>Brown envisions an economy in which employers do not buy and sell people 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.
[Interpolation by Gar - Offlist Jenny explained that employers offer jobs at wages - workers don't bid - they apply]
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>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. <snip>
>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.
Comment. Obviously employers would have to submit joblists, dependendecies (what has to be done before what), what task cannot be seperated and must be done on the same equipment. Then yes - a computerr could do the job. Though you still might find human judgement backed by computing power could get the job done faster. That is human judgement might be needed to exclude some obviously infeasible combinations whose infeasibilty a computer might miss.
>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.
Note that this produces something much closer to balanced job complexes than normal market socialism, but still might be used in a market socialism.
>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.
So since people really don't want super low pay, there would be pressure to "balance" these jobs, add some of the less desirable work to make them pay more - which of course would tend to balance the high paying undesirable jobs too.
>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.
OK this is the problem with this proposal. If acquiring a skill is onerous, the labor of acquiring it should be paid for just like any other work. But assuming the person did not have to pay for their own education (as in our current system) why should having a skill entitle someone to more money than someone who lacks it. This still produces unbalanced jobs. Here is an alternative that would produced balanced job complex (if you wished). Employers bid for labor to attrack applicants just as you say. Skill of course drives up the price of some jobs that otherwise a lot people would bid for. The compensatin money is put into a common pool. Wages are actually paid out of this common pool, adjusted for the ratio of appplicants to the ratio of qualified workers who could have paid. In other words you are measuring the real desirablity of a job. But people still have the incentive to acquire those skills, because they are paid for acquiring them. And they are right in your job system so the wages reflect actual tastes for studying.
If you don't do this, and you end up with a large varietion in jobs; then there is a social cost. If some people are doing jobs with lots of pleasant and empowering tasks (because their special skill let them avoid competition - so they get extremely pleasant empoweing work at the pay the less skilled receive for much less pleasant, less empowering work) and others work at less, they get the feedback, the shaping of conciousness that comes from this. If someone is sweeping floors thirty hours a week, and someone else it a plant manager then the floor-sweeper is getting no training in decision making or debate; the plant manager is getting lots. Unless the floor sweeper has one hell of an axceptoinal talent, the plant manager will have more say in whatever dmocratic processes the system develops than the floor sweeper even if they are formally equal. And I know that some floor sweepers will be great at politics and some plant managers awful. But after twenty years in a situation like this, plant managers on average will get their way more often than floor sweepers.
Now I understand that the system proposed has some other precautions against this. Training is sidely available, if you have a shortage of some skill people will be encouraged to train in it. This even happens in capitalism at times. And I think Jenny's late lamented father included some proposal to limit the ration of highest wage to lowest. If so, this also limits class differentiation, since highly unbalanced complexes would attract too many or too few to certain jobs, upseetin the ration, and they would have to be reconfigured to maintain wages within the ratio. So with the modification I suggested, and perhaps limiting the ratio to, say, 2 to 1 per hour it would indeed be a procedure for maintaing balanced complexes.