As long as the material basis of our well-being is understood to come from paid employment, we will continue to lean upon the moral coercion of the work ethic to justify the decision to not give people the material support they need, and we will do this whether there is a need for everyone to work or not.

Tim Dunlop, “Why the Future is Workless“

On way or the other — the labor market is either broken or perfected — work can’t serve as the disciplinary groundwork of your character or the legitimate source of your income or the proper register of your life’s worth. So, let’s be realistic. Fuck it.

James Livingston, “No More Work”

The current debate over AI is now, will it just take jobs away (there is no doubt about that any more, because it is already making entry level and routine work obsolete), or will it open up those collaborative careers of the future, where we become highly-skilled and highly-paid shepherds of the new technologies? The latter option, known as the substitutability thesis, is actually a pretty old concept, asserting that new technology has always destroyed old jobs while opening up wonderful vistas of better opportunities. After all, how many of us really want to be railroad track layers, coal miners, or assembly line spot-welders?

But even AI boosters believe that it will wipe out a lot of jobs, and there is no denying that it has already started, as younger people struggle to get their foot in the door, and older laid-off workers are finding it all but impossible to get comparable positions in their search for new jobs. But the general drift of AI optimism, probably better characterized as fatalism, is that new technologies will just eliminate boring drudge work, just as prior breakthroughs did, and we’ll eventually become better workers with better careers. It’s just a matter of how much pain there will be in the transition, which will be determined by how good our public policies are, and how closely the private and government spheres work to ease the changeover to our new work regime.

But what if this perspective is just all wrong? And I don’t just mean the usual question about AI technology, “What if it’s different this time?” It certainly is different, very different. But rather, we need to ask much bigger questions around the whole thing, the entire universe or labor, morality, and money.

• What is labor-saving technology for, if not to actually SAVE LABOR, in that we need to, and are now able to, reduce working time across the board, as part of a strategy to sharply and rapidly decrease the damage we are doing to the planet?
• What if we have already long-passed the need for everyone to work maximum hours, and the only reason we still worship the virtue of labor is because the plutocrats need to keep extracting value from the system, and because we have lacked the vision and the power to build a world beyond work for regular people?
• What if the very existence of the plutocracy is not just a manifestation of injustice and bad actors, but is actually systemic evidence that work no longer needs to be compelled to generate plenty of money in toto?
• Or even further, what if the fundamental relationships between money, labor, morality, and power over nature have been irreversibly altered, and the widening inequality in the system results from us pushing the gains of technology and knowledge into the wrong place, into channels of outmoded ideological constructs like the work ethic, careerism, and the provisioning of micro-households, the last of which has become an obsolete vehicle for forcing maximum consumption and maximum labor in the midst of overall economic conditions that don’t require them?
• And that leads to the biggest question of all, echoing the title of an old Wendell Berry book, “What are people for?”

In order to tackle that last big question, let’s start with a few observations about the labor landscape, including some involving AI. First of all, the job market is generally soft. Long-term unemployment is creeping back up, representing about 27% of the total. And labor force participation is at 61%, the lowest since 2021. The biggest driver of job growth, as the population ages, is in the health care sector, where there tend to be a lot of lower-paid aid positions. The participation rate for young people is also lagging, representing the bite that AI is taking out of entry-level work.

Economic growth has now come to mirror the economic inequality of the system as a whole, with the top 10% now driving about half of all consumer spending, which is itself around 70% of US GDP. And the labor share of GDP, how much workers take home from the whole economic pie, fell to a record low of 53.8%, the lowest since 1947.

At the household level, the rise of dual-earner households over the last few decades, and the massive accumulation of personal debt, along with rising federal assistance programs (government transfer payments now account for about 20% of all US income), have masked the decline of well-compensated labor. We’re all familiar with the flattening of wages as related to productivity gains (they started to diverge in the early 70s, as corporate class kicked off their neoliberal response to unionization and civil rights), but the micro-household has also allowed businesses to push all kinds of things back onto people’s personal budgets, things like retirement savings (disappearing pensions), health care costs, and community amenities that used to be free, but have become pay-to-play.

