you write:
>Do the existing factories have the capaicity we need or
>de we need more? Are the existing facotries fundamentally inhumane in
>the way they are set up? Do we meed to modify them physically or can
>social rearrangement alone make them fit places to work? How much
>maintenace should we give them?
We've been around this spinney before on this list but I'll suggest that the problem of bean-counting (and the interminable meetings that accompany it, in my conception of the parecon) can be solved in other, equally radical ways.
Thad Williamson recently reviewed my dad's book on these subjects for Dollars & Sense, and I'll ask your indulgence to post the review here since their website is unaccountably fixated on the July/August '02 issue. Thad specifically compares the job market conception to Albert & Hahnel.
Jenny Brown ___
Jobs--Not People--For Sale
"Why aren't those who do the most dangerous or most unpleasant work–-be it coal mining or working as an orderly in a nursing home–-handsomely compensated?"
James Cooke Brown, The Job Market of the Future: Using Computers to Humanize Economies (M.E. Sharpe, 2001)
Reviewed by Thad Williamson Dollars and Sense, November/December 2002, pp. 36-37
Labor economists and progressive activists frequently point to inequalities in pay as a principal feature--and failure--of contemporary capitalism. But they often ignore the equally gaping inequalities of the lived experience of work, whereby some enjoy pleasant jobs that pay well while others toil at unpleasant jobs that pay poorly.
Few mainstream labor economists feel it necessary to explain why people who get to do things they like to do–-or at least, are spared the "dirty work" produced by all human societies–-should also get to be paid the most. Why aren't those who do the most dangerous or most unpleasant work–-be it coal mining or working as an orderly in a nursing home–-handsomely compensated for performing tasks few would volunteer for, save for economic necessity?
The injustice of existing labor markets in distributing both the experience and the compensation of work in a patently unequal manner is a central concern of James Cooke Brown’s interesting and provocative book, The Job Market of the Future: Using Computers to Humanize Economies.
The title (and cover art) of Brown’s book suggest a sci-fi theme. Indeed, Brown’s central proposal to create an entirely new system for distributing work is inspired by Edward Bellamy’s famous 19th-century utopian novel, Looking Backward, and was described in a 1970 novel by Brown himself, The Troika Incident. But whereas many novelists and political thinkers, from Plato to Ursula LeGuin, have used utopian writing to illustrate tensions between different philosophical values or the limits of any single principle of society, Brown is adamantly serious that existing human societies can and should radically overhaul their economic systems within the forseeable future.
How?
Brown envisions an economy in which employers do not buy and sell people’s labor power, the central feature of capitalist labor markets. Rather, potential employees would be able to select their jobs, bidding wages for different jobs up or down depending on their desirability. Brown proposes, in other words, to replace today's "labor market" with a "job market" so that jobs, not people, are what are offered for sale.
Instead of nervously searching the classified ads and sending out resumes, or going door to door and filling out applications, potential employees would be able to consult a computer-generated listing of all the jobs available in a given economy.
Some of these jobs would require no experience, and no need to meet the employer beforehand: a potential employee could sign up for such a job on the spot. Others would require that potential employees possess experience, education, or particular physical capacities before being allowed to take the job, or that they visit the job site in advance.
Each job package would specify a set workweek and job duration, as well as a wage and a description of the work to be done. Potential employees who wanted to work exactly 24 hours per week in a three-month-long job in a particular city, or who needed a given salary, would be able to conduct a search for jobs meeting their exact needs.
But this computerized job bank would not merely be monster.com writ large. In Brown's version, the computer software operating this job market would be programmed to make sure that there were always enough jobs to match the number of people looking for work. Employers, whether public or private, would input their work needs into the system; the computer then would divide up this need for new work into enough job units so that everyone who was looking for a job could find one.
With the threat of unemployment removed, employers would need to make even their lower-quality jobs more attractive to obtain good workers. Employers who insisted on continuing to offer unsatisfying drudgery for employment would likely see their labor costs rise, for--and here is the "market" part of Brown's job market idea--the computer would be instructed to change the "price" of each job as demand for it varied.
