Jobs Vs. Mutual Aid: Taking Back The Meaning Of 'work' In Community

“Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: Taking back the meaning of ‘work’ in community”  a presentation at the conference 

Jobs & Justice: Strategies and Solutions for Economic Security  March 29 – 31, 2007  at Maritime Labour Centre, Vancouver BC 

by  

Chrystal Ocean and Daphne Moldowin   Wellbeing through Inclusion Socially & Economically  www.wise‐bc.org 

Ocean & Daphne – WISE

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

In November 2004, WISE completed a one-year project whose results appear in our book Policies of Exclusion, Poverty & Health: Stories from the Front (WISE 2005). As part of that initiative, the 21 storytellers, all women living below the poverty line, drafted recommendations for change. Our recommendations broke down into three major groups, in order of logical priority: R1) advocacy and raising awareness, R2) community-based action, and R3) structural issues and policy. The first set of actions concentrates on raising public awareness and interest within our own communities, since without these we cannot effectively proceed to Group 2. The second group includes novel and inexpensive ways to combat poverty from the grassroots. In its plea for a return of community, it suggests a different way of looking at and a revaluation of the activity called ‘work’, whose modern equivalent is ‘having a job’. Our presentation focuses on this aspect of our storytellers’ recommendations.

Among the first things you’ll notice when reading our storytellers’ recommendations report is its unusual approach. We women in poverty talk to other women in poverty; sharing our experiences, our hopes and, yes, our cynicism, which is the recognition of the intransigence of our society over which market capitalism has taken such pervasive hold. If you read the book from cover to cover, you can’t help but pick up a multitude of layers of meaning and a certain mood. What may not be evident, unless you look carefully and think deeply, is something we discovered when we spoke amongst ourselves. It’s a loathing for money. Of the storytellers whose poverty has been prolonged and deep - and by deep, we mean a household income of 30% or more below any measure of the poverty line –, this loathing was a consistent theme. It’s an abhorrence for the dollar, which has attained god-like status in our society. This attitude among people in poverty has interesting and we would argue, predictable, results. The longer we remain in deep poverty, the less inclined we are to want to participate in the market economy. This is not the same as saying we don’t want to work. Less than a handful of our storytellers could be said not to work – that is, be engaged in activities that benefit our communities. And the one storyteller who said she would like to retire meant only that she wants to retire from paid work – so there is more time for her volunteering. I’m in the same position and can trace the metamorphosis of my thinking about money, paid work, and the value of the things that I do in tandem with my slide into poverty. We transition from one set of values, which are subtly and not-so-subtly promoted by big business in support of consumerism, to another set of values. This transitioning is part of the human adaptive process to challenges to survival. If we are unable to live according to our values, then for consistency's sake – and we humans do need something stable in our lives so as not to die of despair –, we must change our values. March 30, 2007   

   

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Ocean & Daphne – WISE

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

And so we do. Such transitioning can be painful. In my case, it occurred over the course of a prolonged and severe breakdown and it took a change in values before some modicum of healing could begin.1 Values are tools for coping. If one set of values isn’t working, then either you die still holding allegiance to those values, or you evolve. The reverse frequently happens when someone ascends from rags to riches. Their values undergo change and they forget the lessons learned from their days of financial impoverishment. As survivors of poverty, our storytellers evolved, the inevitable outcome of which is that those of us who were once conditioned consumers no longer are. Other consequences include an embrace of voluntary simplicity, a strong distaste for competitiveness, and a propensity to question assumptions that continue to support the status quo. Here’s one example.

Consider the training and education mantra that is familiar to us all: Stay in school, get your high school diploma, go to university, get a degree, acquire a skill. If you take this advice, your future will be assured. For decades, children have been told this and adults encouraged to pursue life-long training, all with an eye to getting and staying employed. However, there are problems with this one-size-fits-all advice, particularly when we consider it within the context of market capitalism. First, it assumes that people who are unemployed do not already have training or education. Yet a great number of us do and the larger that number grows, the more it exposes a serious problem. Suppose that everyone followed the advice to get an education, get trained. What then? It used to be that a Bachelor’s degree was enough to land a decent job. Then it was a Master’s degree. Now having a PhD isn’t good enough. Newly-minted PhDs are increasingly required to have at least one post-doc before even being considered for a pseudo-permanent position. As things stand now, many of them are being used – and abused – as contract workers and often getting paid no better than $10 an hour; this, for a decade and more of post-secondary study. How’s that for an investment! For the student, that is. There’s no argument that it’s a great investment of the student’s and taxpayers’ money for educational institutions. If new PhDs cannot find contract or adjunct work at a university, you may find them flipping burgers, cleaning up other people’s messes, driving taxis, and so on. In other words, there are and always will be a finite number of jobs for the credentialed.

                                                        One is never completely healed from the experience of prolonged poverty or the long, hurtful slide into that condition.  1

