S(HE) WHO DOES NOT WORK SHALL EAT ALL THE SAME: TOMORROW'S ECONOMY AND PROPOSALS FROM THE LEFT
Gorz, André
1982: The Triumph-Adler typewriter company is on the skids, and its 9,000 employees told that they are about to be laid off 1983: The company holds one-sixth of the world market for electronic...
...The drastic reduction of work time may permit a deprofessionalization of noneconomic activities without their becoming a burden...
...John Nevin, president of Firestone Tire and Rubber, made the definitive statement on the subject: "The idea that we can have an economy by selling hamburgers to each other is absurd...
...in Madrid (22 percent unemployed, 50 percent among the under twenty-five age group...
...When the unit costs of fully automated goods and services become negligible and their exchange values face collapse, society must inevitably establish a system of political prices reflecting its own choices and priorities in terms of individual and collective consumption...
...Only transfers of this type will permit the lowering of work time for all in proportion to the growth of average productivity...
...The evidence forces one to conclude that if we wish to maintain order, we may no longer reserve the right to an income to those citizens only who have jobs, nor even make the level of income dependent on the number of hours worked...
...Variations on the idea have been discussed or even implemented for years in North America and throughout Northern Europe—in the Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and, above all, in West Germany, where there is talk of Grundrecht auf Grundversorgung (constitutional right to a basic maintenance), or of Biirgerrecht auf materielle Grundsicherung (the right of every citizen to a secure subsistence), or of Recht auf Grundeinkommen (the right to a basic income...
...t would be neither practical nor realistic to translate such a drastic reduction of the annual work time into a corresponding reduction of daily or weekly working hours...
...An income guarantee based not on assistance but on linking indissolubly the right to an income and the right to work does not present these problems...
...It aims to make the growth of unemployment and poverty socially tolerable, for these are considered the inevitable consequences of a free market economy...
...Defining the amount of labor we owe society during our lifetime and getting a lifelong income as payment for this labor are not absolute novelties...
...It is an earned income to which each citizen is entitled in exchange for the normal amount of work—however small it may be— that society needs from each to secure all citizens a standard of living considered normal...
...They all correct market prices by a juggling game of taxes (on gas, automobiles, firearms, luxury products, and so on) and of subsidies (on mass transportation, agricultural products, theaters, housing, hospitals, nursery schools, children's school lunchrooms, etc...
...labor and capital...
...The right to have a job, the duty to work, and the right of citizenship are inextricably linked...
...Such a system of taxation will slow down the continued drop in relative prices of those products that lend themselves to rapid automation...
...Basically, what differentiates the policy of the left from that of the right is that the left refuses the vision of a society divided into a class of permanently employed full-time workers and another of people excluded from "working society...
...A British union of technicians in the electronics industry (APEx) reached a settlement that reduced the workweek by one hour yearly over a period of six consecutive years, with no loss of pay, the aim being a twenty-eight- to thirtyhour workweek...
...The industrialized and computerized caterer will replace old-fashioned cooks and lunch rooms...
...As to public order, one need only see what is happening in, say, Liverpool (25 percent unemployed...
...Because, for once, the firm has published data on the effects of its transformation...
...d) A changed fiscal system is needed...
...nursing aides will take care of the ill, the handicapped, and the old at their own homes...
...All these developments, which are already in sight, will, according to Gelinier, "put to work the less educated strata of the population," who will get "a modest wage" for a "modest job...
...Thus, the industrial payroll is bound to shrink...
...Stock never exceeds three days...
...When communal property was abolished, that right was taken away from them...
...Exactly like the idea of a "social minimum" devised by the neoconservatives today (I shall return to this later), the Poor Laws abolished earlier social provisions that had helped the landless workers in rural areas...
...Explanation: In the space of two years, the firm installed flexible computer-controlled manufacturing systems, i.e...
...However, the level has dropped rapidly...
...It also assumes that, as with the British day laborers in the early days of industrial capitalism, a minimum subsistence will be guaranteed to the vast numbers of unemployed and half-employed, who, as computerization and robotization gain momentum, will be able to find only occasional jobs— irregular, ungratifying, badly paid, and offering no future...
...It presupposes, above all, the following political actions: a) Formulation of medium-term productivity targets for the various branches of the economy...
...robots, rebuilt its plant, and overhauled its organization...
