Income Insecurity
Income insecurity has been a serious human and public policy issue for a long time. In many countries, including Canada, it is getting worse. Where it is worsening, it will soon descend into widespread crisis, for individuals, families, communities, nations, and globally.
Income insecurity is a major contributor to housing insecurity and homelessness, alcohol and drug dependency, mental health breakdowns, health care shortfalls, civil and domestic violence, shortened lifespans and more downdraft issues. It is certainly a major contributor to stress, depression, lack of productivity, and social withdrawal.
Income insecurity effects everyone: children whose adult providers struggle; post-secondary students who may take on massive debt; young working adults whose entry level jobs provide an insufficient subsistence income (derailing safe housing and security of tenure); handicapped and retired folk with limited (and sometimes erratic) incomes that decline in purchasing power.
The primary problem
For everyone who struggles, the primary problem is that we tie personal or family income to wage employment, for most people. (We don’t tie income security to wage employment for the wealthy and their relatives.)
But, we don’t tie employment wages to the cost of living. The cost of living often exceeds the minimum wage income for a full-time job.
And there are important ‘jobs’ that are entirely unpaid. In some cases, people are charged for doing work society considers important. In North America, we don’t consider gaining a post-secondary education to be ‘productive’ and worthy of income. Students are charged tuition. In addition, some of them (student nurses in some jurisdictions) are charged for their practicum work. (Do you ever wonder how some countries can provide free post-secondary education for anyone who wants it, through the doctoral level, and pay a stipend to support living expenses?)
We tie income to wage employment for the benefit of the people (who) and organizations (which) are already privileged. We do this in order to maintain an economic system that is destructive.
The argument is that wage employment is essential for the well-being of society – the price that has to be paid in order for persons to live and for the community to thrive. The rationale is that we live in conditions of scarcity, so there must be production and those who don’t contribute to production must fall by the wayside.
Historically, production has depended upon human labour so, as the story goes, it has been vitally important to draw humanity into the labour pool, by any and every means. This is particularly true if the model suggests that production must always increase. And it is made to appear that production must always increase, for two reasons. First, much of what is produced is consumable (food, for example, or any of the cheap and disposable products sold in a dollar store), and must be replenished. Second, the global population is increasing and so production must keep pace with the increase. There is a third reason for constant production. We have been schooled to believe that technology, design and branding render one day’s popular item obsolete. And, historically, products have been designed and manufactured to become obsolete without the possibility of modification.
Believing that wage employment is essential for the well-being of a transient economic system, we have ‘sanctified’ wage employment with arguments that it is intended by ‘God’ or some religious dogma, or moral, or innate to human nature. The message is, take any job, under any conditions, because to decline work is somehow ‘immoral’, or self-defeating.
The emerging problem with this perspective is that more and more work can be done (will shortly be done) by robotics and artificial intelligence. In many cases, work will be better done by robots and artificial intelligence than when humans intervene. Structural unemployment is going to expand (explode) in the next decade, beyond the capacity of band-aid solutions.
The crisis descending upon us is the result of connecting income security to wage employment. The link needs to be broken, deliberately and with consideration.
What might happen if public policy and laws shifted from encouraging corporate growth (more extraction, more production, more consumption, more waste, longer supply chains, more gatekeepers, more debt) and instead encouraged steady state operations by corporations (the production of fewer goods, but more durable goods designed for ever-green modification, less extraction, less waste, shorter supply chains, fewer gatekeepers, less debt)?
What might happen if our public policy and laws discouraged corporate and also personal and family ‘churn’ ( buying for the sake of taxing the purchase)?
What might happen if public policy and laws were no longer directed toward creating ‘employment of last resort’?
What might happen if a wide range of ‘income supplement’ programs could be absorbed into a Universal Basic Income?
What might happen if there were fewer gatekeepers, and reviewers, and authorizers, and auditors? What might happen if the people who maintain income tests, and investigate fraud, and authorize payments and review and audit didn’t feel the need to maintain such systems as a guarantee of employment?
What might happen if fewer people felt their existence was precarious? What would happen if people felt they could buy fewer products, but products that might last a lifetime instead of cheap products that needed to be replaced frequently. (Think of the unskilled labourer who has to buy a new pair of cheap work boots each year because earnings are not sufficient to buy a pair of excellent boots that might last 10 years. Think of the homemaker who buys a cheap and breakable kitchen appliance every couple of years because s/he can’t afford to buy a more costly but long lasting product.)
We do not live in the midst of scarcity and we don’t need to grub for what we can get. We live in the midst of abundance, and our problems lie with our systems of distribution, notably the distribution of income.
In the emerging age, of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, nano-technology, and quantum computing (and more), human labour contributes – and will contribute — an ever smaller part of a nation’s G.D.P. Arguably, the productivity gains we want to achieve, including reduced energy and reduced waste, would be more likely by discouraging human labour. Perhaps the wage employment contribution of people is only significant where there is a requirement for high integrity (moral judgement), high imagination, or high compassion, or some combination of the three.
Perhaps we would be better off if people were drawn toward craft work, reducing the production of industrial products and, instead, producing unique and more durable goods, specific to the needs of individual customers. Perhaps we would be better off if people had the means to buy durable goods rather than cheap and short-lived products driving industrial manufacture.
What are your thoughts?