What is work?
Some investigations into where the definition of the job comes from, and different view on the universal basic income.
Note to readers: I still have about 3 or 4 more parts for the politicizing climate doomism series, but am putting those on hold to write about other topics for a while.
Grace Blakeley's recent book Vulture Capitalism describes in detail how monopolistic corporations plan the functioning of the economy, either internally or by shaping the state to its interests. The overall goal of the book is to show how every part of the economic system is a function of decision making from concentrated capital. It gives about as good of an overview as anyone could for how global capitalism currently operates.
There are, however, a few arguments in Blakeley's book that I disagree with. One is that I think the Universal Basic Income (UBI) is misunderstood. Blakeley writes:
We must also ensure that workers have the right to refuse work. No worker should be forced to take a poorly paid, dangerous job simply because they have to survive. Some argue this is a case for a universal basic income (UBI), but most UBIs are proposed at a level that would not allow workers to survive without work. And handing out cash does little to democratize the economy and could instead reinforce neoliberal individualism and consumerism.
A far better proposal would be to de-commodify everything people need to survive by providing a program of universal basic services, whereby all essential services like health care, education (including higher education), social care, and even food, housing, and transport are provided for free or at subsidized prices. And ensuring that these services are governed democratically would also help build social solidarity at the local level—something that a UBI would be unlikely to achieve.
I want to go through Blakeley’s reasoning here and argue that it’s inconsistent. First I will look at some historical cases of how work has been defined under capitalism; for poor people, women, office workers, the colonized, and dissidents. Understanding this allows people to view the UBI as a tool for getting people to redefine what work is. The final point will be that a UBI should follow from Blakeley’s views of human nature as inherently creative (which I share).
How work is defined
There doesn’t seem to be a technical definition of “job” in economics. Asking my economist friends, all I could get is “getting paid money to do tasks”.
Blakeley points out that the justification for the firm comes from an economist, Ronald Coase. In his 1937 article The Nature of the Firm, he argues that the hierarchical structure in business is justified through the employee-employer relation:
Without businesses, he argued, producers would have to write new contracts every time they wanted to buy something or employ a worker, and this would be expensive and time-consuming, especially when it came to employment contracts.
The reasoning is that if we didn’t have these kinds of authoritarian structures in workplaces, then employers would have to write a contract whenever they wanted to buy something or tell an employee what to do.
But he puts quotations around the phrase “employee-employer”, because this kind of language is new and euphemistic terminology for what are ordinarily described as servants and masters. This servant-master language is what is used in many of his arguments, usually following it up with “employee-employer” to make it more readable with the language of the modern age:
1) The servant must be under the duty of rendering personal services to the master or to others on behalf of the master, otherwise the contract is a contract for sale of goods or the like.
2) The master must have the right to control the servant’s work, either personally or by another servant or agent. It is this right of control or interference, of being entitled to tell the servant when to work.
This view of what’s considered to be work in the firm came to be synonymous with the justification for business. But firms could easily be seen as being run democratically. To point out something obvious, worker democracy doesn't require contracts for every issued order. Within worker democracies, it’s agreed upon that administrators are elected, and can be recalled if they don’t do their job properly. The ordinary work day would still involve some degree of telling people to carry out tasks.
What is lost on people who argue in favour of economic democracy or socialism is the very idea that you even need to do that. You do not ever need to argue in favour of democracy. Rather, you need to argue in favour of authoritarianism. This is the basic principle of anarchism, (and everyone should accept that anarchistic principle).
But it’s also interesting to observe that Ronald Coase’s problem of being deluged with contracts for every decision is basically the principle behind greenwashing today. That consumers have to do research for every single thing that they buy is a kind of tacit and impossible social contract behind greenwashing.
Let’s consider how work was defined for women. The economist Gary Becker decided Coase’s theory of the firm was appropriate for modeling family relationships. His definition of work for women was applied in the following way, according to Liberating Economics:
Gary Becker, whose work on the economics of the household revolutionized the field in the 1970s, proposed that this was the most efficient and natural arrangement because of human biology. For an efficient household in which each member contributed their comparative advantage, husbands, he argued, should specialize in earning, while wives should specialize in care work because of their biological function of reproduction.
On average, women do almost twice the amount of unpaid labour as men. The most recent data for Australia based on time use diaries indicates that women spend 4.13 hours per day on unpaid domestic and care work compared to men's 2.14 hours (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022).
