The Last Taboo: How Jobs Cause Poverty
By J.S. Larochelle, 2003, revised 2022
Intro by C.A. L’Hirondelle
This article is going to sound preposterous, ludicrous, nutty, absurd and any other word for outrageously unbelievable that you can find in a thesaurus. That’s because it is taboo to say that the very thing that almost everyone says is necessary for people to make a living is actually the very thing that is robbing us of all human health and a livable environment. Only those who are in the David Graeber school of jobs criticism are the exception.
It is almost universally accepted that jobs are the solution to poverty, not the cause of it.
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HOW JOBS CAUSE POVERTY
By J.S. Larochelle
Question: Why do some people get paid for working while others don’t?
Work must be done in order to have food and the other things we need to stay alive. This work includes growing, harvesting, and transporting food, and then also shopping, cooking, cleaning, planning meals, testing recipes, and even learning about nutrition.
The task of feeding the world’s people requires an enormous amount of collective time and effort. While millions of people every day work for pay in the food industry, millions of others do vast amounts of unpaid work related to food. And that unpaid work is essential to the continued existence of paid jobs. Digest that: The very work that is a pre-requisite to paid work — gets no pay.
THE DIVISION OF PAID AND UNPAID LABOUR
“Unpaid labour is a taboo subject because acknowledging it would undermine the ideological foundations of capitalism.” — C. L’Hirondelle, 2002
Historically, it was men who did paid work outside the home while women did unpaid work in the home. One of the reasons given for this division of labour was that women needed to feed children. But if mothers hadn’t provided this vital service to society, the people with paid work would have had to take time away from their jobs to feed their children.
Children are also not paid for the work they do — for society— as children. And unless they have a paid job outside the home, they are not even thought of as working. Like everyone else, they too need guaranteed access to nutritious food to be healthy and grow to healthy adulthood. When they don’t get the things they need to stay healthy during childhood, they can negatively impact them for the rest of their lives.
Anyone who does unpaid work and can’t find a reliable source of income risks living in ill health and abject poverty.
Another problem with unpaid work is that it creates the illusion that only the paid workers create societies’ wealth.
This is entirely false because, without shoppers and consumers, store owners would quickly go bankrupt.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith points out: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.”
As it turns out, paid producers are dependent on unpaid shoppers and consumers. And yet Adam Smith’s self-evident maxim — that consumption is the sole purpose of production— is rarely discussed in economic debate. This is because few economists will admit that capitalism can only prosper by not paying for most of the world’s true work.
Instead, status quo economics justifies that some people become wealthy because they work hard and are very productive while other people are poor because they don’t. In other words, the powerful define economic terms to their own advantage, which lets them simply steal wealth from others.
A stark example of this is slavery: people work and create value while other people steal that value and claim it as their own ‘private’ property. Historically, governments made slavery legal; it was the legalization of theft for the benefit of the few. It’s one way the powerful make laws that distort the process of government and then use those laws to create the illusion of individualism, self-sufficiency, independence and freedom.
THE HISTORY OF POVERTY
Americans were waging a revolutionary war against the British because they wanted to gain their freedom and independence. This happened at the same time they were openly stealing the work done by slaves and were also stealing the lands of Indigenous peoples who had been living on the continent for many thousands of years.
Throughout history, the rich and powerful use physical force and coercion to gain wealth by stealing it from others and privatizing it. Then they lie about how they got wealthy and chalk it up to “hard work”.
All over the world, natural resources are being ‘privatized,’ and thus average people have no choice but to find a job or starve. And this process of fencing in all-natural resources will kill many millions of people when the world’s job market goes into the next depression.
“Only after people’s capacity to subsist is destroyed, are they totally and unconditionally in the power of capital.” — The Subsistence Perspective, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen
“Deprive a child of all clean water or protein, and the child will invariably suffer rapid degeneration of life-powers. Deprive a person of habitation in most climates, and that person will soon experience a very reduced range of thought, feeling, and movement and, perhaps, in a number of hours, death from exposure.” — John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System
WORK/WAGE SLAVERY AS SOCIAL CONTROL
For decades now, we have been told that more jobs and only more jobs will solve our social and economic problems. Even progressives call for “good, dignified, unionized jobs” ("Green New Deal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" on All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, March 29, 2019)
But we must ask why the world’s economy isn’t producing a sufficient quantity of the material things and services that all people need to be healthy and not live in poverty?
