Unemployment and Learning

High unemployment is here to stay. Adapting to it will require changing how and when we learn.

...

Complete entry

Posted by CygnusX1  on  11/13  at  07:35 PM

Quote : "High unemployment is here to stay. Adapting to it will require changing how and when we learn."

I agree totally with your views on serious education for the masses. The world as a whole has an ethical responsibility to enhance the quality of life for all, by ensuring the increasing world populace has employment or other productive means to support, feed and cloth themselves. Yet our technologies, speed of IT and communications, and our reliance upon computers have made the world a much smaller place, and lightning speed datacoms and computation are squeezing the cents out of every spare buck to be had. Hence you are correct, a sustained level of unemployment seems unavoidable. It has become a way of life and we appear to accept this.

A large slice of the financial profit realised by our so called civilised western economies and banking systems is based on debt, the debt of the working class majorities, and which aim it is for the banks to keep these masses in debt. And look what happened? Our modern financial institutions nearly crashed the lot : literally overnight! The financial crises and the unemployment backlash from this recent recession are our real rewards for bailing out these irresponsible financial institutions. This and the prospects of further increased taxation.

Yet we cannot hope to employ all of the peoples all of the time, you are correct a more flexible approach is required, and the acceptance of periods of short-term unemployment may be a necessity. We have all been through this, and the so-called fast track re-training is often a necessity for most of us to get back on the employment ladder.

There are various ways we can achieve this change in mindset, and which I believe may prove to be of benefit to our social evolution and mass education in the longer term

1. Job sharing and part-time employment
Whilst not always the answer for everyone, this permits time for studies and re-education. Whether these are schemes supported by employers or government sponsorships or by other means. The main problem with this is that whilst employers make much noise in support of job sharing and part time employment, they still do not take it seriously or value it enough. It's time for employers and institutions and governments to get serious about this, and realise the benefits not only for the individual, but also for their own business and their flexibility. This also helps to provide and to support a means to overcome long-term unemployment.

2. Personal development
I envisage, (I dream!), this as becoming the norm and a key part of the accepted rewards for being a member of society. Personal development can also be used as an incentive and a benefits package associated with all types of employment. Here the employee is not only paid a salary but should be guaranteed a path of education and re-training, which will provide benefit to the employee in the long term. And you are correct, this should be more than merely the pseudo development training offered by most employers, (again we have all been there). Once again this is an area that employers do not yet take seriously, and for the most part only view as extra expenditure on their behalf.

3. Ethical change and longevity
With the predicted advances concerning the overcoming of chronic disease, and with increased longevity we are faced with an ageing populace, which I believe needs to remain productive in some small way at the very least. Yet how can we achieve this, surely we cannot have 75 year old folks carting trash, or sweeping streets or made to pursue even more demeaning employment? No, what we need is a change in ethics to incorporate this elderly population and encourage them to be productive. And the answer must be via either re-education or using education. For those who have spent many years employed and productive would have much to offer in the training and re-education of others, (this is obviously only one area and means of productivity).

Eventually, if these types of ideals are realised, we may see that it is the norm, rather than the exception, that we only work for a part of our lives compared to the expected 9 to 5, 5 to 6 days a week till you retire or drop dead, that is currently the tradition. And why not I say? Is it not the dream that technology and computers would help to reduce our working burden, and not to add to it? A change in mindset and a more ethical viewpoint will also help to provide more education and leisure time - and time for us all to evolve to higher levels of personal development and understanding.


Excellent article

Posted by Mark Plus  on  11/13  at  10:39 PM

What about all the people who lack the neurological goods to benefit from "education"? I suspect at least a third of the adult population needs something more like zoo-keeping than additional schooling to stay out of trouble. Ferdinand Lundberg expressed this well in his book "The Rich and the Super-Rich," published in 1968:

"The cleverness of the rich, as I see it, has consisted largely of the fact that the acquisitors among them have been able to operate practically unhindered by law among multitudes of thoroughly confused people, who are readily victimized in politics and economics. The victims have at all times been left externally free to choose in their own way. The rich, whether they knew it or not, could always have been fortified in the thought that the handicapped will usually make the wrong choices under the rule of external freedom.