...This is the point of view advanced by Michel Drancourt and Albert Merlin in their most recent book, Demain, la croissance, and by the great ideologue of the business class, Octave Gelinier, in Le Chbmage gubi . . . si nous le voulons...
...At present, the "working life expectancy" is twenty-five years of 1,600 hours per year, or 40,000 hours for a person employed full time...
...That, at least, is the theory...
...Certain bargaining agreements concluded or at least proposed by American trade unions during the 1960s and 1970s anticipate this type of settlement...
...to encourage a child to walk, talk, and sing...
...it will not treat me as a supernumerary to whom it gives alms so that it may sleep well at night...
...OBVIOUSLY, THIS REGRESSIVE neoconservative version is not the only one possible...
...Lifelong income, then, appears as the share of socially produced wealth due each citizen because of his or her participation in the social processes of production...
...or in Sao Paulo or New York...
...These workers previously had always had the right to use the commons to raise a bit of grain and some vegetables, and to pasture a few sheep...
...such work alone defines the man or woman who performs it as a citizen by right, freed of any particular subordination...
...The reduction of work time will thus fulfill one of the basic conditions for the redistribution of work to all men and women...
...One assumes, of course, that you are not among the many "modestly" and "precariously" employed, for that is a different matter entirely...
...The Netherlands are the most advanced country in this regard, for every adult has the right, even if he or she has never worked, to a minimum of 1,000 florins per month (the equivalent of 425 dollars), plus 500 florins per person sharing the same home...
...A paid job that does not valorize any capital, that serves particular individuals in their private lives, and whose professionalization does not increase its productivity, is a servant's job...
...It implies a fundamentally different strategy...
...A Guaranteed Income: Right-Wing Version IN ITS RIGHT-WING VERSION, the idea of a guaranteed income is as old as the Industrial Revolution itself...
...The market would find its "natural balance"—i.e., the price of labor (the wage) would find a level at which labor supply and demand are balanced...
...For the period 1965-1973, an average of 6 percent and 4.8 percent per year was achieved...
...Such distortions of the price system, as well as problems of competitiveness, can be avoided by the following solution: employers pay only for hours worked, and thus real unit costs can be measured accurately...
...For all these reasons, some neoconservatives— notably Milton Friedman—advocate a system that guarantees a subsistence minimum to each citizen, in the form of a "negative...
...The basic principle is this: If your yearly income is above a given amount (for example, $6,000), you will pay taxes...
...Their effectiveness or success depends much more upon human qualities and emotional investment than upon a professional qualification certified by a diploma...
...nursing aides...
...When the manufacture and programming of robots is also done by robots, this process will be speeded up even more.' 2. Automated industries consume great quantities of outside services...
...This is what our eminent authors believe...
...It will become increasingly easy as it gathers momentum...
...For today, too, employers are eager to keep only a small nucleus of indispensable people on their permanent payroll and to hire or fire at will all the others who, not being part of the permanent personnel, are also excluded from wage agreements, fringe benefits, pension 181 plans, and union protection...
...In other words, the right to an income can no longer be the same thing as the right to a wage...
...If this argument were true, the total wage cost would be constant, the given firm transferring back to outside workers the wages that have been saved by automation...
...the various types of maintenance and repair work...
...Many more people will have access to more qualified jobs, which are currently monopolized by elitist professional organizations, as the work time in these positions will be reduced...
...The pricing system will be the tool and the reflection of these choices...
...Wage costs are down to only 5 percent of total cost...
...On the left, one finds people that class analysis cannot place, but also militant workers and trade-unionists, who are aware of the dangers of the current developments...
...Ageneralized reduction of work time at no loss of real income presupposes a firm desire for social change...
...And for the next ten years, the forecast is, among other data, for 53,000 additional computer programmers as compared to 800,000 additional janitors...
...regardless of age...
...Simply to reduce working hours as productivity rises (wages remaining constant) would result in significant disparity and exorbitant privileges in those types of work in which automation has been most rapid...
...The weaker their societal usefulness the harder they will be taxed...
...Hence the idea of an income that would be guaranteed to every man and woman independently of work done...
...b) To avoid grossly unequal work times in the different industrial branches and professions, an employment policy must induce workers to move from jobs where automation is rapid toward those where it is slower or nonexistent...
...or one is excluded from it, depending on whether one does or does not participate in the social process of production...
