Transcript Work & the ‘Real Economy’ What is work & its trajectory of evolution? What is Green Work? What’s a “Job”? How are jobs and work remunerated?

Work & the ‘Real Economy’
What is work & its
trajectory of
evolution?
What is Green Work?
What’s a “Job”?
How are jobs and work
remunerated?
What is Green Work?
• Cleanup?
• Efficiency?
• Blue-collar? White-collar?
• Should all work be ‘green’?
What’s the ‘Real Economy’?
• simply material production?
• Complicated by the rise of
cultural
production/consumption
• Raises questions about the
purpose of production
Industrialism: The Divided Economy
Invisible
Use-value
“Consumption”
People
Unpaid
Women
Informal
Private
Visible
Exchange-value
“Production”
Things
Paid
Men
Formal
Public
Invisible Economy (1)
Total Productive System of an Industrial Society
(layer cake with icing)
GNP-Monetized
½ of Cake
Top two layers
GNP “Private” Sector
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of
Cake
Lower two layers
All rights reserved.
2
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
Rests on
GNP “Public” Sector
Rests on
Social Cooperative
Love Economy
Rests on
Nature’s Layer
Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson
Energy & Production
• early manufacturers had to be
energy producers
• water wheels, production near rivers
and streams
• steam power: allowed
decentralization but was expensive
• industrial production: involved
millwork getting power to a range of
devices.
– pulleys & belts could consume a third of
the power
Energy & Production II
• electric power: allowed replacement of millwork
– 1900: 5% of factory power came from
electricity
• new developments:
– steam turbine, allowing bigger power plants
– Tesla: AC allowing transport of power over
distances
• From Edison to Insull: rise of central utilities, The
Grid
– key factor: load balancing; more customers,
better efficiency
• electrification of production: essential to mass
production and industrial cog-labour
The Rise of Information
• Science followed technology: Electricity: 1st
science-based development
• Herman Hollerith: punch-card tabulator: 1890
census
– allowed big businesses to process information much
quicker
– customers, finances, employees, supply chains,
inventories
• Dismantling of power generation: paralleled
the creation of departments for data
processing
• Rise of bureaucracy and white-collar work
Issues
• Automation of blue-collar work.
• Degradation & outsourcing of bluecollar work: globalization.
• Undervaluing of Resources: labourvs. resource-productivity
• ‘Automation’ of white-collar work
• De-marketization of production & the
Commons.
• A crisis of “jobs” or a Crisis of
Remuneration?
• Is Fordist-era manufacturing the
solution?
Dimensions of ‘Real’ Economic Strategy
• Focus on production for needs; devise means
to do this
• Integrate formal / informal economies: homebased production—food, energy, craft, reuse,
and community-design to support it
• Target key areas of conventional waste and
inefficiency for paid work: retrofit, renovation,
deconstruction, reuse centres, local-sustainable
food, horticulture.
• Transform conventional work on green
principles—every job and sector
• Downsize destructive & parasitic sectors:
financial, advertising/propaganda, incarceration
Dimensions of Strategy II
• Transform unionism: based on the
purpose of work and nature of wealth-community-based
• Transform business & markets:
– new drivers for regeneration (based on real
rather than financial objectives)
– new forms of stewardship
– new forms of ownership & participation
• disarm the totalitarian power of money
scarcity
• end debt-based money system, erode
speculative finance
Remuneration & Qualitative Wealth
• Sever work and income?
• Wages: tied to certain kinds of
production & markets. Public
goods not so well served by
markets.
• Economic insecurity: closely
related to environmental
destruction.