[Translated article by Peter Decker]
Unemployment is “social problem No. 1," the fight against it the "highest priority." All relevant points of view are so united that they created an "alliance for work." Less clear is who actually has the problem of unemployment and wherein it lies.
Those would first of all be the unemployed persons. They have a problem. However, this does not consist in the fact that they do not work – others get along perfectly well with sweet idleness. Real unemployed persons do not have money, and one needs that to live in the free-market economy. Their problem is poverty -- and really only they have that. Their life and living expenses are not the concern of this economy. Because even if they have "work," it is organized not for their living expenses but for the profit of the entrepreneurs, and they are prevented from the work necessary for them as soon as it is no longer useful for profit.
There is secondly "business." Their admission of the "problem of unemployment" is an open lie that serves the ideology that their profit making is a public service. Business actually does not suffer from unemployment, but creates it by its rationalizations. The masses that it throws on the street do not disturb business, but are useful to it because a high number of job applicants presses down the wages of those who are employed. Nevertheless, the employers also participate in the "alliance for work" because the political wish for more jobs gives them an opportunity to get acknowledgement for the necessary conditions under which more jobs could be made available: labor must be available for cheaper, then it would surely be more profitable and possibly its use even increased. Wage levels, benefits, work time regulations, and protection against dismissal -- everything that the workers have of their work, all the regulations which were once put through for their protection are accused of being employment barriers which must be eliminated if there is to be “more work.”
This interests the third party in the game, the state. Because, first of all, its tax office suffers if increasing parts of the population earn no money, pay no taxes and, instead of depositing contributions into the social insurance system, apply for support. Secondly, politicians know about the abstract danger of the "social explosive;" a mass army of unemployed persons who already once undermined “the stability of democracy” and “the social peace.”
The "social problem No. 1" -- the problem that creates the poverty of the unemployed persons in the society -- has only one policy. However, their fight against this "evil cancer" turns out to be just as complicated as it is unsuccessful, because the idea that it could itself organize the work that the “society lacks” points to itself. For the organization of work the liberal state has authorized the owners of the means of production. It is weak there and wants to be. Because it also stands for the point of view that only work that makes more money than the wages that it costs is of value, is worth being done. Finally, the state also lives from the surplus above living costs that is taken out of profitably used work – indifferent to whether this surplus is taken as a tax from the gross wages or from profits. The task to make work profitable and to use only profitable work is left to the entrepreneurs; however, they make the paid work efficient for their profit by the fact that they make the work cheap for themselves: They use the people they pay more effectively and more intensely, saving thereby on other workers and their wages and dismissing the redundant. Governments recognize unemployment as an unwanted but inevitable side effect of the national economic success on which they depend. Therefore, their fight against the double problem that their form of success entails always knows the same means for a remedy: More of the growth that creates the unemployed persons! Thus the problem not only remains, but increases with the growth of capital: The more unemployed persons running around, the louder the call for growth; the larger the poverty of the unemployed persons, the more clearly the economic diagnosis that the country must lack profits and opportunities for profits.
Modern scientists hold themselves responsible for big questions and issues. They prove the correctness of their models and the usefulness of their ideas – in response to calls for social relevance -- by taking care of the current "problem of unemployment." Their common achievement consists in interpreting this false social question, in which totally opposite parties with opposing interests face one another, as a genuine suffering of the society and a danger to it. They try to help solve the problem with the interesting discovery that there would not have to be the whole problem if ossified thinking did not prevail everywhere, which they try to pry open.
having given up the concept of its relatively successful "management," recognize in the pure existence of such a problem an offence against the laws of the economy. If the law of supply and demand was respected in the labor market and the free play of market forces allowed, a separation between people willing to work and the demand for them could not appear at all. The "offer deficit" of the many unemployed persons whose work nobody wants to buy is, for the economists, proof of the fact that their price is too high! And the injustice that the society commits against them consists of withholding from them a fundamental right on which the free-market economy is based: the right to make their offer at an attractive price. If the free market participants would be free enough to lower the price of their work until either a buyer is found or the “marginal utility” at which they could make their work available, then the entire trouble would no longer be worthwhile any more. Then they would have by definition all that they want -- and those who then still have no work, just do not want it. The fact that poverty with and without work is their solution to the unemployed person problem does not bother the economists at all: The market gives its chances to everyone and portions out its offers at the fair -- corresponding to real market conditions -- price. They return to the plaintiff the reproach that in the case of unemployment their fine free-market economy does not produce the desired results: They and/or their unionized representatives have to answer for the injustice of the exclusion that the unemployed persons suffer. Their price cartel, an incomprehensibly legal monopoly, destroys chances for jobs because it prevents the price of labor from sinking to the "clearing level of the market". Twisted entitlement thinking by the workers and the unemployed wage earners is responsible for the exclusion of the unemployed persons. Economists advise you to rethink.
also express themselves critically, if not directly against the unemployed persons; therefore, they are considered “social”. They do not want to take part in the wage-hostile idealism of an all-regulating market and also do not believe that there would be enough paid work for all with the correct price.