...Work that one exchanges not with society as a whole but with members 184 of a particular community, whether it be familial, tribal, religious, or other, is but particular work, subject to particular rules implying a particular relationship...
...A system of political prices will thus be substituted progressively for the system of market prices...
...The result will be a very large number of jobs...
...Moreover, advances in productivity are not spontaneous...
...Not from the commodity-producing sector, which will be largely staffed by robots and will employ steadily fewer people...
...As we have seen, nothing of the sort has happened...
...its prices are down by 30 percent, and, despite a 20 percent increase in production capacity, it can hardly keep pace with its flow of orders...
...2 Michel Drancourt and Albert Merlin, Demain, la croissance (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1985...
...They ensured every member of a rural parish a bare subsistence income pegged to the price of bread...
...Loss of earned income due to the reduction of work time is compensated by a special fund...
...The organization of work and technology will adapt to these external constraints, just as they have adapted (especially in the U.S...
...To be able to do more work, with and for others, in free cooperation or for the pleasure of giving, is an enrichment of life, so long as time is not scarce...
...2. Social income as counterpart of social productivity...
...At last, the choices of what to produce will have to be made in terms of its use value (and not its exchange value...
...Nevertheless, whatever the size of the guaranteed minimum income, its fundamental defect remains: It leads to a split-up of society, to a dual stratification that can go so far as a South-Africanization of social relations...
...the IRS will guarantee you a minimum (for instance, $2,500) if you have no income at all...
...On the contrary, the redistribution of work and the reduction of work time must be programmed as independent variables and social constraints requiring that increases in productivity be achieved at fixed target dates...
...No more than two hours elapse between the moment when an operator presses the keys that send the parts from an automated storeroom to the automated assembly lines and the moment when the typewriter is checked, packaged, and ready for mailing...
...Society needs me...
...In Western Europe, the "normal" work time is currently about 1,700 hours per year for people who are working full time...
...Think about this for a moment...
...RELEASED FROM DAILY CHORES by computers, robots, and an army of anonymous, modestly paid servants, you are promised that you will have more time for trips to the beauty salon, psychiatric sessions, slimming regimens, cruises, seances of transcendental meditation, plus other personal upper-crust services...
...Since this level severely risks being below the subsistence minimum, the minimum should be guaranteed to all citizens by a system of negative taxation...
...The guarantee of a minimum income can be linked to higher social ideals...
...Notes 1 According to a study by the West German Labor Unions' Economic and Social Research Institute (WSI), the labor force may be structured as follows toward the end of this century, if laissez-faire politics prevail: 25 percent, permanently employed, skilled, unionized workers...
...It is essential only that the size of these reductions and of the corresponding increases in productivity be well studied in advance...
...or—a more likely and sensible choice—forty years of intermittent work...
...They are free (with minimal restrictions) to choose their daily and weekly schedules as they wish...
...More than 80 percent of us will earn our living by offering services to others...
...The lowering of direct industrial employment will be compensated by indirect employment...
...they always result from an external pressure—competition...
...3 France, whose performance is not record-breaking, has registered the following increases in productivity since 1977: 5.2 percent per year in industry, 3.7 percent per year for the whole of the economy...
...Right and duty are always linked: my right is the duty of others toward me, it implies my duty toward them...
...fast-food restaurants will supplant the local snack bar...
...The quality of these products and 186 services would deteriorate and shortages would appear that would lead to the development of a black market for labor...
...In the auto industry, a thirty-year work span was negotiated, which gave the right to full retirement ("thirty and out...
...Let us examine this a bit more closely...
...A fifty percent deduction would then finance your income during nonwork periods...
...But to the point: Where will the money come from for you to afford all these services...
...To be more precise, it releases society from the obligation to assure each citizen of the opportunity to participate in the social process of production...
...BEYOND A CERTAIN POINT, reduction of work time may become cumulative...
...In the steel industry, the union demanded "lifetime employment" and a lifetime income that corresponded to not less than thirty hours per week, even if the hours worked were actually fewer...
...The guaranteed minimum income continues to be the wage of social exclusion, for it consolidates a system dominated by capitalist relations of production and by what I have called the "working elite...
...If the installation of robots were to demand as much labor as it would save, it would not allow any lowering of total wage costs and would have no effect on the level of industrial employment...
...It does not shatter the link between income and work but that between income and work time...
