This post isn’t about municipal governance, but hey, I’m on vacation.
The other night I was listening to a popular political podcast. The host and his guest are both known for being thoughtful and intelligent, and identified themselves as being an “elder millennial” and an “ancient GenZ” (40 and 28 respectively), and yet they both repeated a perspective that I knew was ingrained in older generations but that I thought was less common among younger people. I’ll summarize it briefly as a transcript (though this is not exactly what they said):
Host: But what happens if AI really does replace low-skilled jobs? Is there a solution for that?
Guest: Well, the go-to solution is a Universal Basic Income, which isn’t great. People who like UBI say we should just work less, but you can’t take away jobs because work gives people their sense of meaning.
Host: Yeah, we’re probably pretty close to having self-driving trucks, but mailing a cheque to out-of-work truckers won’t give them back their dignity.
This drives me crazy. I used to hear this argument a lot, and thought that it was a perspective driven by the ingrained work ethic of generations who had lived in economies in which working harder yielded more reward. I grew up hearing my parents and grandparents declare that as a maxim, and it had largely worked for them; but that’s clearly not the case anymore, if it ever really had been. During a brief window in the post-war West, that had been the case for a large portion of the population. Now the hardest-working people often get minimum wage with little hope of advancement (or no wage at all), while we’ve just set new records for income inequality.
I get what people mean when they associate purpose and dignity with a job; it’s tremendously satisfying to be self-sufficient, and can feel crushing to depend on income supports. But let’s be clear: there are plenty of people who don’t work and yet have no lack of dignity; and plenty of jobs that steal what little dignity people have. This sense of dignity isn’t about having a job, it’s about having agency and independence.
Who Has Dignity?
Over half of all Brightonians are over 50, and most of those people are retired. They do not lack dignity or purpose simply on account of their employment status. Sure, plenty of folks have a hard time retiring, particularly men; when you’ve oriented your life around a job for 50+ years, it can be difficult to find new things to fill your time. But I think that a major component in retired people feeling like they have no purpose is rooted in the belief that purpose comes from work, and this accounts for much of the large disparity between retired men and retired women, since women are less culturally conditioned to find their self-worth in their careers in the first place.
The idea of tying worth to work is also troubling when it comes to disability. Is a disabled person less dignified if they are inherently unable to work? Do they have less purpose or value? Culturally, and it pains me to say this, yes: we treat people with disabilities with less dignity and respect than we do others. This is shameful, but true. And we do it on a systemic scale as well as an individual scale: the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, set a timeline of 20 years for all facilities and services in Ontario to be fully accessible, and 20 years later we’re nowhere near that goal. We recognize that people with disabilities should not be treated differently, should not require accommodation just to access institutions and businesses and public spaces, should have their needs built-in to the built and policy environments…and yet we don’t put our money where our mouths are. And the rate of government support for people with disabilities is shamefully low: a disabled person in Ontario is expected to live on a maximum of $1,408/month in 2025, for all expenses. Meanwhile, the average rent in Ontario is almost $2,000/month. If we truly believe that people with disabilities should have the same dignity as everyone else, why do we keep them living in poverty? I think this too is tied up in the myth that dignity comes from work, or income: I think we feel that someone who is not able to provide for themselves should not have anything of value.
This has been extremely apparent lately in relation to the rise of visible homelessness in Northumberland, particularly in Cobourg, where the Town of Cobourg has created and leveraged by-laws to undermine shelter services and attempt to drive people experiencing homelessness out of town. Mayor Cleveland went so far as to promise to pay the bus fare of any homeless person willing to leave town, and threatened to somehow pack the homeless residents of Cobourg onto a bus and drive them to Brighton so we can see how we like having homeless people in our town. (We do have neighbours experiencing homelessness here, though not in the same numbers as in Cobourg.) The arguments that continue to be made for this horrendous treatment of the most vulnerable people in our society include moralizing arguments against giving anything to people who can’t or won’t take care of themselves as we think they should. Certainly, these people are granted zero dignity — but it’s not their employment status that causes their undignified state, it’s our attitudes. We can choose right now to start treating them with dignity, but we do not.
Meanwhile, consider a hypothetical heir to a fortune. It’s not hard to imagine; we have endless books and tv series and movies about people who come from “old money” and need to find ways to fill their time because they’ve never had a job. Sure, we scoff at these characters who’ve “never worked a day in their lives”, but we certainly don’t treat them the way that we treat people experiencing homelessness or disability. And I would guess that they don’t struggle with the same sense of purposelessness that a newly retired person does. Clearly dignity and purpose are not job-dependent.
Whose Job is Dignified?
When we first moved to Brighton, I spent some time unemployed. It was a very challenging time, psychologically: I definitely experienced the stress of insecurity as well as an existential sense of purposelessness. So much of my identity had been wrapped up in my former career in academia, and six months of unemployment stripped all of that away.
It was a tremendous relief when I was first hired at a factory in Belleville. It was massively different from my previous job, so I still struggled with the change in direction, but it helped a lot with the financial insecurity I had experienced. But it didn’t take long before I began to struggle with the work itself: not that it was difficult work, but that it was work that undermined human dignity in many respects.