"Full employment will never return. 85 per cent unemployment in Germany is due to structural problems. Even if the economy boomed, there would if necessary be 15% who are today without jobs to include into the conventional employment statistics.” (SZ. 12./13.12.98)
As scientists, they concern themselves with the reasons for unemployment; if the reader wants to know the reasons, characterized as "structural," he finds, however, the same story. The reader should be content with the information that necessary causes are present, but they are immovable and nothing can be done against them. Think constructively! is the slogan of practically oriented policy advisors who do not want to let themselves base the problem that millions are excluded from working life and acquisition. Because a "return to full employment" cannot be expected anyway, more people can receive work and income only if the work is stretched out on a shoestring and shoestring incomes are distributed to everybody. More "gainful employment" should be made possible by reducing aconsumption. We must get accustomed to "flexible work lives" with partially independent and partially dependent employment. Education phases without acquisition could take turns with a variety of simultaneous part time jobs; job sharing and sabbaticals could free jobs for others, etc. The appeal of these suggestions, which is why they come from the science department of the Nuernberger Federal Institution for Work, consists in leveling the difference between employment and unemployment and in dissolving the contrast of unemployment with the definition, valid up till now, of employment as well.
Today's labor market planners ask themselves this: why what has been happening for a long time does not happen much faster, and discover the barrier to the overdue reform of the occupational world in the social-state thinking of the politicians. The "Bismarck" welfare state, once invented in order to make the misery of the wage laborers sustainable, makes demands on the funds that are established for the foreseeable emergencies in the wage laborers’ existence by payments of dues from the wage dependent. Those who receive pensions, unemployment pay and medical insurance are required to, first, make deposits, second, have a long working life, and third, pay enough into the three funds. The funds, for their part, can redeem their promises only if enough people deposit into them and the many unemployed persons do not tilt the relationship between deposits and support for the insured. Today, on the one hand, fewer people deposit into it over the course of a full busy work life, so the system fails to provide the expected service. On the other hand, they are expensive nevertheless, increasing the costs of wage laborers for the entrepreneurs, preventing employment. In the end, job seekers cannot afford the wonderful forms of free employment if social insurance is no longer connected with them. The intellectuals advocating labor market reform think that work, which means poverty, should be required only of people who do not stand at the end of their working lives completely un-provided for. They seek ways to organize the loss of wages that can nevertheless guarantee the required safeguards. But they want to separate the social insurance system from wage incomes. Only then can the citizens get a wage that does not require that they ask themselves whether it can support them immediately or not. The discovery that the total of the wage earners’ money is no longer enough to support the survival of the class, including old persons, sick people and the unemployed, can also be treated constructively. Then, of course, one searches for pecuniary resources from which -- if no longer from wages -- the means for the welfare services could be raised. And because it is impossible to saddle the expenses of the living costs of the working class on business, which is supposed to create more jobs, the consumption of the wage-working masses presents itself to the reformers as a tax source to be increasingly tapped.
cannot be expected to offer the conventional advice. They look more deeply. What the labor market experts suggest as a solution, they hold as part of the problem: The distribution of scarce work at the cost of its income – it already exists! A lot of “precarious” jobs are nothing but a "rearrangement of unemployment" and prove that full employment is irreparably past. The attempt to return to full employment must fail. Such a thing is simply not possible any more:
"…two per cent unemployment, normal work, social identity and security qua job: That is history. But the politicians do not have the courage to express the bitter truth about the end of full employment. In the whole world the number of the so-called `continuously temporarily employed’ persons grows ... " (Ulrich Beck, SP interview, 20/21.March 99)
"…we cannot assume we can extend the work society into the future. In all European states we have to rearrange unemployment. In Germany it is a third, in England half, no more is the normal employer-employee relationship secure." (Beck, taz interview, 13.06.1997).
