At 4:53 PM -0400 21/7/02, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>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.
In this case it isn’t.
What I’m talking about here is a rearrangement of some of our assumptions about what socialism itself has to look like. Edward Bellamy's idea was that you pay everyone equally but decrease the work hours for the difficult jobs until enough people volunteer for them. In the Job Market conception, difficult and undesirable work comes with higher pay, easier and more desirable work with lower pay. But it's a market mechanism, not a planning mechanism, so it's very responsive and doesn’t require so many meetings.
>> 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.
With a computer mandated to maintain a constant average wage, yes, in fact it would only be the rottenest jobs that paid well and the most pleasant that paid poorly. Most jobs would probably cluster around the mean.
>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.
Heck, I get surly even in a state job. The Job Market invention suggests that we will do good work when we are (1) able to choose our work, (2) compensated fairly in a way that we can SEE is fair (3) benefiting from the fruits of our labor, including gaining increased leisure from increased productivity, and when we (4) have democratic control over the production system, by which I mean voting on a maximum work year (which is really a vote on aggregate production), setting maximum and minimum wages, etc.
The extraordinary thing about such a system is that it transmits reality in a way that planners couldn’t hope to: the extra human cost of hard labor translates into higher priced goods (which seems proper); increased efficiency simply results in shorter work hours all around (as we would like).
There are a lot of tired arguments about whether various forms of socialism do or don't create an economy that we’d want to live in. The idea here is that with a little creativity we can show additional advantages to the unconvinced, while junking some of the more unhelpful aspects of centralized planning. And without going all market socialist.
Jenny Brown