Chapter 7 Employment , useful or not?
So here’s the rub, what motivates people and is motivation dangerous when it’s used by others to achieve objectives that benefit the few and not the many. For example , encouraging students to study so hard for what . To compete with each other, when indeed what we should be trying to do is educate to improve things as a whole. What really is the difference in getting 80% in an exam and 85%. Both candidates are obviously very good, yet one ( the lower one) might end up on the scrap heap. There must be an economic law that says that this is a waste of resource.
Despite the idea that hard work gets results, with the influence of computers and the future role of Artificial Intelligence ,this may no longer be true. I myself like manual work, it gives me a good feeling , I can see the result of my efforts. Also I enjoy being given time to do a task and complete it , sometimes to perfection..
There can be a joy in work.
The only thing is everyone seems so unhappy in work. No one wants to be there. We’re just in it for the money ,we tell ourselves, and we ask for more money as we are so unhappy and that is the only thing that will make us happy.
Meanwhile, and this is my “turd” theory of Economics, the turds rise to the top. Ruthlessness and skullduggery by seemingly innocuous middle managers can turn into manipulative, self-serving profit seeking behavior , which takes it’s toll on the workforce and the standards within any organisation. You know what I mean , don’t you?
We blame the organisation, the corporate entity for whatever ills it has bestowed on us. Unfortunately it’s the people within those organisations that cause the problems. Some say Unions need to exist to solve this, but in my experience Unions are just as bad as the middle managers who will agree anything for their next pay rise. Union representatives are paid by the union , but whether or not they have a big enough budget to change things eg. help an employee with a legal claim on the company or a dispute,or even a health and safety issue is doubtful.
The Union Representative on the whole is powerless and it is the goodwill of the Company that they work for that enables them to have a role, attending meetings with executives and being first to know of the planned redundancies or closure of the factory , whatever it may be.
Union Representatives are basically harbingers of bad news, the CEO’s want to announce good news themselves. That’s nothing to do with the Unions, it’s the Corporation that has brought success.( and therefore deserves the reward).
Surely an insurance scheme that could help employees who need financial backing to pursue a claim with employers would be a better option .Free legal advice would also be helpful and it would no longer be under a banner of them or us. An employee resource that when things go wrong , there is somewhere to go to with the financial backing to address it. I would think that would stop many of the abuses. in the work place. Is any Government willing to put this in place?
There is no need for these massive powerful Unions who appear at Political Party Conferences and treat their members as if they are tied to one particular belief. Everyone has moved on from that. What employees want is to be treated fairly and with respect and when things go wrong to be able to address it without incurring huge fees or having to refer their case to an ambulance chasing no claim no fee firm of solicitors.
But what about the future, will there be any jobs for people to do. Of course there will be. We need things done, we need to have a reasonable standard of living, we want to have decent leisure time. We need things to” work” and therefore we need to work and we need to be paid for that work. No amount of Artificial Intelligence is going to solve that.
The argument that these hammering, plumbing, connecting, rubbish disposal, documenting, data analyzing, cleaning, health care and counselling, the list of jobs and needs is endless. The prospect that these tasks will somehow replaced by AI is ridiculous. And the business model that has some Computer Geek Mogul earning some God-Like Fortune by solving the difficulty of actually employing people is unattainable pie in the sky. We need people and we need each other.
Yet the Media will write endless articles about us being replaced by robots. I have real experience of this, my first graduate job was working in the Car Industry in the UK. The office had about one hundred and fifty people in it , it was like a chicken coop. Many years later all those roles were subcontracted and the office was maybe down to about twenty people. It made sense and in truth was inevitable.
During my chicken coop office period; robots were replacing manual workers on the shop floor , they were impressive beasts and the best solution for repetitive manual work. They were the future , and they were part of a manufacturing revolution in the Car Industry . That made sense. Please note we no longer manufacture cars in the UK in the quantities we used to , mainly because we were too expensive and despite robots taking over production to reduce labour costs production was moved to other Countries where labour was perceived as being cheaper. So the fact was they still needed labour, so the Robots didn’t save the day.
However not every manual job is so repetitive; and we are beginning to realise that mass production is becoming irrelevant and not necessary. The requirement to have masses of anything is becoming redundant and I can assure you when that demand drops and increasingly ( as happened in the electronic industry) the market is flooded and people are happy having the next best thing rather than the latest technology , or indeed as will increasingly happen ; recycled technology. Then Chief Executives start panicking and cutting costs. The workers go first and then the Executives who of course award themselves a big exit payout for managing the crisis.
The view that digitising and analoging everything saves time and reduces costs in the fields of the Arts and Literature is worrying .It also homogenises everything and takes the colour out of creativity . Are the only people who are inventive nowadays coders? I think not.
Infact, they are the least likely people to come up with an original idea, because their whole element of work is based on discipline and repetition sat behind a computer following a strict set of rules to achieve their goal. Not your average worker behavior.
So just as the top executives can’t see past their spreadsheets telling them that the only way forward is to reduce costs and that employing real people is wasteful and requires too much investment. Economists should be looking at the benefits in human input , creativity and honest working together and not this false team work, stab in the back, keep the competition at arms length philosophy that the workplace has turned into.
Can it be quantified , of course it can, we have for too long worked on a model of cost cutting without recognising the benefits of working together and accepting that there are jobs that need done , that they are valuable and that the quantitative benefit of working together is better value for money than some chief executive screwing employees into the ground by making them work harder for less benefits. Then running off with a pot full of cash and bonuses
I would say I haven’t notice this approach in any of the election manifesto’s, our options are more of the same and not anything new. Whoever gets in still sees the people as inconveniences and are looking for some miracle Truss and Kwarteng style economic wizzardy, where wealth trickles down and bankers and computer scientists will solve all the world’s problems. It just isn’t going to happen.
thenotsomightyom 