As scientists they are not embarrassed to investigate causes. The sociologists also know about a necessity, a subject that produces it and one that is affected by it. Of course, there are no unemployed persons who are affected by poverty, and no entrepreneurs who cause them; on the contrary, "we all!" play both roles. The collective subject “humans” is both author and victim of a development that is helplessly brought about. "It is important to recognize that the development of the productive forces is so large that we can produce more goods and services with very many fewer workers." "Humans (!) replace themselves (!) by intelligent technologies." (Beck, sp interview) Beautiful stupidity, "humans." Only he invents "technologies" that take work from him and either suffers "precarious employer-employee relationships" or is completely without a source of income. His beautiful productive forces increase the wealth and shrink the expenditure of work for it with the interesting result that "humans" are thereby much poorer. This dialectic, which sociologists swear is at the same time terrible and inevitable progress, proves only that there is no collective subject "we" in whose name they speak: "society" does not distribute work among its members, "society" does not speed up the productivity of their work. If it was so, if "society" was the subject of this progress, then it could easily stop the increase of productivity with its unwanted consequences. There would certainly not be such consequences in such a case: The decrease of the necessary work would result in general wealth and growing leisure instead of increasing poverty. However, sociologists insist on interpreting this society of hostile interests as a collective and the conflict between those who use the work to make profit and those who must live from the sale of their work as a fairy tale that contradicts a uniform "we": The "work society" destroys its own bases and endangers its existence.
Again, differently: Sociologists designate the economy, in which capital and wage labor face opposite each other, as a "work society," and see it characterized by the nonspecific quality that in it people work. As if every other society -- feudal, socialist or otherwise – would not perish within days if it stopped working. The coined phrase, which is a whole theory, maintains that the work necessary in every society is the special fulcrum and pivot of the society that determines its organization, the position of the people in it and its laws and customs. Taken literally, nothing in this picture is correct: The whole society has never worked (that would be irrational), work was never a reason and source for participation in social wealth, "through work." It so happens that the rich really do not work but decide on whether others work, and then only to the degree that it enriches the owners of the means of production. The whole social wealth belongs to them and if they pay off a part of it as wages, then what the workers can buy from their wages is always considered as their fair share.
But to whom does one say this? It does not help to inform sociologists about the functioning of the economy; it does not interest them. They have decided to ignore the real functioning way of the economy because they see it as having another, higher function, which they see failing now. Only because they want to certify its end in their review of better times, they have the idea that capitalism, for which they had in earlier times different names and other structural principles, should now be designated as the “work society.” And only because of their idea of a higher function, the rise of an unemployment rate to approximately 5% to 10% of those who are dependent on wage labor – while 90% are still used – is called the “end of the work society." It is all the same to them whether the real function of work -- to create capitalistic wealth -- is won by successful rationalization or many millions more are lost to unemployment -- they know only their higher purpose of work and consider it endangered.
"Work was the main integrator of society" (Heinz Bude, discussion about some perspectives of the work society, taz v. 8.7.97),
"work has for 200 years served as the cohesive of the society" (sp article),
work "secured co-operation in the individualized society" and "made possible society, democracy and liberty" (Beck).
The higher function of work for whose sake they ignore the real function is always the same product of the art of sociological abstraction: Work is appointed a society-forming principle: It creates, according to this idea, products, not wages and profit – anyhow, not really -- but no more and no less than their existence did not structure the society, i.e. it holds the society and its members together with the stake. In their system thinking, sociologists do not want to know at all what is present in each case for a system and in what its purpose lies; as the secret principle of every society they always discover the same thing, i.e. the fact that it is a system and always has one and the same purpose: Self-preservation. Here the ordinary people believe that entrepreneurs work for the maximization of their profit and workers for their wages, these uncritical parasites of "objective necessities" know that the participants thereby unconsciously do something else which is much more fundamental: They manage a functioning of the society and reproduce its existence.
The “loss of meaning" which they certify to the "gainful employment paradigm" expresses the concern that wage labor could lose their view of a social-formative function. In this respect, the scientific early warners of the system stability of the state fear a "social explosive" is used and only used, of course. The sociologists also recognize the damage, neglect and poverty of individuals as a problem in only one respect: The bums could make problems for the society and endanger its stability. On the other hand, they are only analysts and not propagandists. They know the production of stability by definition is an achievement of their subject, society. It is the process of integration of its members -- and if this integration is ever more poorly ensured by gainful employment, then a new securing social cohesive grows spontaneously from the life of the society: New values and orientations form spontaneously if people cannot orientate themselves by work and wages any more.
The guardians of the automatic social cohesion become critics of policy because they fear the readiness to adapt to the requirements of a new "mode of integration." Ulrich Beck explains that the politicians with their "publicly celebrated faith in the recovery of full employment" (The Brave New World of Work, Frankfurt/New York 1999, p. 93) endanger the society. Because they do not have the courage to move away from this unattainable goal, they create hopeless "cheap jobs" a la "job miracle America," which can not be the "cohesive" that it was in the good old occupational world. Without consideration credibility and dangerous effects, politicians promote an "imperialism of the work world," which attempts to shape all social spheres according to its values and wants to define the self-respect and life perspectives of people – and which, nevertheless, no longer corresponds to reality. The values become obsolete and the orientations of professional life cause frustration, leads to an averting of the disappointed citizens of the society -- and all this only because the politicians do not change their old thinking and refuse to exchange the outdated paradigm of the central role of gainful employment for the newly developing social cohesive.