Jobs that everyone wanted to do would become more expensive to the job-buyer (employee)--in other words, those jobs would tend to pay less, since more people would be willing to do them. Conversely, jobs that no-one wanted to do would become less expensive to the job-buyer, i.e., would pay more.
Of course, some jobs that very few people are capable of doing (professional athlete, astronaut) would continue to be highly paid, and the highly skilled would generally be able to command greater earnings than others (if they wished). But holding skill level equal, under this system jobs that are less pleasant would be better remunerated than more pleasant one.
Neoclassical economists may claim, of course, that workers already have the ability to trade off "pleasantness" against income in taking jobs. Under Brown’s system, however, workers would be fully informed about their options--and would have the security of knowing they did not have to take the first job that came along.
Overall, Brown's proposal--which is not simply for a different way to hire workers, but for an entirely different kind of economic system--differs markedly from most contemporary attempts to describe how capitalism might be overhauled or replaced. Advocates of market socialism, for instance, have worked out elaborate ways to redistribute property, wealth, and the flow of income while continuing to use markets, and in particular the labor market, to distribute goods, services, and labor time. Those who also emphasize improving the experience of work have generally relied on other strategies: increasing workers’ bargaining power with employers within traditional labor markets or perhaps establishing self-managed worker cooperatives.
Brown’s ideas about abolishing the labor market as we know it are much more radical. Brown’s book might be usefully compared to Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s vision of "participatory economics," in which consensual, democratic planning would replace markets as a mechanism for creating and distributing goods. Like Albert and Hahnel, Brown relies on the possibility of using computing power to help perform the tasks of balancing supply and demand in the economy, and like them, Brown is committed to the idea that people should be treated equally in their work lives.
But for Albert and Hahnel, equality at work can best be realized by developing "balanced job complexes" in which all the workers in a given enterprise share in all parts of the work, fun and not so fun. In contrast, Brown’s system would allow employees to work out their own trade-offs between pay and the intrinsic satisfactions (or lack thereof) of different jobs. Brown’s approach is markedly more individualistic, so it might be more likely to appeal to Americans conditioned by the experience of capitalist labor markets.
Brown also argues that having a computer-run job market will provide a mechanism for broader democratic control over the shape of the economy. If a society wanted to take future productivity increases in the form of increased leisure, for instance, it could instruct the job market computer to apportion work and jobs accordingly. Societies could also choose to limit wage inequalities by setting maximum and minimum wages, again using the computer to implement the limits.
Like any far-reaching proposal, Brown’s book invites many, many questions: What about the problem, for instance, that the actual productivity of any worker (no matter what they look like on paper or in a job interview) can never be known in advance? Without the threat of unemployment or the promise of higher pay for more work done more quickly, would employees under this system have incentives to shirk and hurt the economy? How could the implementation and normal functioning of the computerized job market be subject to effective democratic oversight?
Brown, who died in 2000 at age 78, attempted to anticipate such questions both in the book and on the website www.jobmarketbook.com, addressing topics ranging from inflation to the profit rate to job training in this proposed new economy. Brown suggested that the job market system be implemented gradually, which would help in identifying and redressing problems.
It is premature to judge the merits of Brown’s proposal, but not premature to say that it is worthy of serious scrutiny. Many radicals may be put off by the idea that something as simple as what is in effect a social invention--a technical tool--could be the mechanism for profoundly re-shaping human economic life.
But Brown would be the first to stress that his proposed tool would be worthless unless it is married to a vision of a humane economic system, one in which workers can determine what they want to do and for how long without fear of unemployment.
In existing labor markets, employers treat their workers as disposable commod ities. Brown's vision is one of a society in which jobs, not workers, become objects that are bought and sold. That's an interesting and in many ways attractive vision--whether or not job markets prove a viable and desirable way to bring it to life. ___