Surely, if average people had power, they would demand to build enough houses and grow enough food for all. One aspect of wage slavery is having no control over what work we do on the job. Another is not being paid enough to meet basic health needs.
Many politicians and social leaders act as if economics were somehow ethically neutral and that it makes no difference what the world’s businesses produce as long as the business owners and investors make sufficient profits. They also seem to not care that many people’s wages are far too low to maintain adequate health.
“Life has become the instrument of capital expansion, rather than investors’ capital being a means to enable human life. The world of values has been turned upside down.” — John McMurtry, The Economics of Life and Death
Everyone values their own good health and life above all else and would act to preserve it. In order to do this, we must use a portion of our time and natural resources to ensure that we have nutritious food, housing and other life-sustaining things.
However, businesses are compelled by market forces to reduce costs as much as possible. If that means generating higher profits by firing workers and replacing them with more productive machines, that is what they do. Over the last centuries, there has been rising productivity solely due to fast, efficient machines spewing out vast quantities of everything under the sun.
This mass production has meant mass consumption. And in many cases, we have mass over-consumption of types of products that create mass ill health. In turn, this creates jobs in the growing health care and medical industries. However, many jobs are now dependent on the continuation of the ill health caused by over-consumption. Can we afford to keep this cost of jobs going?
THE BURNING ISSUE OF WHAT PEOPLE NEED
No one needs to consume junk food to be healthy or to have a good life, and yet, the market system is producing staggering quantities of it.
“The burning issue of what people need, as distinguished from their ‘effective demand’ is never raised in market analysis.” — John McMurtry
No one lives in poverty due to a shortage of junk food and junk products. Yet in the last century vast amounts of time, energy and material resources have been requisitioned by the business sector to produce and sell more of it.
This is another huge cost of jobs that we can’t afford. This is because we could instead use these same junk food and junk product resources to build homes, community gardens, and provide clean water, sanitation and health care.
THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM
Free-market business people and their political, media and academic allies point out that their economic freedom permits them to do as they please. But ‘freedom’ does not explain why business people choose to make and aggressively market, advertise and sell products that cause ill health.
Business people continue to make and sell junk food because they have no choice under the market system. John McMurtry calls this “the freedom of no alternative”.
Why is it that businesses have had to take little to no responsibility for how their economic activities affect people and the planet?
“Seduced by the dangerous illusion that our technologies place us beyond the constraints of life's natural limits, and forgetful that we have created economic institutions for which the creation of livelihoods is incidental to the making of money for those who already have far more than they need. The result is an economic system that is mindlessly converting life into money in an act of collective insanity.” — David Korten, forward to Richard Douthwaite’s “The Growth Illusion”
CONCLUSION: A REVOLT AGAINST DESTRUCTIVE JOBS AND ‘ILLTH’
There is only a very small minority of people who benefit from the present system of destructive jobs and health-destroying products.
John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century writer, used the term “illth” to describe the fact that the economy produces ‘bad’ products as well as good.
Now in the twenty-first century, we have an out-of-control market-driven economic system. Millions of people have jobs that depend on “illth” industries that produce widespread ill-health while millions of others live and die in poverty.
It should be clear by now that current social and political leaders are so completely hampered by their own financial self-interests that they have no will to solve the world’s poverty or environmental problems.
This means that average people will have to take action and start speaking out against the high costs of jobs. It means loudly withdrawing our support for the current job system. And if we can, refusing to work at destructive jobs. It means ensuring that people have access to the resources we need to feed and shelter ourselves. It means demanding a guaranteed income as a just transition to a livable economy. This will allow us to end destructive work, and instead work to grow and build things for their health value and for permanence —not merely for their cold, hard ‘cash’ value.
Resources:
What is Jobism?
David Graeber on Jobs
Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil: Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition, 2000. http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/paper/150.html (no longer available)
The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet, 1992, 1999, by Richard Douthwaite
