The Great Recession taught industries that you ‘could’ still do business with fewer permanent heads on the payroll; gaps are filled in by former employees brought back as contractors for less $ than before and with no benefits. Zero trickle down from that little profit-maximizing deal.
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People don’t take UBI seriously because they recognize that it’s not a realistic possibility right now. It’s not a realistic possibility because there’s no incentive for capital to grant such a concession. After all, it’s not like workers have just now started to become unnecessary - why do you think the prison industry has one of the highest growth rates, even during recession? Between prison, security, and social atomization, Capital seems to have the surplus population pretty well handled. Why would they implement UBI to solve a problem they don’t have?
We need to become the problem. Truckers may lose their value to Capital as couriers, but what if those unemployed truckers become, say, highwaymen, using their knowledge and connections within the industry to hijack merchandise and sabotage automated equipment? They would have a new valuable service to offer Capital: staying out of the way.
That’s the kind of service that UBI buys: the willingness to allow Capital to continue its work in peace. It’s how all previous labor gains were made. But Capital isn’t going to pay for that if the underclass is already peaceful.
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You have a milkshake. I have a straw.
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Truck drivers, don’t worry! Trump has your back!
(Wait, did I say truck drivers? I meant CEOs of transport companies. As per usual, he professes to love the working class while pushing an agenda that only benefits the ruling class. See also: his obsession with coal mining.)
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Uhhh…what?
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Do not
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Capital substitutes for labour at the margin.
I believe the most common job in North America for men is driving a truck. So with self driving cars and trucks eventually coming, there go millions more jobs.
Though among the fastest growing jobs now is ‘elder care nurse’.
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$40k/year is not so impressive when you’re working 80-100 hours a week for it.
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Even if there were, how many of the truckers do you think could afford to pursue a case against their employers?
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That picture still baffles me.
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Not many, which is why i think the article mentions that some of the successful ones were initiated on behalf of the drivers through groups or unions
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It’s much easier to think in centuries when you’re ruled by an imperials dynasty. People care about their own grandchildren.
There are a few large corporations in the world that are still controlled by families. Some are hundreds of years old and still family-owned more than 10 generations later. They think and operate differently than their competitors, because their owners really do care about the state of the company 10, 20, 50, or 100 years down the road. They’re still far from perfect, and I certainly don’t advocate hereditary monarchy. But I think we can mostly agree, even in the US, that we’ve done our best work when we were able to come together explicitly to try to build a better world for our descendants.
Is there any way we can recapture that spirit in public life? Because like a couple of commenters pointed out, in 10-30 years this will be a moot point, and tens of millions of people will be perpetually unemployed because all their marketable skills will have been automated away. They way society is set up now, that leads to a horrible hellish dystopia. But there are alternative visions out there, if we actually can put in the effort to make them happen.
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Working in America is more like autonomous feudalism.
You sharecrop a lifestyle instead of a field of cabbage.
To get that money you rent yourself out (even a rental truck has more rights than you) to interests who the government has built the table for and handed the deck of cards to. None of the profit is yours, you are just a cost of operation.
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Cheaper than if they owned them outright.
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Taking that concept a bit further - as Mark Blyth (the political economist who called both Brexit & Trump) says “I tell my hedge fund friends that in the long run The Hamptons are not a defensible position” it is hard to defend low lying beaches when they come for you.
If you are going to have a permanent and growing underclass, combined with easy access to guns - Capital will have to invest in living in armed and gated communities. (Again Mark Blyth - on the reason they had to do the Wall St. bailout in 2008 - of the 330 million Americans, 150 million work and collect regular paycheques, there are also 56 million handguns in the US, and 70% of US citizens live from paycheck to paycheck, so when the Banks close and the ATMs don’t work and people can’t buy groceries, put gas into their cars etc… how long before people start using those guns’)
Since WWII which was followed by a policy of full employment - which led to a 30 year boom but by the 70s led to inflation and strikes (because as Michael Kalecki predicted in his 1947 critique of Keynes book, with full employment, wages rise across the board, leading to inflation- and labour can move from job to job so Capital no longer has the whip hand - it will fund a market revolution) So you get Reagan and Thatcher and the Patco strike, and Free trade (and Union decline) and focus on inflation for 30 years (great for Capital, horrible for the middle class)
Capital will not take UBI seriously unless it is forced to, but many governments are talking about it. It is not necessarily a left wing policy - Milton Friedman was in favour. (so rather than spending increases for prisons and various welfare programs - give everyone a UBI which can be taxed back at the higher incomes and while it has only been tried once in the 1970s in Manitoba - the indications were, lower crime rate, better health and young people were more likely to complete or go into higher education) The Province of Ontario is planning a trial UBI program in the near future. Also Silicon Valley types like Musk are seriously talking about UBI as well.
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Nor is it when a large portion of it is going to pay for the (company’s) truck.
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We are at that stage now. Median wages can’t afford shelter, education, or healthcare without government assistance. This false prosperity makes the public complacent. The problem is the government assistance we employ is designed to funnel wealth upwards, making wealth disparity even greater thus making even more reliant on the government.
It’s a precarious balance that could crash at any time, and if it does and the general public finds out what they are really worth pitchforks will be drawn,
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I have no idea if that is horribly pessimistic, totally brilliant, or an observation I’ve just never encountered before but that is banal other circles.
I do wonder though, at what level of available robotics do the unemployed masses with guns cease to be a threat to those with enough robot servants? And will the wealthy few be separated from them by high enough walls, and enough generations, to not care about their suffering even to the point of genocide?
It’s probably a lease, where ownership isn’t transferred until the whole lease is paid. The company is basically loaning the money to the driver and talking a security interest in the truck.
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What if I told you we already live in that world? The turmoil we’re seeing is not due to the sudden creation of these walls, it’s that the walls move, and they have finally reached you and me. We used to benefit from the walls but are now finding ourselves on the outside. The transition is confusing and scary.
There is a possible future in which we are utterly subordinated to fully automated Capital, with no hope of influencing the world or sharing in its wealth. But we’re not there yet. Automation still has many weaknesses, the powerful have many vulnerabilities and contradictions. That’s why the present moment is so important. We need to organize resistance and build a future for ourselves now, because if we don’t we’ll inherit someone else’s future.
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