![]() ![]() (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)įifty-one years ago, the national Democratic Party and its presidential nominee were characterized as the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion” in one of the more devastating, effective and enduring slogans in American political history. This would result in a less "work" than full employment but more real income, including security and equity, for most people.President Joe Biden speaks about the 500,000 Americans that died from COVID-19, Monday, Feb. The alternative, as the title of the essay might suggest, is that the government would ensure individuals' shares in real income through fiscal means and separately ensure that sufficient work is done to produce the total real output needed. Another problem is that "full employment" requires "investment" that is an increase in the wealth of the minority but that is not necessarily useful for raising living standards of everyone in the majority and is environmentally desctructive. There is conflict with those who control the firms. ![]() There are individuals' shortcomings as workers. There are transitions between products, processes, and individual firms. One problem with this approach is that not everyone can work all the time, even during occasions periods "full employment," for a number of reasons. ![]() The government has, in the case of the U.S., determined that "how much work is enough" is "full employment": everyone (except the wealthy who control the firms) works all the time. The why is that firms are controlled by a tiny portion of population who direct the firms for their own benefit, minimizing what everyone else gets: "profit maximization." So unless some other authority - government - steps in, firms have no particular interest in the work of a given individual or in giving a share of income to that individual, whose destitution is at the whim of the tiny minority. Much less labor is needed to produce what we need, even at middle-class standards, than the amount that is available for employment. Why? Because we need the work done by employees to produce the things we need to live? No. Physicists' muscle work done for yourself at home is a partial alternative, but specialized firms outcompeted subsistence production at home long ago and as a result employment has become the alternative to destitution for most people. It means employment that allows you to get a share of the income produced by firms. "Work" as used here does not mean accelerating a mass over a period of time, the way physicists mean it. This will likely be a long process, given that it took half a century of labor struggles, union action, and corporate experimentation to reduce daily working hours in the United States from 14 to eight and workweeks from seven days to five. At the macro level, the legally mandated eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek are gradually giving way to a new equilibrium. These changes can be viewed on two levels. But amid the ongoing experiments with hybrid models, we find ourselves confronting a deeper question: How much work is enough?Īt least in developed countries, these post-pandemic shifts and experiments could trigger a labor-market revolution as profound as the changes in workplaces, schedules, and compensation that marked the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial era. Millions of individuals will never revert to their pre-pandemic work routines, compelling both employers and employees to establish new models that cater to their evolving needs. WASHINGTON, DC – The COVID-19 pandemic might be officially over, but much like a railway switchyard, it has already diverted countless lives onto wildly different paths. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |