Precarity - A choice that needs changing

Photo by Sid Suratia on Unsplash

Exsanguinate - to drain of blood; make bloodless; to bleed to death.

Precarity - a state of persistent insecurity with regard to employment or income.

Money is the life blood of society. It doesn’t have to be, but it is. Imagine, if you can, having little money to navigate society. Without resorting to crime, how do you feed your family? Have a place to live? Move around? Get medical attention? Have your children attend school? Have a merry Christmas?

Some places and help are accessible. In New Zealand, hospitals are free which is why Accident & Emergency clinics are often full of people needing GP level care. Schools are free but everything that surrounds them – clothes/uniform, shoes, food, books, activities – is not.

To be an engaged member of society you must have access to a regular stream of money.

Precarity is a state of mind – the state of being, or feeling, precarious. That’s important. It’s a fear. A fear of losing what you have, no matter how little. The fear of being economically exsanguinated.

A precarious society is where the majority of citizens are worried and unable to take control of their lives. They eat, clothe themselves and their children, turn on the heat in winter at the behest of policy-makers wielding financial power.

This situation keeps the population precarious – docile, to use a Foucauldian term. Workers feel precarious about losing their jobs. Those needing government assistance (the sick, unemployed, disabled and old) feel precarious about benefit cuts or not keeping up with inflation.

Precarity is a necessary feature of capitalism, a choice. Our society, as it currently operates, needs a pool of unemployed people made desperate for work/money. This keeps wages low, workers keen and unions membership low. Those in power and those who benefit from the status quo have been polishing this particular turd since the 1960s. Then, full employment meant everyone who wanted to work had a job (acknowledging that the 1960s was a sexist’s paradise). In today’s economic language, full employment has been dumped in favour of maximum level of sustainable employment - the maximum number of people employed to keep inflation in check so profits are not impacted for the wealthy.

For a minute, imagine a society with a universal basic income sufficient for every citizen to live with dignity. To attract workers, businesses would have to pay more than this dignified income and this prospect makes capitalists reel. They can’t scare citizens into shitty jobs for minimum wages. They would have to treat people well – for capitalists, this is a dystopian thought. When proposed, they saturate the media with dire warnings of bankruptcy, communism and the end of society as “they” know it.

Remember this Australian arsehole?

“We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy.”

That “pain” he is talking about is most evident in the form of hungry children. Don’t be surprised, business has been calling for moves like this for years, albeit the employ subtler tactics. Australian businessmen lobbied the government in the 60s to increase unemployment so they could have a more compliant workforce. Arseholes - then and now.

It is happening right now in New Zealand.

When Christopher Luxon, New Zealand’s soon to be Prime Minister said, “there are jobs available in every shop front window in the country”, he is either ignorant or a fool – that’s not how the capitalist system works. There can never be jobs for everyone under the current system - fact.

What Luxon is saying to the unemployed, precarious workers and possibly the sick and disabled, “be fearful, we’re coming for your money you bottomfeeders.” We want everyone except the wealthy (the owners of the means of production for those daring enough to have a Marxian thought) to be precarious – to be worried and feel the pain!

Is there another way?

Absolutely. Do some research into a universal basic income. It starts by reducing/moving precarity from society.

PS

In a tragic twist, a 1970s American experiment into Universal Basic Income may have doomed it in the USA.

“There have been basic income experiments in the U.S. in the seventies as well, where researchers found that the divorce rate went up by fifty percent. At that point, conservatives became fiercely anti-UBI, because it would make women too independent. Ten years later, other researchers discovered that a statistical mistake had been made. In reality, the divorce rate did not go up.” HuffPost