemployment does take active forms, such as the raising of interest rates already mentioned, but its passive form is much more significant. Governments have an enormous ability to mobilise resources, which could easily be used to provide employment for all, but isn’t. A measure of this ability can be seen from the recent bailouts – overwhelmingly used to defend the possessors of inordinate privilege from their own mismanagement rather than secure jobs for ordinary people. A high rate of unemployment is usually, more than anything, the result of efforts by government and the business lobby to discipline working people – this particularly demanded during a recession where falling profits result in efforts to squeeze even more from working people.
Lets say we accepted this, in our view, grotesque and absurd, argument that having millions of people who could work, out of work, is necessary for a healthy economy. Even then, for the government to blame the unemployed for unemployment, when having millions of people unemployed is their deliberate policy, is malicious, repulsive and sinister. Given the facts outlined above, efforts to solve unemployment, to 'get Britain working', by putting pressure on unemployed individuals cannot work, are not intended to work. While an unemployed individual can, by strenuous personal effort, gain employment, this comes at the expense of making someone else unemployed.
No
matter how hard the unemployed strive to get work, millions will
remain unemployed. Where governing institutions work to deliberately
maintain unemployment, the labour market is a rigged, zero sum game.
A prisoners dilemma where, whether we are in work or looking for it,
playing makes us all lose.
When this is understood, Benefits for the Unemployed look absolutely essential, the most moral thing in the world. They are a most meagre and insufficient token restitution paid by government to those it has robbed of a livelihood. Reducing them, tampering with them or placing conditions on them now looks obscene.
However,
our main goal is not to inspire people to pity the Unemployed. Rather
we want to inspire working people to act in their own interests. The
unemployed serve two purposes in the extortion of working people. The
first is passive suffering. To sit as an example to disobedient
workers – step out of line and that’s you. The second is the
active self debasement they perform when seeking work. Driven by the
misery they experience, they engage in humiliating competition with
their fellows – who will accept the worst pay and conditions, who
will do the most for the least – unemployment for the loser. The
effects of this travel all the way up the pay scale. As competition
for lower tier jobs becomes more fierce, desire for, the number of
people desiring and so competition for higher tier jobs increases.
Once
this is understood, we see that the 'skivers', demonised in the
tabloids, in fact manage to avoid participating in this calculated
attack on working people. They refuse to play, refuse to engage in
this competition, refuse to undermine working people. A strong case
can be made that they are better citizens and better people than
those who abandon their dignity in the desperate pursuit of work. At
the very least they manage to avoid behaviour which damages the
position of working people.
To
be clear we have no objection to people seeking jobs in which their
dignity is preserved and respected, jobs they enjoy which positively
contribute to their personal development and inner life. However, in
the current situation most unemployed are pressed by the DWP to see
such work as a pipe dream, to abandon such hopes and take any offer –
however humiliating. If we want people to have dignified and
fulfilling work we need to improve their bargaining power and end
employment dependency by giving them other options.
We
are taught to respect the motives of those who embrace personal
responsibility, who have a 'moral' drive to contribute no matter what
and refuse 'handouts' out of pride. However we must recognise that
this behaviour is deeply destructive. These people are willing
victims and willing participants in a scam which harms us all. As
Oscar Wilde puts it:
Most
people believe that 'contributing' to the improvement of society is
the moral thing for people to do. However, when the economy is run in
the warped and exploitative manner outlined in this article it is
naïve and counterproductive to believe that this can or should be
done by seeking and performing paid work. We believe that working to
mitigate and abolish the unhealthy dynamics we outline and ensure a
more equitable distribution of wealth is much more important than
'contributing' to a bloated economy which is trampling ordinary
people and destroying the planet. Blindly seeking to contribute
actively hampers this.
In
our view it is absolutely immoral for an unemployed person to take
personal responsibility for their situation. It is equally immoral to
accept any guilt, shame or stigma. Worse, but much more
understandable, is for an unemployed person to accept undignified
work. As far as social responsibility goes, the first duty of the
unemployed is to seek what happiness they can, to live with dignity
and not to debase themselves in the pursuit of work. Wilde again:
“Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates [dole],which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging,it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.”
The more
comfortable life is for the unemployed, the weaker the impact of
unemployment on those in work, which Robinson outlines, becomes. Thus
we work to defend and expand benefits – ending employment
dependency by giving people other options. We believe changing
attitudes is as important as changing policy. Thus we work to educate
people – that those in work and the unemployed have the same
interests, that we are being played off against each other, that an
injury to one is an injury to all. We believe that the work ethic is
a harmful and anti-social attitude and we campaign against it. We
work to build the self esteem of Unemployed People, we want them
happy, relaxed and proud. We want people to take their benefits with self assured glee, then clamour angrily for more. We believe in Dignity – and that to
abandon it in the workplace is not a noble sacrifice, but something
which harms everyone, not just you
Our ultimate policy goal is an Unconditional Basic Income. Think its
unfair that the unemployed get benefits while those in work don't?
Then give benefits to everyone unconditionally. No means testing, no
bureaucracy, no-one falls through the cracks. We will cover this at
length in a later article.
What do we want most of all? A mentality of entitlement. Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do. This is not a utopian dream, indeed, the basis for an Unconditional Basic Income is already written into law. Article 25 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ours... to fight for.
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood"
---
References:
1 Robinson, Joan, Collected Economic Papers: vol. 1, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1973, pp. 84-5
2 Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, pp. 206-73
3 Herman, Edward S., Beyond Hypocrisy, South End Press, Boston, 1992,
pg 94
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