Consider the indigenous people in America, in their Red Deal, which was their own variant of the Green New Deal. On the topic of green jobs, they point out:
A green economy should be born from, and center the labor and needs of, caretakers. Indigenous people, for example, are already working “green jobs,” they’re just not getting paid or enjoying the protections employment offers for land, water, and treaty defense. Caretaking is often unrecognized work that is heavily gendered, severely criminalized, and never fairly compensated. The pay gaps between carceral and military workers (mostly men), and care workers (mostly women), makes this crystal clear. The climate justice movement needs to center the labor struggle of caretakers if it is to be successful.
…
Indigenous peoples and local communities who have distinct cultural and social ties to ancestral homelands and bioregions still caretake at least a quarter of the world’s land. This includes places that are the lungs of the world, such as the Amazon rainforest, and its veins, like the Missouri River Basin—areas facing existential threats of deforestation, damming, water contamination, oil and gas development, and mining. Indigenous people protect the land, air, and water we all need to live
And so the caretakers of the world are not considered to be doing real work, but the oil executives are. What are generally considered to be green jobs under capitalism are pretty narrow in scope.
Within mainstream economists, even the most progressive economists tend to restrict green growth’s requirement for research and development to STEM fields. Clearly this is needed, but what about the pluralist economists, or people who work in African studies? (like Grace Blakeley). African studies is clearly good for the economy. It allows people to understand how it works, for one thing.
Now let's consider the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. If we define a bullshit job as “people who think their work is not making a meaningful contribution to the world”, then we can define the bullshit employment rate as (bullshit job / labour force participation rate). A survey in the UK would suggest the bullshit employment rate is around 37%.
The bullshit employment rate of course does not count people in the tech industry who think their work is making the world a better place, even though it often isn’t. Graeber’s methodology restricts these kinds of people from consideration:
I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not.
We can look inside the narrow definition of work that’s provided by capitalist and patriarchal societies and see definitions of what’s considered to be “skilled work”, and what isn’t. This shows up significantly in agriculture. In Regenesis, George Monbiot gives an example of a farmer in Britain that was able to create innovative forms of regenerative agriculture that could save the planet. The lack of formal education would put them in the “unskilled labour” bracket. On the other hand, having expertise in AI driven industrial agriculture is considered pure skill. Though we know full well that such a system is unsustainable.
In summary, work is currently defined as a servant-master relationship, unpaid labor is not defined as work, meaningless bullshit is defined to be work, and green jobs are often not considered to be work either. This is not an exhaustive list of examples.
Justification for the UBI
One of the defenses of the UBI is the evidence that suggests it would increase the chance of people working more, particularly part time work. Studies of the UBI in Alaska and Finland are used to demonstrate that the UBI increases the propensity to work. This is supposed to counteract the welfare parasite narrative that people use income to play video games all day. Such people exist (see Elon Musk), but I think they are rare.
These defenses of the UBI may be true. But implicit in this narrative is the “work” they are talking about is what capitalists have defined to be work. I reject this narrative, and argue that if human beings are inherently creative, then it would follow that the UBI can be considered as a job creator. This is based on the view that such creativity is defined as work. Grace Blakeley shares my view that human beings are inherently creative:
What differentiates us from other animals is our capacity to reimagine and re-create the world around us
So then we can argue that if human beings are inherently creative, the unconditional part of the universal basic income has the functional role of de-commodifying labour and allowing individuals to define what they consider to be work, rather than someone else defining work for them.
Now consider Blakeley’s arguments that the UBI would reinforce consumerism, individualistic neoliberalism, and not allow people to survive without work.
A UBI would not reinforce consumerism, that’s what adverts do. I think she’s likely arguing against a UBI here in which all other variables remain the same. But of course, no one should take that proposal seriously. Income needs to be reduced in the professional class to avoid ecological overshoot. This reduces consumption.
At the same time, a small income goes much further when you have free transport, free education, free child and free adult care, and expansion of public housing, electricity and internet. Under such a scenario, people would likely find it far easier to live off small incomes. This is what the Universal Basic Services (UBS) aims for.
What’s euphemistically called the “cost of living crisis” would probably be called something like the “price gouging crisis” in an honest society. Or the “austerity crisis”. This kind of phrasing can remind people that it’s political. One easy and quick solution to the price gouging crisis is to put a cap on profits for the energy and supermarket oligopolies. This would be a step towards implementing economic democracy. As Stephen Prager explains:
This is something that West Germany did to curb inflation after World War II: “the authorities established legally binding ‘maximum prices for end consumers’ and capped profit margins at 20 percent. Only after this combination of price controls and revenue caps did prices finally go down…”
So yes, people likely would be able to survive on the UBI, on the condition that we reigned in the price gouging crisis, deflated house prices, and then implemented a UBS as well.
Such an income could be used to supplement and support collective work done in worker cooperatives, which may have low or even negative profit margins. This in my view would counteract the view that the UBI reinforces the sociopathic version of individualism.
Here are some extra thoughts on why the UBI is justified. The unconditional nature of it is precisely why it’s a good thing. In Finland, it was only when housing was constructed for the homeless on unconditional terms, that they were able to sharply reduce it. That was the success of housing first. Similarly, another name for the UBI could be income first.
The UBI allows people to leave relationships in which they are controlled by financial deprivation. That’s considered to be a significant form of oppression in feminist economics.
The Job Guarantee (JG) or UBS aren't capable of getting rid of oppression within relationships. Though, personally, I am in favour of the UBI + UBS + JG + 20 hour work week. I need to make that clear for the people who think that an argument for the UBI is an argument against the UBS or the JG. Writing more about how these four proposals can work together is beyond the scope of this article.
Concluding thoughts
I want to finish off by referencing one of my favourite political essays, government in the future. It argues for a future of libertarian socialism, but also contains some comments on the hypocrisy of free market fundamentalism that Blakeley talks about. And the wastefulness of mass consumerism. This essay was written in 1970, by Noam Chomsky, and revives the enlightenment definition of work. Chomsky quotes the philosopher Wilhelm Von Humbdolt:
Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does, and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and invented skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character and exult and refine their pleasures, and so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often tend to be degraded. Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.
Endnotes
Barker, D., Bergeron, S., & Feiner, S. F. (2021). Liberating economics: Feminist perspectives on families, work, and globalization (2nd ed.). University of Michigan Press.
Blakeley, G. (2024). Vulture capitalism: Corporate crimes, backdoor bailouts and the death of freedom. Verso.
Chomsky, N. (1970, February 16). Government in the future [Speech transcript]. The Poetry Center, New York, NY. https://chomsky.info/government-in-the-future/
Chomsky, N. (2013, May 28). The kind of anarchism I believe in, and what's wrong with libertarians [Interview by M. S. Wilson]. Alternet. https://chomsky.info/20130528/
Coote, A., & Percy, A. (2020). The case for universal basic services (1st ed.). Polity.
Cumbers, A. (2020). The case for economic democracy. Polity.
Dahlgreen, W. (2015, August 13). 37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless. YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/13005-british-jobs-meaningless
Graeber, D. (n.d.). Bullshit jobs. Strike! Magazine. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Haagh, L. (2019). The case for universal basic income. Polity.
New Economics Foundation. (2010, February). 21 hours: The case for a shorter working week. https://neweconomics.org/2010/02/21-hours
People's Agreement of Cochabamba. (2010, April 24). World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia. https://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/uploads/Peoples_climate_agreement.pdf
Jason Hickel. (2024, January). The limits of basic income. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/01/the-limits-of-basic-income
Solender, A. (n.d.). Price gouging is real and we should do something about it. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/price-gouging-is-real-and-we-should-do-something-about-it
Tcherneva, P. R. (2020). The case for a job guarantee. Polity.
The Red Nation. (2021). The Red Deal: Indigenous action to save our Earth. Common Notions.
Stern, N., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2023). Climate change and growth. Industrial and Corporate Change, 32(2), 277-303. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtad008
Geide-Stevenson, D., & La Parra-Pérez, Á. (2024). Consensus among economists 2020—A sharpening of the picture. The Journal of Economic Education, 55(4), 461-478. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2024.2386328
Baker, D. (2024, October 5). Automation is Called "Productivity Growth." Dean Baker's Beat the Press. CEPR. https://cepr.net/publications/learning-from-mistakes-its-time-to-lower-interest-rates/
Monbiot, G. (2022). Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Penguin.
https://www.inverse.com/article/41324-basic-income-alaska-permanent-fund
To clarify on the Theory of the Firm, it's possible that people can interpret it in a way that justifies economic democracy.
But when researching this article, and looking through Blakeley's sources, it seems clear to me that this wasn't really a thought in the neoclassical mind. The firm became synonymous with the corporation by the 1960's, according to one of the research articles that Blakeley references.