...It does not consider the growth of unemployment inevitable or acceptable...
...Now, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS of competitiveness, a marked rise in wages cannot be instituted by any country or even by a group of countries...
...And though production has increased by 20 percent, manpower has been reduced by 36 percent...
...For example, it may aim to save society's cohesion via a more expansive version of human rights and human solidarity— this being the view of some Christian Democrats...
...According to the ideas of the neoconservatives and of Friedman himself, the introduction of this system should coincide with the abolition of all other forms of social protection: minimum wage, Social Security, compensation for unemployment and illness, dependents' allowances, etc...
...It would be feasible only were there a concerted action by all the industrialized nations, which is virtually impossible...
...We will be paying each other for baby-sitting, beauty care, housecleaning, sexual services, etc., each person being specialized in one given activity, the professional exercise of which is to permit him or her to pay for the services of the others...
...c) A reform of educational methods and policies is needed...
...estimates, industry will employ 10 percent of the working population at the end of the century, as compared to 16 percent at present...
...the chain of "express" hairdressers will oust the old hairdressing salons...
...Even better (or worse): whereas, in the past, the owner had maintained enough men on hand so as not to be short of manpower when it was needed, particularly during harvest times, the Poor Laws permitted owners to replace many of their permanent workers with day laborers hired for the duration of indispensable work, and then send the day laborers home to live on the minimum subsistence that the parish was obliged to give the poor...
...One belongs to society (or, more exactly, to democratic society and not a slave state), and one has certain rights within it...
...2 179 As regards goods, one thinks, of course, of cars that drive themselves...
...The linkage between working and being entitled to an income is broken...
...Now, 20,000 hours equals ten years of fulltime work, or twenty years of half-time work...
...But where is the creation of value in all this...
...3. The microelectronic revolution will boost the demand for goods and especially for services...
...However, as soon as one moves beyond general principles to deal with practical questions as to how to organize society and especially how to distribute work to all those wanting to work, ideas begin to diverge and a right/left cleavage appears that does not correspond to the usual patterns of class analysis...
...the building trades...
...It starts from the fact that, as the amount of labor that society needs will keep diminishing, liberation from socially necessary labor is the only sensible goal...
...The time needed to comfort or to offer advice...
...On the basis of an annual average of 1,000 hours and on the assumption that all necessary work can be shared among the entire potentially active population, the number of hours a worker works, in the course of a lifetime, will hardly exceed 20,000...
...As the women's liberation movement has always maintained, this opportunity is the very basis of the individual's full status as a citizen...
...The goals for each industrial or service sector will form the basis of negotiating industrial agreements in which the growth of productivity, the level of employment, new forms of work organization, skills, training schemes, as well as the reduction of work time, will be defined, taking into account the specific conditions of each enterprise...
...Financing the progressive reduction of work time without loss of income cannot be achieved by direct taxation or any form of Social Security...
...As Klaus Haefner has shown, the educational system has so far given us the "human computers" required by Taylorized industries: priority is given to discipline, punctuality, memorization, the development of cognitive and analytical capacities—all these at the expense of "such 'secondary' qualities as affection, sympathy, compassion, the ability to love and to communicate, sensuality, artistic faculties...
...This greater employers' "freedom" in the utilization of labor presupposes, obviously, the easing of both labor and social legislation...
...Its assembly line can now produce thirty-eight different models (with as many as thirty variations for each), in any sequence...
...Obviously, this is not a very promising prospect, and even American neoliberals will not pretend that it is...
...of domestic robots that do one's cooking, housekeeping, shopping—indeed, one's piano-playing, one's physical training, etc...
...This would mean that for a workweek reduced by half, every hour would in fact have to be paid at twice the present rate...
...As the neoconservatives see it, the guarantee of a subsistence minimum is the basis on which the labor market can function without interference...
...to aid a dying person...
...Even in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher, an unemployed adult who lives with his or her parents and who has never worked can receive four pounds per day (about six dollars) for as long as needed...
...None of these caring activities has anything to do with economic rationality...
...Likewise, social income for nonwork time will have to represent—in a heavily automated economy—by far the most important source of personal income...
...This mass of marginal, vulnerable workers may represent 75 percent of the active population by the year 2000...
...The guaranteed minimum is a way of accepting this split-up, and of making it more tolerable...
