How to End Unemployment Tomorrow
It’s so simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it before. Shorten the workweek and raise the minimum wage. It works every time!
Everyone must have employment because everyone has living expenses. It’s either a job or hit the streets with the homeless. Inventions in laborsaving machinery and processes cause unemployment. The natural consequence of improving productivity is that someone loses his job.
The American worker today is 20 to 25 times more productive than in the horse and buggy days. Our productivity improvements are now accelerating at a pace unseen in history. Computers and the Internet, big-box retailing, robotized factories are radically shifting the work, making millions of jobs obsolete. Reducing the workweek would accelerate the process even faster because leisure time, time to think things through, can only improve processes. Each time in our history when we’ve shortened working hours the Patent Office is hit with a flood of new laborsaving inventions. This should be cause for celebration. It would be if ALL benefited but we haven’t reduced the workweek in 50 years! Government has filled the gap with public employments, now a quarter of the workforce, an unproductive solution at best.
I need a metaphor here to further explain. A metaphor is a “way of knowing.” I think the best metaphor is a hydraulic system. Hydraulic systems operate at very high pressures, typically 3000 psi. When activated, this pressure would blow out any line or valve in the system so a device called an “accumulator” is installed to absorb the shock. We have an “accumulator” available to absorb the shock of permanent job loss. It’s called the workweek. If we don’t employ it the system will do exactly what it’s doing now, break!
Too many employers see only one side of the equation, theirs; higher labor costs. What they fail to see is that with more people employed more people can buy what they sell. Henry Ford doubled the wages of his workers when he “got it.” If his workers, the most productive in the world at the time, couldn’t afford to buy what they themselves were producing how could anyone else? This scared the hell out of the nation’s employers because they knew they’d have to match those wages. They did of course, and the whole nation saw a dramatic improvement in the standard of living. The businesses adapted fine. One should know one’s own history.
There are other ways of ending unemployment tomorrow. The most obvious is to repair and update the existing infrastructure. Several trillion invested in real capital (instead of devaluing our paper money supporting a military-welfare state) would make useful employments for the 20 million without work. Imagine 20 million people paying taxes instead of collecting them. Any idea how many working people it takes to support one without work? I don’t but it must be ten or more.
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Definitely, the unemployment rate is going to remain very high.
It sure will until Obama figures out the simple solution.
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