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Ocean & Daphne – WISE

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

The knowledge industry is self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, and as our institutions of purported higher learning become evermore made over into the corporate model, contractual and part-time employment is increasingly the norm. But that’s just one aspect of the transformation of our educational institutions. Some of you may be aware of the word ‘externality’. An externality is a cost of doing business that is borne by a third party. Employee training is a corporate externality and the third party is the taxpayer. Recall the growth of vocational training centres or colleges during the 1960s. They arose in response to business demands for skilled, that is, credentialed, workers, a demand they could get away with because there weren’t enough jobs to go around. After a slow start, in May 1965 the Ontario government responded to business demand by introducing Bill 153. This created the province’s community college system, whose purpose was to provide a post-secondary education alternative for people not wanting or able to attend university. Colleges were to be independent of existing systems, community-based and fulfill the needs of business and industry. Other provinces responded similarly. Business types must have been ecstatic. University administrators weren’t, as they saw their institutions losing students – and revenue – to colleges. The goal of university education used to be the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and by virtue of that, the production of well-informed citizens with honed critical thinking skills. But slowly, steadily, in answer to the threat from the ascendancy of colleges, universities began transforming themselves into vocational training centres. Again, what a boost for business! But now, even during a boom, where demand for credentialed workers outstrips supply, the message from industry remains the same. CEO’s and other business types have been slow to adjust and rather than face the consequences of their own poor planning and trend forecasting, they instead demand that governments ‘do something’ to bail them out. North America’s auto industry is a good example of the corporate world’s shedding of its responsibility. Anyone with common sense would have realized that the increasing demand for hybrid and other alternative vehicles helped drive import sales. How could our auto manufacturers not have seen this coming? Who has paid for the failure of their vision? Auto workers, who are now, apparently, equipped with the wrong skills. The push and demand for credentialed workers contains its own irony. Today, businesses say they can’t find enough workers with the requisite certification. While that may be true, it doesn’t mean there aren’t people with the needed skills out there - it’s called experience - or people who wouldn’t enthusiastically respond to offers of on-the-job training.

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Ocean & Daphne – WISE

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

Now let’s turn to the issue of work vs. having a job Work is defined as a physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something. Job is a regular activity performed in exchange for payment or a position in which one is employed. Work is something we do. A job is something we have. In the terminology of the markets, jobs – and the people who occupy them – are commodities. Persons seeking paid work compete for jobs. Businesses create jobs and compete for labour. Competition is elevated as a value by virtue of its necessity to sustain the demand and supply of the employment and other markets. Jobs are competed over, both to get them and retain them. Persons to occupy jobs are competed over, both to get them and retain them. To enhance productivity, to eke out more product or service from each hour of paid work, businesses compete with other businesses, industries with other industries, locally, nationally, globally. By virtue of all this competition in which money is the measure of value, unpaid work is devalued. And so the business of living, which involves housework, yard work, cooking, cleaning, childrearing, caring for elders, caring for the sick, teaching, learning, helping a neighbour, volunteering – much of it done by women – is deemed to be just what people do as part of their day-to-day living. We don’t pay people to breathe, the argument goes. Why should we pay them to do other ‘normal’ activities? Underlying this question is the view that people must be paid as reward for doing what is assumed they wouldn’t do otherwise. Alas, this view doesn’t explain the people who will do unpaid work which is unpleasant - I don’t like mopping up vomit or cleaning out bedpans, do you? And it doesn’t explain why some people enjoy their jobs in and of themselves, or that most people enjoy working and contributing even when some of it is nasty. Another aspect of the job market we find disturbing is the separation of paid work from the rest of life. One goes out to work, to a job, leaving the family and often the community, behind. At day's or night's end, one returns home to resume one's life. Presumably we don’t have lives while we are working for pay. The separation of work from life, family, home and community is like a thick black line drawn through the centre of our lives.

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Ocean & Daphne – WISE

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

When we think of work as part of the business of living, then including our children in our activities is a natural extension. They participate, contribute, and learn alongside us. One of our native storytellers describes such a childhood. I don’t regret being up at 4 or 5 in the morning, at 4 or 5 years old, going to different households and making [the elders] their tea in the morning, and their coffee and scrambled eggs. They’d all sit around and take turns talking to me. I’d go there and build their fires, at such a young age. That’s just tradition, how we raise our children, to be fully participant and be somebody. There was no ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’. It’s all ‘ours’, ‘us’, ‘we’ in our language. You’re somebody; you’re special. You’re a little person right from the very beginning. (Policies of Exclusion, Poverty & Health, p107). Native children are not separated from the business of life or the everyday activities of their community. When people ask, What do you do?, they're really asking, Do you have a job and what is it? Who you are becomes defined as what you do 'for a living', rather than the activities which are the sum of your life and expand outward into the community. This is why we titled our presentation Jobs vs. Mutual Aid - Taking back the meaning of work in community. Work is so much more than ‘having a job’. It’s part of the essence of life and all work that contributes to the support of community should be valued.

Solutions How do we address the disparate issues of values induced by poverty which challenge the status quo; the transformation of our educational institutions into serving our corporate masters; and the subsuming of work under ‘having a job’? In the ideal world of our storytellers, these issues would not exist, since the market economy would be replaced by a gift economy, something we briefly describe in our book. However, in addition to being dreamers, we storytellers are realists. No gift economy can be realized in our lifetimes, and so we go on to other recommendations. While we’ll leave the recommendations in the book for you to read at your leisure, we offer the following ten suggestions which are consistent with them: 1.

Recognize volunteer hours with income tax credits, free bus passes, grocery chits.

2.

Resurrect the wisdom of the village raising the child. This would include support for early learning and childcare, but the wisdom goes much further than that.

3.

Make the teaching of the young (and not-so-young) part of the same philosophy and set up mentoring circles that value and hence reward experiential knowledge.

4.

Develop local economies using the co-op model.

5.

Encourage living and working within the same community, rather than commuting to outside.

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Ocean & Daphne – WISE

6.

Jobs vs. Mutual Aid: ‘Work’ in community

Zone for residential and commercial mixing and encourage the creation of at least one village square in each neighbourhood.

7.

Place higher value on work done in neighbourhoods by neighbours.

8.

Encourage local business to provide its own training and apprenticeships and the valuation of experience, character and a willingness to learn.

9.

Support businesses that hire locally, provide goods or services to the community, and are socially responsive and responsible.

10. Make no distinction between paid and unpaid work. Value all work as a public good. Thank you for listening.

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