...As regards services: Gelinier promises that "important enterprises with highly sophisticated management will supply you, at a low fee, the person-to-person services that used to be supplied by individual craftsmen...
...Thus, a lifetime guaranteed income is not, in this conception, a new right granted by the state...
...With this, each person would always have the possibility of 183 interrupting or reducing his or her paid activity to go back to college, or to acquire a new skill or trade, but also to build a house, raise children, join a band or write a book, become his or her own doctor or analyst, work as a volunteer in a commune or co-op or a Third World country—and this without ever losing his or her normal income...
...Neither a state-regulated economy nor a police state is needed to impose sizable reductions in work time every four or five years...
...Ergo, from a left-wing point of view, the essential thing is not the guarantee of an income independent from work...
...Assuming that the French GNP will keep growing 2 percent annually (a somewhat optimistic assumption), and that the annual rise of productivity will not exceed 3.5 percent to 4 percent (a somewhat pessimistic assumption), the quantity of necessary labor will then diminish by 30 to 40 percent within seventeen years.' Assuming that this quantity of work can be shared among all those who want to work, work time could drop to less than 1,000 hours per year at the outset of the twenty-first century— and that despite the substantial growth (of about 40 percent) of the wealth produced...
...In whatever way money is allocated by the state to the unemployed or the destitute, this allocation is conceded to them and may, therefore, be withdrawn or reduced...
...This is, after all, an extension of practices already in effect in all modern economies...
...the commons were distributed to the landowners, and fenced...
...Its function will no longer be to pay people for the amount of work performed (that having become marginal), but to assure the distribution of socially produced wealth...
...TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY ADRIENNE FOULKE AND THE AUTHOR 187...
...It is not from work itself but from socially necessary work time that income must become independent...
...The American economy illustrates this remark perfectly...
...New tertiary jobs" mean, essentially, that millions of men and women will have to compete for the privilege of selling their personal services, often for less than the minimum wage, to those who still have well-paid jobs—and there are fewer and fewer of these...
...This fund is fed by a tax that, like the British Value Added Tax (VAT) or the taxes on alcohol, gas, tobacco, etc., is levied against products and services at differing rates...
...Conversely, when the market price of labor drops too low, the incentive to look for a job flags, and the scarcity of labor supply makes for rising wage rates...
...and Japan) to the introduction of new standards of pollution control...
...THIS IDEA WAS BROUGHT UP recently, but with great caution, within the French Socialist party, in the form of a "guaranteed minimum" or a "social minimum...
...and these facts furnish a response to those who keep doubting that the "microelectronics revolution" entails a net saving of both This article appeared in Lettre Internationale, Spring 1986, c Andre Gorz, and is reprinted by permission...
...Only socially determined work is governed by rules and regulations of a universal character...
...Workers and unions will have everything to gain from greater flexibility of work time and self-management of this flexibility on the basis not of weekly but of monthly, quarterly, or annual work patterns.4 One thousand hours of work per year can correspond to, say, ten working days per month, or two fifteen-day periods in three months, etc., the full wage continuing to be paid during all the weeks or months when one is not working, as is the case currently for the annual paid vacation or the sabbatical year...
...These steps had a twofold purpose: to develop commercial crops, and to force landless countrypeople to hire themselves out to the owners...
...Does this not remind you of the famous paradigm of Bertrand de Jouvenel, in which two mothers pay each other for each to care for the other's three children, thereby creating two jobs and upping the GNP by two salaries...
...Why is this story significant, compared to hundreds of others...
...The distinction or opposition of workers vs...
...In West Germany, the economic recovery of 1983-84 did not prevent the loss of 500,000 industrial jobs, after the recession of 1981-82 had already brought about the loss of 700,000 jobs...
...just see the U.S...
...These authors see prodigious markets opening to "swarming ventures...
...cultural, artistic, and educational work...
...The market economy threatens to collapse because the volume of 180 goods produced grows while the number of solvent people decreases...
...nonworkers is to lose its base, for as the average work time decreases—as it inevitably must—wage work will become intermittent for all and cease to be people's main occupation...
...What it actually does is to permit labor costs to fall so low that a goodly amount of work that would not have been profitable if paid at the normal wage rate can be passed on to people who are simply looking to supplement their guaranteed income and therefore take less...
...It is by its rights over me that society recognizes me as a member...
...Every citizen must have the right to a normal standard of living, but also the possibility (the right and the duty) to contribute to society the equivalent in work to what he or she consumes...
...This was already the purpose of the Poor Laws, established in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century...
...Or it may free people from the need to sell their labor power by fixing the guaranteed minimum so high as to allow virtually limitless independent activities that are not, properly speaking, economic—this being the view of the libertarians...
...When the production process requires less and less manpower and distributes less and less in wages, order is in danger—both public order and order in the market economy...
...income tax...
...Best not think of it...
...most often this will be temporary, precarious, and part time, for "our society has a growing need for manpower flexibility...
...Versatility, the capacity to change and adapt, the ability to learn by oneself, to acquire new skills, will have to be encouraged at all levels...
...Since these taxes may be deducted from export prices, competition will not be affected...
...As a member of society, I have the right to demand the guarantee of a normal standard of living, but being a member of society also means that society has rights over me...
...As for people's real income, it will be made up of an earned income (wage) and a social income which, during periods of nonwork, will guarantee one's normal standard of living...
...These goals may be worked out—in fact, they have been, in the past—by planning committees composed of representatives of the unions, of the consumers, of the administration, and of executives from every branch of production...
...Its function is to free a privileged social stratum from a number of necessary or desirable tasks which they could easily perform themselves if they cared to, by transferring these tasks onto people who can find no socially useful or productive work...
...The speed and extent of possible reductions of work time are frequently underestimated...
...It is not the guarantee of an income independent of work that will be at the core of the left's program, but the indissoluble linking of the right to an income and the right to work...
...However, the owners had no need to hire a supplementary work force that would be permanent...
...The normal practice of a trade or profession may then include much more thinking, researching, expanding and updating one's knowledge, meeting people, traveling, loving, etc...
...But this has a reverse consequence: it also abolishes the right to work...
...Rises in productivity differ markedly from one industry or service to another, and indeed from one division of the same industry to another...
...In preventing the lowering of unit costs, the simple reduction of work time as productivity rises (wages remaining constant) would eliminate all competition between enterprises, and would result in a bureaucratic management routine, no one being interested in increasing productivity...
...If all the socially necessary work could be spread among all those who wish to work, the annual work time would drop to 1,350 or 1,500 hours per year (assuming a 10 or 20 percent rate of unemployment...
...The libertarian groups—for example, in West Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands—who advocate the allocation of a basic income to all citizens, with no conditions at all, are strangely blind to the fact that this would make the recipients dependent upon the goodwill of the administration and of the politically powerful class of wellpaid job holders who pay most of the taxes...
...4 The employees of the Province of Quebec (Canada) have gained the assessment of their work time on a monthly basis: they owe 140 hours per month...
...This article appeared in Lettre Internationale, Spring 1986,c André Gorz, and is reprinted by permission...
...In particular, the guiding priorities and values of teaching will have to be transformed...
...It's an interesting idea...
...Transitional Politics THE GENERAL REDUCTION IN WORK TIME without loss of income cannot be achieved merely by union struggles and collective bargaining, even though both are prerequisites...
...This demand can be carried forward by a strategy of collective action and popular mobilization...
...The definition of a work cycle based no longer on an annual scale but on a life span will be the logical continuation of this new organization of time...
...infants will be sent to computer-controlled day care centers, etc...
...On the contrary, it transforms into obligatory, paid professional work what could be enjoyable free-time activities, were they taken over voluntarily, as ends in themselves...
...The lack of time and an ideological preference for wage work have led capitalist societies to entrust specialized public or private institutions with typically convivial or personal tasks like caring for infants, helping the ill or the disabled, comforting the afflicted, giving advice to the troubled, but also other things such as obtaining new neighborhood facilities, the upkeep or improvement of the urban or rural environment, etc...
...On the other hand, a very large increase of labor costs would involve a prohibitive rise in the relative prices of the more labor-intensive products and services: agriculture...
...That's the stipulation of membership of every man and woman in society—his or her full citizenship...
...Fundamentally, it comes down to asking that labor savings due to the microelectronic revolution benefit everyone: everyone must be enabled to work less and less with no loss of income, and everyone must be enabled to work...
...The demand that labor time should be defined on a life basis and paid in the form of a lifelong income will make it easier to unite in action the workers and the unemployed, labor and the new social movements...
...Where is the surplus...
...They are in agreement as to the principle: We must break away from an evolution that leads the majority of the population to depend for its livelihood on the labor market...
...1. Allocation of income as social welfare...
...Considered in these terms, the guaranteed lifetime income is the logical consequence of a massive reduction of working hours without loss of real income...
...If your income is sizably less (for instance, $4,000), the IRS will supplement it...
...Of the thirteen million jobs created in ten years, the large majority have been in occupations "at the bottom of the ladder": charwomen and housecleaners, male and female...
...According to some U.S...
...The multiplication of these jobs is a sign not of economic vitality but of decadence...
...On the right, one finds the upper class, together with its usual allies, plus a significant number of skilled, unionized blue- and white-collar workers...
...This catastrophe can be avoided and the reduction of work time will have an emancipatory effect only if education gives priority to the flowering of distinctly human abilities: manual, artistic, affective, interrelational, plus ability to ask unexpected questions, to invent new goals, to make sense, to refuse nonsense...
...it is the guarantee of an income that does not decline as fast as the average work time...
...and Octave Gelinier, Le ChOmage guéri . . . si 110145 le voulons (Paris: Editions Hommes et Techniques, 1985...
...50 percent, people who only find seasonal or occasional jobs and are unemployed most of the time...
...At present, the jobs of domestic servants tend to be socialized, which does not change their nature substantially...
...1982: The Triumph-Adler typewriter company is on the skids, and its 9,000 employees told that they are about to be laid off 1983: The company holds one-sixth of the world market for electronic typewriters...
...The apparent slowdown is due essentially to the retention of redundant personnel by public services, banks (which are nationalized), and administrations...
...Collective Action and Strategies THE GUARANTEE OF A LIFETIME INCOME raises fundamentally different problems depending on whether it is regarded as a form of social welfare, financed by taxes and allocated by the state, or whether, on the contrary, it is seen as the payment each citizen receives in return for his or her participation in the social processes of production...
...Their productivity can't be measured...
...they are a logical development of past union struggles for the reduction of work time without loss of income...
...waiters and waitresses...
...As a conse182 quence, the labor savings implied in technological changes should be distributed in such a way that all men and women can work, but work less and less without loss of income...
...Parts that had been manufactured by subcontractors are now produced in the mother factory...
...185 The evolution of productivity cannot, then, be considered in any way an independent variable to which the development of work time could be subordinated...
...of computerized medical equipment...
...5 In previous times this sort of work was performed by slaves or domestic servants...
...25 percent, unskilled personnel employed intermittently by subcontractors, service industries, and small businesses...
...The present educational system will result in the catastrophically futile training of men and women for tasks in which their computers will compete with them and beat them...
...An average work time of 1,000 hours per year is becoming a tangible prospect...
...THE GUARANTEE OF AN INCOME independent of any work has its supporters on the right, left, and in the center...
...to do housework, cook a meal, keep a park in shape—this time is pretty much the same, whether the work is done by friends, family, neighborhood cooperatives, or by specialized services employing paid professionals...
...In France, in 1984, the normal work time earned the average household a disposable income of 15,000 francs per family per month (about $2300...
...The compulsory contributions of employees and of employers to Social Security would likewise disappear...
...5 Having society perform these tasks makes no economic sense, since it does not free time on a societal scale...
...The Poor Laws dispensed them from doing so and, by insuring the survival of the unemployed, freed the owners of all scruple...
...Squads of men and women housecleaners will be sent by radio calls from block to block...
...Will your money then come from the service sector, and chiefly from person-to-person services...
...One can see the parallel with the present situation...
...Nothing would be allowed to shackle the free play of the labor market...
...The doubters offer three main arguments: 1. To manufacture and install robots demands a great deal of work and creates many jobs...
...A Guaranteed Income: Left-Wing Version THE LEFT-WING VERSION of the guaranteed income is radically different...
...This same type of guarantee had been gained by New York dockers, whose work load varied widely in the course of a year and, because of automation, was reduced to a very limited number of annual work hours...
...The only advantage of an unconditional basic income is that it does away completely with the obligation to work...
...Both formulae would imply that the income earned for a decreasing number of working hours can be taxed heavily enough to pay people during the hours, days, weeks, etc., when they are freed from work...
...it is simply the normal remuneration, spread over one's lifetime, of an amount of work done during one's life—say, 20,000 hours...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
