International Socialists

Unemployment has plagued New Zealand for the last two decades, and now levels of five or six per cent unemployment are being accepted as improvements!

Rae Sinclair explores some of the issues around both employment and joblessness, and presents some socialist explanations and solutions to the problem.

 

 

At the last protest march I was on I carried a placard which read "Blame the System, Not the Victim!" This slogan is a good one for cash-strapped organisations to use. It can be used in various situations,  protesting anything from health or welfare cuts, the rising cost of education to the inadequacies of the justice system. It even has the right number of syllables to be a useful generic chant! It is a statement people can relate to because most people feel that they have been the victim of some system at some time.

 

But for socialists this slogan is more than a cost effective, multi purpose protesting tool, it is a basic analysis of our society. The system referred to is capitalism, and most of those who participate in it are its victims. Capitalism creates many victims and in numerous cases does so in a way which makes this victim be unfairly held responsible for their position.

 

The unemployed are a classic example of this, particularly in the New Right economic climate of New Zealand. If labour is bought and sold in the market, like everything else, then using a simple supply and demand model it is easy to see how a surplus of labour to demand brings down wages. So unemployment has its advantages for employers. Unemployment not only keeps wages down, it also encourages a stable work force. People are more likely to stay in jobs with low wages and poor conditions in times of high unemployment for the obvious reason that they fear becoming jobless themselves.

 

Times of high unemployment allow employers to offer not only lower wages but also poorer conditions, to employ more part time staff and to casualise their working structures, cutting worker benefits. High unemployment also creates what Marxists call a "reserve army of labour," allowing businesses to expand without having to greatly increase their costs.

 

It is clear that a relatively high level of unemployment serves the interests of the employers, or ruling class. It is equally clear, for precisely the same reasons, that unemployment does not serve the interests of the working class. Those who are out of work are certainly not prospering and neither are those stuck in jobs with poor pay and worse conditions. It is not a huge jump in logic to consider that, since employers benefit from unemployment, then they must attempt to maintain it at a relatively high level. The current state of affairs, instigated by the Employment Contracts Act and continued in the Employment Relations Bill, allows employers huge control in determining pay rates and conditions, and thus allowing the economy to expand while unemployment levels remain static or even increase.

 

Things like overtime, penal rates and holidays, which in the past were commonplace rights, are now - if they are anything at all - privileges. This means that instead of taking on new employees to do extra work, an employer's existing workers can simply be expected to work harder. Business can expand with labour costs kept to a minimum, with the threat of unemployment compelling people to work any hours required of them.

 

I could just about - just about - live with the idea of the ruling class using their huge amount of power to control the labour market like this, if they were up front about it. If they said, "Thanks very much, unemployed, we really need you to maintain tension in the labour market. Here's the dole and keep up the good work." But they don't! Exactly the opposite is the case. They blame the unemployed person for being unemployed.

 

The unemployed are not recognised as an unavoidable and integral part of capitalism's arrangement of the labour force and society, but are instead thought of as lazy, good for nothing bludgers who could get jobs if they just got off their butts and looked for ones.

 

We've all heard the talk. The worst part about this is that it is not just employers and their mouthpieces in the media who treat the unemployed with contempt. Often it is the working class as well. Because capitalism is based around the exploitation of workers, around the theft of their surplus labour, it is vital for capitalism to develop a morality and mythology of work. If the working class were not presented at every turn with the idea that work, hard work, was morally good then it would be far easier to recognise - and tire of - exploitation.

 

Ideas that hard work is a reward in itself, that laziness is "ungodly" and suffering on earth is rewarded in "heaven" are presented to the working class at every turn to try and refute the evidence of exploitation and alienation. It follows, therefore, that anyone who does not work is immoral, or stupid. There is a huge amount of rhetoric around "the unemployed." Statistics are used to try and imply fault in the correlation between poverty, low education and unemployment. Implying that the low educated and poor are to blame for their positions ignores the fact that it is the capitalist system which creates this sort of poverty and traps people in its cycle.

 

So it seems that people have the choice to either go to work and be exploited or be unemployed and marginalised. This seems like no choice at all. I am sure many workers would agree with me that working can feel like being trapped in a giant prison with invisible bars. Life is spent at work, preparing for work or recovering from work, with very little time left in between for living a fulfilling life.

 

Work defines your identity - Joe Bloggs the plumber, Mary Smith the salesperson. Work determines your standing in the community, where you live, what sort of social life you can have and so on. What are the rewards you get from work? Some of us are lucky enough to have jobs we enjoy, where we feel that what we do is worthwhile and we enjoy the company of our colleagues, but most of us go to work in order to make enough money to maintain ourselves and spend the little bit left over on pleasures. We have no control over our workplaces, what we produce, our own labour. It can feel as if we have no control over our own lives.

 

This nasty state of affairs does not mean socialists want to see work itself abolished. Of course, in any society there will need to be labour. Socialism cannot get rid of the need to work, but it can radically change the way working is ordered and regarded within society. By changing from capitalism's aim - profit - to humanity's aim - need - socialism would immediately change the systems of production.

 

This will require workers controlling the means of this production. Where now there is capitalist individualism, teaching us to see ourselves and others as selfish, disconnected entities, collective control of the means of production will encourage collective consciousness, more akin to that of traditional hapu and iwi organisation, where each individual is regarded as a valued and integral part of a greater whole. Individual effort benefits the entire society which, in turn, benefits the individual. To achieve these sorts of goals we need to overthrow capitalism. This will not just change the nature of work. It will change the nature of not working. Unemployment is yet another symptom of the sickness called capitalism.

 

Without a market which needs a reserve army of labour, there is simply no cause for unemployment to exist. Need and fully democratic planning will determine the way that labour and distribution are organised, not the needs of a few to keep wages low. Unemployment at the moment often comes about as a result of drives for "efficiency," a process which usually means finding new ways of maximising profit. A socialist vision sees efficiency as being able to meet the needs of all people in the best possible way. Removing the parasite of profit removes both the phenomenon of unemployment and the situation which makes people feel like every year they are being forced to work harder and harder.

 

Right now this revolution seems a long way off, and we still have to go to work each day  - so what can we do now to pave the way for radical changes in society? As I have mentioned earlier, changes in the methods of production bring with them changes in attitudes, and we can work on these now. Protest and political action build solidarity between workers and the unemployed.

 

Socialists, through magazines like this, meetings, talks at protests and even at the pub, can counter the lies of the bourgeois press which places the blame for unemployment with the jobless. We can work within our unions to stop them accepting the logic of the ruling class. Workers and unemployed fight far more effectively together than apart. We need to, because, as Marx wrote all those years ago, we have "a world to win."