Mike Kidron

The Presence of the Future

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Extract 6 – Redundancy

Chapter 4 – Society

Redundancy

This explosion in production was not entirely due to the vast increase in inputs. There was a parallel burst in productivity – the efficiency with which those inputs are used. This explosion in productivity explains the low – and declining – impact economic growth has had on employment. One hundred and fifty years ago it took a 1.6 percent increase in real output to generate a one percent increase in employment. Today nothing less than 4 percent will do.

Bounding productivity has resulted in sprawling encampments of people not producing goods and services for the market, although they might supply it intermittently. They are of two sorts, the excluded who have never been part of the market system, and the expelled who have.

The excluded comprise the population of a residual but still large subsistence sector predominantly in the edge countries. They embrace new arrivals in the labour market everywhere, ill-equipped or not equipped at all by their education and culture for the jobs on offer or in prospect. In many rim countries they are typically young newly-urbanized former peasants. In hub countries, they are typically young ‘discouraged workers’ – people not in employment but not seeking work who have never had a job. They embrace the millions of military-draft evaders and deserters, who need to avoid the state in its many forms, who as a result cannot travel, drive, learn, vote, own houses or land. They also embrace the physically excluded, such as the 2.3 percent of the potential male labour force incarcerated in the US. Famously excluded are what has come to be known as the underclass, an inner-city, ghettoized, population characterized by un- (or irregular) employment, by long-term welfare dependency, by drug and alcohol abuse, by fractured families, who are weakly immunized against criminal behaviour. It is unskilled, composed often of distinctive minorities and suffers from multiple, mutually-reinforcing disadvantages.

The excluded are not necessarily idle. Far from it. They might work invisible to the authorities, informally, illegally; at one thing and in one place one day, at something else somewhere else on another. But they work. They might be paid or, particularly if they happen to be women or children, not paid. But they work.

The expelled – largely-male, oldish, long-term unemployed – are employment exiles, whose skills have been wiped out by changes in production (notably by the shift from ‘industry’ to ‘services’, from mass production to batch production); by shifts within production (from, typically, monitored behaviour following detailed instructions, towards goal-governed activity whose effect is monitored); or who have been winnowed out as jobs are divided into a secure core requiring multiple skills specific to the enterprise and a cascading series of the less secure, less skilled jobs outsourced to contract workers, outworkers and outside contractors. There is a rich variety in this category: those actively seeking work and not finding any, the discouraged, or economically inactive, who feel they will not find any, the constrained (the disabled, the slow, young parents) and the shiftless (the idle, the aberrant), the ‘suppressed unemployed’ estimated at one-third of the Russian industrial work force at the end of the 1990s, or the ‘unemployed within their company’, kept on the payroll on a greatly reduced wage – estimated variously at between 800,000 and 1,200,000 in Japan at roughly the same time. Some are on unpaid holiday or on ‘virtual work’ schemes (7–10 percent of Russian workers in the 1990s). Some are victims of ‘restructuring’ (a quarter of the work-force in Bulgaria in the early 1990s); some officially ‘surplus to their current posts’ (two-thirds of the workforce in Cuba); and many (in China, xia gang) who ‘leave their posts’, people sent home from the towns on nominal pay although they are not yet officially sacked, and their lookalikes, those ‘waiting for work’, ‘early retirees’, ‘absent from their posts’ and all the other euphemisms used where unemployment is not allowed to speak its name.

The boundaries between those with a stake in market society and those without one are uncertain. Market society can throw plumes deep into the outside world attaching new millions. It can collapse in on itself, expelling millions. The subsistence community of one decade can be sucked in by dam-building or road-building in the following decade only to be displaced in the one after that. Privileged car builders, steelworkers or metal bashers can find themselves idle in one country, replaced by lookalikes in another, while their daughters and perhaps their wives trip into stores and banks to serve behind counters. The boundaries shift with the business cycle: temporary jobs that gain substance in good times, collapse into bits and pieces, fiddles and self-exploitation at the next turn of the wheel. Three decades of prosperity after World War II extended the relative population of stakeholders throughout the world, especially in the rich countries. The subsequent decades witnessed a steady relative growth of redundants as economic growth faltered and populations boomed.

Crudely estimated there are now some 3,200 million stakeholders in the market system. 660 million of them, a fifth of the total, in the hub countries, comprising two-thirds of their population; and 2,510 million, four-fifths, in the rim countries where they constitute slightly more than half the population. At the other extreme there are 2,600 million redundants worldwide, 45 percent of humanity, 200 million in the hub countries where they constitute a fifth of the population; and 2,400 million, half the population, in the rim countries.

This extract is from the section titled Redundancy of Chapter 4 Society.


Last updated on 13 November 2019