Quite right, the Job Market idea is a suggestion for how to arrange such a ‘market.’ Unemployment is spirit-killing even in a fairly comprehensive welfare state. In countries where the dole is more than the minimum wage people do voluntarily take jobs that pay less than the dole. (And as my British friends tell me, it's not just the meagerness of the dole, it's the 'no bloody jobs in this country' hopelessness.) Is involuntary unemployment s omething radicals are willing to agree is necessary?
In the Job Market conception, a suite of software not only sets wage rates based on job attractiveness, but divides the sought-for work among those seeking it, leaving no-one without a job, and, as one can imagine, shortening work hours.
>
>A free market in labour could only exist where the every citizen was
guaranteed
>an adequate income unconditionally. Such proposals have been on the public
>policy agenda for many years, in the form of proposals for a GAI, GMI,
>negative income tax, etc.
The GAI proposals I'm familiar with--correct me here--generally don't deal with the maldistribution of work. In a sense, they're saying, no, everyone doesn't have the right to a job, only an income. GAIs force up the wage floor and give us more bargaining power, but within a system where ownership still means that owners have the power to set wages. In a Job Market system, ownership (whether public or private) no longer means that.
>But in such a genuinely free labour market there would be no need for a
>minimum wage, which is a necessary safeguard only where there is some kind
>of forced labour.
A maximum, on the other hand, is probably a good idea.
>Obviously those attempting to purchase free labour would
>have to make an attractive offer and those trying to obtain labour for
>dangerous and unpleasant jobs would need to be able to offer either extremely
>high wages, or some other kind of rewards (such as high status or acclaim.)
Right, Job Markets suggest two approaches to that problem. Dangerous or unpleasant jobs which can be exciting, challenging, or at least tolerable when you're 20 can be backbreaking and mind-numbing by 40 or 50. With no way to 'get out,' people work these jobs till they can’t anymore, or retirement, if you make it. A system which affords real job choice and job fluidity would allow a natural job progression as we age, and as our desires, abilities and interests change.
The president of the Steelworkers union here in the late ‘70s was ridiculed for saying no-one should work in a steel mill (it was used against him at the time, he was accused of being soft on industry job cuts), but we know what he meant, that hours and working conditions must somehow be determined by those doing the work. In a Job Market, job conditions would not rely on an exhausting push and pull between union and management (or, less exhaustingly, workers committees and the central whoever). Instead, managers who insisted on keeping rotten job conditions would simply pay a high premium through increased labor costs.
Of course, setting wage rates this way would translate into high prices for those things most difficult and nasty to produce, making the price of cane sugar high and legal briefs low.
Jenny Brown
>Bill Bartlett
>Bracknell Tas
>