I want to be clear that the conditions at this factory were good, as far as factory work goes. It was clean and safe, the equipment was well-maintained, and the management was for the most part supportive and constructive. I also learned that it was one of the best factories around: many of my coworkers compared this workplace to other factories they’d worked at, where work was much more difficult and dangerous for much, much lower wages. As far as factory work goes, it seems I’d hit the jackpot.
But sleep deprivation is a helluva thing, and switching back and forth between shifts made my life schedule (not just my sleep schedule) challenging to manage; work had to be my top priority at all times, and any time that I wasn’t at work felt like recovering from work or preparing to work. Plant politics between management and the union often made the environment feel hostile, making every day at work into a social tightrope. I developed plantar fasciitis in my feet from standing on concrete floors, which limited my ability to even walk in my off time. And while the work wasn’t difficult, that was part of the challenge: I often spent a whole night standing in one place folding boxes, next to a machine that folded boxes, knowing that as soon as the plant installed a new machine to fold boxes my job would change (or maybe disappear). It was hard to feel fully human doing a robot’s job at 2am, but then I also felt insecure at the idea that this dehumanizing job was my lifeline, and it might just disappear.
Again, this was a “good job” by almost every metric, and yet it was and is inherently dehumanizing. A great many jobs make people work much harder in more dangerous or undignified labour for much less pay. Where’s the dignity that we are supposed to get from that work? It doesn’t come from the work itself, it comes from what the work provides: enough money to not be in poverty, and the agency to spend it how we choose. But how much of our dignity must we sacrifice through dehumanizing jobs, just to get the dignity and purpose of that income?
Income Without Work/Work Without Income
A Universal Basic Income can come in a lot of different forms, but the general idea is that we give absolutely everyone a basic amount of money, sufficient to live on, and we don’t claw it back as soon as they make any other money (as we currently do with Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program). So if it costs $25,000/year for basic necessities in an area, then everyone in that area is given $25k/year, so nobody is below the poverty line. If people want to add income to that through jobs, they can, and they’ll pay taxes as normal. One version is called a “reverse income tax”, so that at tax time anyone whose income is below the threshold gets a top-up to that minimum income; in another version, everyone gets the same amount no matter what, and higher tax rates are adjusted to bring back the money from those who really didn’t need it. There are other versions in between, but the important part is that it ensures that everyone has enough money to live on, and nobody has to prove that they’re destitute on a regular basis in order to qualify for it.
The most common argument against a basic income program is that people won’t work if they don’t have to. Some folks combine this with the argument above, linking jobs to purpose and dignity, suggesting that we’d all become nihilistic couch potatoes if we had a basic income. We’d quickly lose our will to live, if we didn’t have that night shift at the factory to give us dignity. Right?
But if having enough money to live stopped people from wanting to work, why does it seem that those who have the most money are so often the ones who strive so hard to earn even more?
And how do we account for all of the people–mostly women–who work hard every day of their lives for no pay at all? Caring for children and parents and spouses is work, and if it were paid work it would amount to almost a TRILLION dollars per year in Canada alone. Many of these people don’t have a “job”, but they work as hard as anyone; ask them how they feel about having no purpose in life.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of any community, and Brighton is no exception. These are people from across the social spectrum: largely retired, as they tend to have more time than others, but also people with jobs and careers and families and other commitments. They dedicate some of their time and effort on a regular basis to do things just because they are good things to do, expressing their values and supporting their neighbours. People who work for free like this experience so many benefits that psychologists recommend giving prescriptions of volunteering to mental health patients.
Decoupling Labour from Value
When economists measure value, they look at many different metrics and ratios to spot efficiencies or inefficiencies in the economy. It’s not just about how much we produce, but how much it cost to produce it, in materials and labour and energy and time. More recently, economists have been looking at ratios of greenhouse gas emissions to Gross Domestic Product, and have been excited to find economies where these have “decoupled”: it’s good news that we can produce more goods and services while at the same time producing less greenhouse gases.
But that’s not the only decoupling that’s happening. Automation and AI are decoupling production from labour, too, as it’s now possible to produce more goods and services with fewer human workers. This is also excellent news! It means we can get all of the boxes folded, without anyone having to stand there through the night on aching feet, questioning their value. But to those workers whose jobs are being replaced by robots, it’s scary–because we can’t get around this idea that our worth as people is tied to our labour, or our job.
Economists tend to note that we’ll find other ways to work: new technologies create new jobs, not just eliminating old ones. But what if we just accepted working less as the good news it really is? What if we found a way to make sure that nobody was in poverty because there was less work to do? Would people truly feel less purpose and dignity in life, or would they simply have more time to care for their loved ones, volunteer, and do other things that make humans happy?
I bet we’d have more art, and garden-fresh vegetables, and home-made bread, and home-cooked meals. I bet we’d be better educated, more well-read, and more thoughtful. And I bet we’d have more social connections, more political engagement, and more harmony with our natural environment. All because we had more time, and weren’t kept in poverty. And I bet most of us would still have jobs, because we don’t work just to prove our worth to society or put food on the table, we make things because we’re human.
If we can recognize that dignity and productivity are both inherent to just existing as a human, and stop tying both of them to jobs, we’ll be happier and more productive, because we’ll be producing things we care about rather than just whatever we can get paid for.
Next week I’m off to the AMO conference, so you’ll get a post or two about that soon!