This would be so easy. If up to now the "gainful employment" provided security, a sense of life, social participation and thus stability, now, however, that there is ever less to be had, then the society itself must only declare the fact that work, participation and acknowledgment can also be granted without acquisition. "The antithesis to the work society is not the leisure society, but the activity society" (Beck), in which "activity for self-determined and meaningful goals" becomes a purpose in itself beyond acquisition. On the occasion that the "gainful employment" integrator is not to be had any more -- and only because of that -- the lovers of real integration are left to explain how little self-determination there has been up to now, nevertheless. “Eight hours of work a day and wages paid" that is not a free self-classification into the larger whole that creates real stability. Sociologists discover the massive unemployment on the whole somewhat positive, as a chance for "the recuperation of democratic competence," as an "increase of possibilities to act socially" (M. Miegel). In free "citizen work" the individual can bring himself into the society. In addition "the precariousness of the new work forms" needs only a "right to intermittent gainful employment” to become “converted into a right to freely selectable time" (Beck).
Oh, to be correct, there is still something. Precious money. As a side issue in their sociological imagination, the conscientious theoreticians somehow recognize the only real problem of unemployment: The unemployed persons do not have money. Only because of money are they without work, only because of money are they lacking work. The fact that they do not search for work without pay, does not help them any. But the promoters of the new integration recognize by citizen’s work free of acquisition that the money problem must be solved. Citizen work gives them just a "citizen’s money," or a "guaranteed basic income," which frees the citizen for self-determined commitments to the beautification of the society. No problem, such a thing only need be decided by policy. If it were only that, then policy could also immediately ensure that unemployed persons have no money problems, or that living costs are not be attached at all to profitable work, or that the economy is concerned with care and not profit. But, nevertheless, the scientists do not want to be excessively wishful: The sociologist Beck, with a multicolored mixture of idealism and realism, solves the minor problem of financing his new social cohesive:
"Who is to pay that? A source for the citizen money is for example the enormous sums that are spent in Europe in the form of unemployment and social welfare assistance, on the fact that someone does not do anything. The receiver of citizen money carries publicly important and effective citizen work out, and is to that extent not unemployed and refers for its achievement to the citizen money. This gets funded from public transfer funds, by means of the operational social sponsors, local self financings, as well as the amounts to be gained from citizen work." (Beck, S. 128/129)
If unemployment assistance and income support is what the miserable ones already get anyway, with small donations from the large-scale enterprises that have dismissed these people for cost reasons, and if municipal payments for public works are actually added, and if the citizen’s work produces then still another commodity that a buyer pays for privately, then isn’t this nevertheless an income -- or what? No wonder that the advocates of citizen work must prevent, with so much realism, a dangerous mistake:
"Citizen work may be confused in no case with the requirement, now everywhere suspended, of the person on social assistance to perform local work." (Beck, S. 129)
This had to be said. The height of this fine "guaranteed basic income" decides namely whether social idealists who spin capitalism take the floor or whether responsible social scientists make a new interpretation of the existing poverty administration, which is to free this unwanted growing state sector from the nefariousness of the asocial and the makeshift. A lot of meaningful activities, which occur to the advocates of citizen work if they make suggestions for free and self-determined activity, are also telling: Using second hand stores for those with pinched pocketbooks, consultation with do-it-yourself enthusiasts, who must tinker with their furniture themselves, etc. The technical designers of the new social cohesive know the entire amount of unsatisfied needs that can be satisfied by non-money work – namely, all those needs whose satisfaction cannot be made a pecuniary resource in capitalism: social needs. Is that the idea, that paupers may also experience themselves as adequate members of society if they take care of the income support and hardships of people without incomes, who are in this way like them, and thus protect the world of capitalistic wealth from harm?
Fortunately for their inventors, this question is never decided because nothing comes of the general introduction of non-gainful employment. No matter how wonderfully and realistically the sociological dreamers may sketch their project, the responsible politicians reject it and proclaim this brave new world of work to be "visionary." They insist on the fact that gainful employment has to remain the social standard. They infer from the thesis of the end of the work society and its attendant substitute solutions only that the science of unemployment will furnish them with blessings and survival ought to be sought after. They, however, administer capitalism. They do not want unemployment to be bearable or even made more bearable -- all steps in this direction only weaken the need to work, to which humans belong dangling in the air – whether they find buyers of their services or not.