PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Are Jobs the Answer to Unemployment?
by Ruthless Criticism Thursday, Sep. 24, 2009 at 11:10 AM
ruthless_criticism@yahoo.com

Dissenting remarks on the March for Jobs at the G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh

Certainly, anyone who loses their job is facing a disaster in this world of private property where everything costs money. Their source of income for buying the things they need to live is gone. But to advocate jobs, because losing one is anything but good, is a mistake.

The fact that an employee loses both his job and his income so easily shows what a lousy means of livelihood a job is. The enrichment of the speculators fails, the managers decide they must “restructure” and bang! millions are thrown on the street. The employers who decide whether a job exists or not apply the same criteria in both cases: jobs exist as long as they promise to produce profits for them, making more money from money. To plead for jobs is to affirm this capitalist requirement, so it is absurd and contradictory to be both in favor of jobs and at the same time protest layoffs. The income of the workers is a byproduct of profit making – that is the job!

Now in the crisis the employers say – and this is completely open and public: we don’t hire because it isn’t profitable for us. Workers are a cost! Indeed: when they want labor, they want to pay as little as possible for it so that the difference between cost and profit, the interest of their business, is as large as possible. The workers are the negative variable of profit; they are service providers to be squeezed and cost factors to be badly paid – that’s the job.

In this society, people express a need for work that goes unmet. This is not because they can’t work – they can, want to and must work. They are denied the ability to make a living. The opportunity to earn an income by work is in someone else’s power, like a scarce good that lies beyond their reach. The need for work arises in capitalism because people are forced to work by the circumstance that they are prohibited from doing the work necessary for meeting their own needs; people who have no access to productive resources have no other choice than to work for the increase of other people’s wealth; so in order to receive a wage at all they have to meet the terms and conditions of the owners. This simple truth could make it clear to every worker what role he plays in the calculations of the employer – a very weak, dependent role, no doubt, but that is no reason to call for a job.

To call for jobs merely demonstrates one submissive willingness to work. It is the request: exploit us! We can serve others' interests! We can only live in this way! And the louder the call for jobs becomes, the less it is heard. The owners of the workplaces have a larger supply of labor that they do not need for the profitability of their investments; they can make profits with much less staff than before.

Yes, there are millions of unemployed suffering deprivation, with no income, living in poverty and sinking ever deeper into poverty. But jobs aren’t what they really need – every sensible person is happy when work and toil are over. Their distress is not the result of any overall social poverty, a shortage of products or a lack of productive resources. It’s just the opposite: there’s an abundance of food, housing, all the useful things that are needed for a decent life. Nobody needs work. It’s an absurdity to say: our society lacks work. Right when it is announced that not so many workers are needed! What is missing is not the useful things and the need for them, but the prospect of profit. For workers in capitalism, the blessing that less and less labor is needed to produce the necessary and desired goods is a curse: the more the material sources of wealth advances, the more miserably they live.

Anyone who takes this seriously will not beg for jobs. They would do better to insist on their antagonism to an economy where they always have to be anxious whether they can even earn their bread tomorrow.

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