The result is that paid work has to now bear incredible pressure: to earn, to purchase formerly-free public services, and to create the entire infrastructure for the reproduction of society itself through little humans. As work becomes more precarious, it simply cannot handle the load, and younger generations increasingly can’t even get off the ground for many of these household milestones: buying a home, having children, contributing materially to their communities, and saving enough money for retirement.

The labor market is thus diverging in what it is actually producing — low-pay, low-skill, and/or limited-mobility jobs — and what we think it should be producing — amazing “jobs of the future” where we’re all high-paid shepherds of our wondrous AI collaborators. And it is all set within an overall environment of hyper top-heavy plutocracy, where the ultra-rich drive the lion’s share of the (largely) luxury economy, while regular people are left fighting for the fallen crumbs, perpetually terrified of getting laid off or getting ill, which could be a literal death sentence.

The mechanism on how to get from the depressing reality of paid labor (70% of Americans report being disengaged from their work) to the rosy future is never adequately or convincingly explained. For liberals and/or Democrats, the bridge of solutions is familiar: tax the rich, tax AI, tax carbon emissions, rejuvenate labor unions, create a massive Green New Deal infrastructure project. These are all cycled through every election cycle, but they never really go anywhere, as the country is mired in a hyper-polarized and toxic coma, which blocks everything from getting off the ground. The arc of history does not seem to bend or even lean a little towards these polices, and that’s really because they still represent a belief that the system itself is salvageable. Which it isn’t.

For MAGA and Trumpism, we don’t really need to get to the jobs of the future, because the jobs of the past will do just fine, and they’ll magically reappear once we get rid of all the brown people and their enabling enemies from within. The logic behind the MAGA faithful accepting Trump’s epic grift is that old Ayn Rand belief that the rich can do no wrong, and if you’re not cashing in like the President and his cadre of kleptocrats, then it’s someone else’s fault (i.e., some liberal somewhere). But that scapegoating only goes so far, because it can’t pay the bills. So people end up doing their own bit of grift, cashing in however they can, regardless of whether it’s actually moral or replicable for the masses. These mid-level con games of the MAGA-verse blend in seamlessly with the general rural hustle that goes on, where people have to do whatever they can to make a living, because the mass employers are either gone or pay shit. And the whole thing gets a veneer of romanticism through that shopkeeper capitalism prism that Ayn Rand pushed so unconvincingly.

So as usual, I’ll finish out by circling back to some old themes, but I’ll sprinkle in some updated phrasing. What do we need to do, to get a handle on this crisis of employment?

• First, we need to abandon the archaic ideas that work is lofty, noble, character-building, etc. We can all see by now that morality and hard work have virtually no relation to economic reward, political power, or general social justice. We have to stop pretending that the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are millions of times better, smarter, or more righteous than nurses, firefighters, accountants, and eldercare workers. Wealth and income have become detached from actual social worth and utility, so we should jettison the work ethic as the core of our civilization.
• Along with consumption, transportation, pollution, population, and most other things, we must rapidly and sharply reduce the quantity of our labor, in order to begin the sacred project of halting the damage we are doing to the planet, and then healing the damage already done.
• As such, people need the upper hand vis-a-vis the labor market. A long as people are compelled to work in order just to not die, they have no power in how they approach paid work. Workers should be scarce, so that businesses have to compete to make working conditions as positive and dignity-creating as possible. And in the bigger picture, giving people the ability to NOT work is crucial in facilitating the withering away of many areas of unnecessary consumption that must happen.
• The micro-household is the driver of economic precarity, as the cost of living far outstrips gains in wages, putting unsustainable pressure to provide everything that businesses and the public sphere have pushed into the commodity market. Workers will never have the upper hand while living in our current household format.

And we’re back to the usual project proposal of this blog: Bigger Home Bases funded through Universal Basic Income, and backstopped by a Modern Money Theory approach to federal spending. Check out earlier posts for the deets on these.