Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

A com­mon com­plaint I hear in­for­mal­ly from some grad­u­ates at the UWI con­cerns the dis­con­nect be­tween what they know and the jobs they get or are of­fered. The com­plaint isn't they do not have the re­quired skills for the po­si­tions. Rather it is of­ten the stu­dents are be­ing hired for gov­ern­ment da­ta en­try jobs or sales po­si­tions when they know and can do much more. In these po­si­tions they of­ten feel un­der­utilised and bored.

In an­oth­er anec­dote, last week I over­heard a group of UWI stu­dents dis­cussing the lo­cal On the Job Train­ing Pro­gramme or OJT as "OJT=UWI's Cepep." Think­ing about Cepep and lis­ten­ing to some UWI grad­u­ates dis­cuss the poor al­lo­ca­tion lo­cal­ly of jobs to skill sets re­mind­ed of a 2013 es­say writ­ten by the an­thro­pol­o­gist David Grae­ber on the sub­jec­tive val­ue peo­ple feel about their point­less jobs.'

Grae­ber not­ed that in 1930, the British econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes "pre­dict­ed that tech­nol­o­gy would have ad­vanced suf­fi­cient­ly by cen­tu­ry's end that coun­tries like Great Britain or the Unit­ed States would achieve a 15-hour work week." In tech­no­log­i­cal terms we've cer­tain­ly reached a lev­el ca­pa­ble of this trans­for­ma­tion in work hours. So Grae­ber asks why didn't it hap­pen?

For Grae­ber, in­stead of tech­nol­o­gy be­ing used to lessen our work­ing hours and free hu­man­i­ty to pur­sue oth­er pur­pos­es, tech­nol­o­gy was used in­stead to find "ways to make us all work more."Grae­ber then ex­plains for this to be pos­si­ble, "jobs have had to be cre­at­ed that are, ef­fec­tive­ly, point­less. Huge swathes of peo­ple...spend their en­tire work­ing lives per­form­ing tasks they se­cret­ly be­lieve do not re­al­ly need to be per­formed."

For Grae­ber, this was not some se­cret con­spir­a­cy, with men in a room think­ing up point­less jobs, but rather the tri­al and er­ror steps of cap­i­tal­ism dur­ing the 20th cen­tu­ry. And it has moral and spir­i­tu­al con­se­quences for our hu­man­i­ty.In sim­ple terms, Keynes' pre­dic­tion nev­er hap­pened be­cause he didn't fore­see the mas­sive rise in con­sumerism from the 1960s on­ward.

In­stead of work­ing few­er hours, so­ci­ety went in the oth­er di­rec­tion of need­ing to work more hours in or­der to earn the re­quired monies need­ed to buy the nev­er-end­ing as­sort­ment of more and more toys, goods and con­sumer items we take for grant­ed to­day.

The nu­ance to re­mem­ber here is the pro­duc­tion of these goods is not where the new jobs ap­peared. For ex­am­ple, the new make-work jobs have very lit­tle to do with the pro­duc­tion of a con­tin­u­ous con­vey­er belt of smart phones, sneak­ers, mp3 play­ers and much more, al­ways with a new­er mod­el com­ing out right af­ter the old.

As pre­dict­ed, these man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs were large­ly au­to­mat­ed away. And Grae­ber's re­search points out, "even if you count in­dus­tri­al work­ers glob­al­ly, in­clud­ing the toil­ing mass­es in In­dia and Chi­na, such work­ers are still not near­ly so large a per­cent­age of the world pop­u­la­tion as they used to be."

No, for Grae­ber, based on em­ploy­ment da­ta from the US be­tween 1910 and 2000, "the num­ber of work­ers em­ployed as do­mes­tic ser­vants, in in­dus­try, and in the farm sec­tor has col­lapsed dra­mat­i­cal­ly.At the same time, pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, cler­i­cal, sales, and ser­vice work­ers tripled, grow­ing from one-quar­ter to three-quar­ters of to­tal em­ploy­ment."

These new jobs aren't most­ly ser­vice sec­tor jobs ei­ther. In the US and UK it in­cludes an un­heard of ex­pan­sion of new fields and in­dus­tries, "in­clud­ing the cre­ation of whole new in­dus­tries like fi­nan­cial ser­vices or tele­mar­ket­ing, or the un­prece­dent­ed ex­pan­sion of sec­tors like cor­po­rate law, aca­d­e­m­ic and health ad­min­is­tra­tion, hu­man re­sources, and pub­lic re­la­tions."

Along­side this trans­for­ma­tion from jobs that pro­duce things to jobs that do not man­u­fac­ture things, full em­ploy­ment has been de­vel­oped ide­o­log­i­cal as a moral ne­ces­si­ty. Those who want to work less are seen as bad peo­ple or moral­ly cor­rupt­ed and de­serve noth­ing.

Iron­i­cal­ly, it was the state cap­i­tal­ism of pseu­do-so­cial­ist states like the So­vi­et Union who be­lieved in full em­ploy­ment for the sake of it. In tra­di­tion­al de­f­i­n­i­tions of cap­i­tal­ism some lev­el of un­em­ploy­ment has al­ways been nec­es­sary for com­pet­i­tive­ness both as a re­serve army of labour and al­so so new sec­tors can emerge to gen­er­ate em­ploy­ment.

Fur­ther­more, as some lo­cal econ­o­mists, in com­ments made pub­li­cal­ly about make-work jobs have stat­ed, pay­ing some­body to do noth­ing–full em­ploy­ment for full em­ploy­ment sake, where the State sucks up the un­em­ployed–along­side a bloat­ed and un­need­ed cor­po­rate and state bu­reau­cra­cy, does not con­tribute to a sus­tain­able econ­o­my.

So what might be some so­lu­tions to this phe­nom­e­non of make-work jobs and the pol­i­tics of full-em­ploy­ment in T&T? Well one for­ward think­ing idea is "ba­sic in­come," some­thing I will re­turn to in my next col­umn.

�2 Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­a­n­is an an­thro­pol­o­gi­s­tat UWI, St Au­gus­tine.