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No Caregiver Credit on a Dead Planet

That's right, instead of joining into a global movement for guaranteed income, another group is going to send us downThe idea behind the Caregiver Credit (a US campaign) is that unpaid caregiving work, usually provided by women, must be financially compensated. Instead of argueing for a universal guaranteed livable income, they are organizing for a benefit targeted to caregivers. They argue that those who do this work should not be lumped in under a universal guaranteed livable income because that would not differentiate between those who provide very important care work and those who might, for example, just want to hang out and go surfing.

So instead of advocating for a universal income, they want a targeted income for caregivers (regardless of gender). While this seems logical there are several serious flaws with a targeted income campaign versus a universal livable income.

There are two levels of flaws with the caregiver credit campaign. There are surface problems and there are fundamental economic problems.

First, it is understandable that people would want to advocate the more politically palatable targeted benefit, because it plays to the pro-work predjudices of society (at least the society that is evidenced by the media). People want to be considered 'good' citizens, not bad or lazy because it can be very dangerous to be labelled "unproductive."

Jobism creates a stunning waste of natural and human resources.

When people demand jobs, they are really demanding money to live with health and dignity. Because Jobists romanticize work, there is a strong taboo against saying: "I don't want to work! I don't want to see my life sucked away by meaningless or harmful activities."

Jobism is the biggest barrier to the implementation of a universal guaranteed livable income.

Jobism ignores most of the work that is done on the planet -- unpaid work -- and simultanerously ignores those who do this work: women. Jobism also ignores that many people cannot take jobs to solve their poverty. They are children, or elderly, or people with disAbilities or people with health problems who make up a huge portion of the world's population.

The biggest blind spot in jobism, however, is the fact that there cannot be more jobs without more consumption.

Jobism also ignores the fact that rising productivity though automation means fewer jobs in the future not more.

"...the economic goal of any nation as of any individual, is to get the greatest results
with the least effort...It is for this reason that men use their ingenuity to develop
100,000 labour saving inventions... The progress of civilization has meant
the reduction of its employment not its increase."
Henry Hazlett, Economics in One Lesson, 1946 pg 70.

Because of this, jobists (many union leaders in the west) often support the creation or maintenance of good paying government jobs. In effect they want a guaranteed income for the few.

Jobists need to give up their belief in the job fairy and demand a guaranteed livable income for all. The creation of a GLI would actually protect wages and working conditions for necessary and essential work. Yet, in spite of this, there is an almost inscrutible loyalty to the job system.

Even 'alternative' think tanks like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Social Planning and Research Council of BC write that a progressive approach to reduce poverty would "emphasize the need for more decent-paying jobs, and would seek to build a full employment economy." (A Bad Time to Be Poor, June 2003, page 39).

Even as people reflexively demand jobs, most people don't dream of spending their lives doing soul-sucking work. They dream of more time to themselves, time to think, to do art, crafts, music, to play, to cook good food, to grow a garden, to spend time with loved ones. People dream of time-off from work, of 'free' time and the fact that people have less and less reveals just how 'un-free' the job system makes us.

"For this 'job', which everybody had congratulated me upon getting, which was
supposed to be so ennobling, which was to make a man of me, was actually
degrading, destructive, and above all useless. It was degrading because it reduced
men to the status of beasts... It was destructive because it reduced a glorious
setting to a black obscenity. And it was useless because the gold, which was
mined at such expense and human cost, was melted into bars and shipped
to Fort Knox in the United States where it was once again confined below ground...
The whole, vast, complicated operation seemed to me to be pointless...
Would we or the nation have been worse if we had stayed drunk all summer?"
Pierre Berton, The Smug Minority

Back to Objection Number One
Next: Objection Number Three

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