>The GAI proposals I'm familiar with--correct me here--generally don't deal
>with the maldistribution of work.
Not directly. They have some implications for the maldistribution of leisure though. ;-)
> 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.
The market sets wages. Owners of capital can't just arbitrarily determine wages, even now. Though they have more market power in relation to skills that are in chronic over-supply, making it a buyers market. A universal unconditional income would, to some extent, divorce the jobs issue from the income issue. Talk about guaranteed employment is perverse really, you can always find work to do - perhaps unpaid voluntary work - but guaranteed jobs is usually just code for forced labour.
The important thing to understand about a guaranteed income though is the effect it would have on labour market discipline. To the extent that workers have greater income security, this eventually translates into a cultural change in the working class which has deleterious effects on productivity. Simply because of the alienation of work under capitalism, the threat of starvation and poverty is the only way that the employing class forces its wage-slaves to work profitably, take away that big stick and alienated workers become surly, uncooperative and unprofitable.
That's why I said I had my doubts it was compatible with capitalism. It would work at first, because working class culture takes at least a generation for material changes in circumstances to flow through to create new ways of thinking, but when it did flow through we would have the worst of all possible worlds. Unless new relations of production could be implemented in the meantime, relations which did not alienate the workforce from the means and output of production.
> >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.
I worked in a steel mill back in the 1970's. It was the easiest job I ever had. The biggest problem was boredom most of the time. We hardly ever did any work, most of the time there wasn't any work to do.
> 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.
The trouble is, this wouldn't just be the case for jobs with rotten conditions.
>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.
Like I say, the impact on production arising from alienation is the biggest long-term obstacle. To put it bluntly, workers just don't like taking orders, having no say and making big profits for a few rich bastards. If they didn't have to put up with it to make a living, the whole power relation would break down. Factories would make bad shoes and probably not very many of them, as the workers loafed around sneering at their bosses.
If I thought a GMI was compatible with capitalism in the long term, I wouldn't be a socialist. That would be an easier solution. If it was a solution. I only mentioned it in the context of illustrating that fair wages are an illusion.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas