Chapter 2 - Work And The Social Contract
In this series, political commentator John Scully argues the Left has lost its way, focusing on banning plastic straws instead of building an American where all people can work & lead dignified lives
The social contract between labor and capital is failing. Simply put, the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else. Work no longer provides for the basic needs of working people and their families. The Left has spun off into a fragmented wilderness of innumerable policy demands, forgetting that work is the basis of a healthy society. To lead the country out of the wilderness, the Left must turn its energy to making work pay for life’s basics – food, home, health, financial security and protection from the coming AI upheaval. Success will not come without a change of attitude toward empathy and caring for all working people no matter their cultural, religious or political background. Read Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Work
At its very most basic, a human society can exist only if its members have enough wealth to eat. The daily effort to acquire this wealth is called WORK. Work is the basis of a self-sustaining society.
Capitalism’s Social Contract
In our western capitalist democracies we assume that there will be some basic sharing of society's wealth. The wealth of the entrepreneur will be shared with those who work for the entrepreneur. This sharing will be sufficient to eliminate poverty and deprivation among those who labor to fulfill the entrepreneur's production requirements. This would be a healthy social contract in an enlightened capitalist society.
What are this society’s characteristics? I see this through the lens of WORK. If I am to work for the entrepreneur, I want my work to be rewarded sufficiently that I can provide my loved ones a decent life and a relatively safe life. My side of the capitalist bargain, my WORK, should provide enough income for good food, a decent place to house those I love, education for my children, child care and affordable health care. I should also have some degree of safety from acts of God and humanity’s recurring policy stupidities.
And, let’s be clear: the vast majority of citizens want to work not just to eat but for pride of independence and self-respect.
Photo by Gerd Altman, Pixabay.com.
Capitalism’s Flaws
In America work is not enough to provide this decent life in sufficient measure for large numbers of its members. For reasons that any but the stupid or willfully blind can see, wages are not enough to keep millions of citizens from deprivation. WORK fails to cover even the basics for many. The costs of food, housing, health care, education, and child care are beyond the means of even the hardest working. Millions are helpless in the face of natural or human caused disasters. The failures of capitalism itself, such as the great depression and repeated greed-caused financial crises, rob millions of WORK and safety from deprivation. The social contract and equilibrium collapse. Capitalism becomes unhealthy.
American’s Challenge
The cost of creating a healthy social contract in our capitalist society is enormous and dwarfs by many orders of magnitude the sum of all other perceived policy needs. It is so enormous that policy makers of good will have trouble perceiving the magnitude of the need and just nibble at the edges. For even these small nibbles they are mocked by the selfish and the tax cutters as socialists, communists or even worse “liberals”.
But we are not any of these. We are citizens who want to live in a healthy society. Because WORK, in partnership with the capital of the entrepreneur, is the basis of wealth creation, WORK must be the focus of public policy on an equal basis with CAPITAL. In today’s America, public policy focusses on Capital in such a lopsided manner that social equilibrium is threatened with collapse. We say that we value work, but we act in the opposite manner.
Meeting the Challenge of Work
Capitalism has no heart. Pursuit of wealth knows no bounds, and the rich cannot be expected to moderate the pursuit of wealth on their own. Taming capitalism and making it work for all the people is the job of the people through the creation of good public policy.
Electoral success will go to the party that fully concentrates its attention on policies that encourage work and that remove obstacles to work. This will be a shoulder-to-the-plow, long-term effort that won’t pay off immediately no matter how many sound bites are spouted by chest pounding pols. It must be undertaken with patient faith that good policy equals good politics.
And, let’s be clear: This applies to all citizens!
Work-Driven Policy
Assuming that the large majority of citizens want to work, let us help them by providing incentives for work and by eliminating the barriers we put up to working.
Policies to enhance work:
Augment income for the poorest through robust negative income tax or, less preferable, a living minimum wage.
Fund daycare to free citizens to go to work.
Provide full health care. Improve the ACA or replace it with a more comprehensive and easier-to-navigate alternative.
Enhance education through additional funding and, critically, match graduates to the actual needs of employers.
Address excessive US government deficits. A future calamitous economic crash caused by grotesque debt will not help the working American.
Other work enhancing policies should be evaluated and supported in order of relevance and degree of value to the main effort.
Policies to Remove Barriers to Work:
Remove disparities in access to work, housing, voting and other aspects of society based on race, religion, and sexual orientation. This is not woke DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). This is simple common sense to free the productive capacity of all citizens.
Rationalize immigration policy to control immigration at a reasonable level. But, provide a predictable future for current immigrants enabling smooth integration into the workforce.
Develop forward-looking, flexible job retraining capability to mitigate the “creative destruction” of AI. Politicians, with the exception of Ross Perot, failed to anticipate the devastating results of NAFTA on jobs and the psyche of our workers. Let’s not do it again with AI.
Eliminate barriers to work for felons; give them the right to vote.
Eliminate jail for failure to pay bond except in extreme circumstances. You can’t keep a job if you go to jail for lack of a small amount of money.
Other barriers to work should be evaluated and eliminated in order of relevance and degree of value to the main effort.
Paying For It
The cost of the above policies will be enormous, and implementation will require intense effort and focus over many years. Congress will have to redirect trillions of dollars from wealthy individuals and corporations to fund a new orders-of-magnitude larger effort to make WORK as fruitful as capital in our society.