"Approached from the standpoint either of IQ or formal education, far more than half the population has not had the knowledge, intelligence or ability to make choices in its own interests. It has merely drifted with the tide, trusting to its feelings, while others gathered in the hay. Nobody in most instances twisted the arms of this population to make it perform as it did in the polling booth and the market; on the other hand, rescue parties have been few and have not been understood as such by the victims, who regarded saviors such as Mrs. Sanger as enemies. A whole line of would-be saviors, including socialists such as Norman Thomas, have been rotten-egged for taking the trouble to make known their panaceas to this same population. Left and right, radicals, reformers, liberals and labor organizers have been bustled off to jails, not usually by capitalists or even by capitalist agents, but by the local rank and file of victims and their duly elected officers.

"Underlying the low IQs and faulty education have been deliberately contrived cultural deprivation as in the case of Negroes and spontaneous, self-induced cultural deprivation as in the case of rural and small-town Protestants and urban Catholics. These, it is evident, have been self-designated victims in a game with rules the rank-and-file did not understand.

"What is evidently the case is that a large section of the population is dependent-emotionally, intellectually, economically and politically--and is unable inherently or by conditioning to function in its own behalf under free institutions. A large section of the population, indeed, if it is to be properly served, should be regarded as public wards, ethically subject to rather close highly informed benign guidance in making life dispositions. No doubt much of this dependency arises from its conditioning, from its unreasonably inculcated faith that provision will be made for it, if not by man then by some remote deity. Perhaps a socialist sector of society should be established for it, perhaps true socialism itself is the ultimate answer."

So what do we do with the people who can't benefit from education, can't get new jobs and in effect become life-long "public wards"?

Posted by Tom Huffman  on  11/15  at  08:50 PM

Every time the issue of long-term unemployment comes up, pundits quickly invoke retraining and education as a cure. However, what I'm hearing from more sources is: "Retraining for what?" A recent article had this:

"Moreover, of those who manage to finish their retraining, a significant percentage do not find jobs. Of those who do, about half earn only a fraction of their former pay, a 2000 Government Accountability Office study found. "

The rest of the article is here:
http://michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/nc-damage-not-easily-mended

What we really need is a combined effort on multiple fronts. Part of the answer may be in an updated version of FDR's Works Progress Administration from the (last) Great Depression. The WPA employed a maximum of 3.3 million in 1938, according to the Wikipedia page. WPA and other New Deal projects, like the TVA and the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) built up an electrical power infrastructure to serve hundreds of thousands of homes that had previously been without electrical power.

Mr. Obama has already made a start toward building a new infrastructure for alternate energy. That could be extended to include the proposed "smart grid." There are other technological infrastructure issues that could be addressed. One of these is the proposed extension of high-speed internet services to small town and rural areas. A recent study showed that the US is 15 years behind South Korea in internet speeds; actually, we're behind 27 other countries. Read more here:

http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/08/24/daily30.html?ana=from_rss

Projects to upgrade our tech infrastructure could help re-employ many of our high=tech workers who've lost jobs to off-shoring (outsourcing) and 41B workers (insourcing).

We can also support efforts toward economic democracy. Remember the article that appeared on the IEET site months ago, on the book: "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better?" The authors have a project called The Equality Trust. It's aimed at inequality in the UK; but many of their solutions, like co-operative companies, can work in the US. Michael Moore featured examples of co-operatives in his film: "Capitalism: A love Story" I do recommend the film, if you haven't seen it. The Equality Trust's website is at: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/

Finally, we need some new economic models. Ones that would allow the lower 95% of the population to share in the rewards of the increases in productivity that have enriched the upper 5%.

---

Add your comment here:

Name:

Email:

Location:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below: