[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
the existence of unemployment, but greens add a twist to the expected
story. They will claim that, while there is clearly unemployment, this
does not mean that there is no work being done. At the root of this
judgement lies the belief that work should not be seen as synonymous
with paid employment. Greens (and, once again, not a few others) point
out that enormous amounts of work are done that do not register as
work, precisely because the tasks do not take the form of paid employ-
ment. Examples of this would be work done by women (mainly) in the
home, caring for the sick and elderly outside the institutions of care,
and work done in the so-called informal economy.
A concrete example of an attempt to make all this visible is Victor
Anderson s suggestion that the money value of unpaid domestic
labour and of non-money transactions outside the household should
be included in Adjusted National Product (ANP) improvements on
Gross National Product (GNP) calculations (1991, p. 39). Greens point
out that this distinction between work and paid employment is not
merely of semantic importance. The modern tendency to associate
reward and status with paid employment results in employers and
potential employees looking to the sectors of production traditionally
associated with paid employment when it comes to strategies for deal-
ing with unemployment. In other words, the unemployed look for work
in paid employment and employers try to place them in such employ-
ment. The green approach to problems of unemployment, in contrast,
is to concentrate on those areas where work has always been done, but
where it is frowned upon, if not actually criminalized. Nothing, evi-
dently, is solved by semantically collapsing the distinction between
work and paid employment, but greens argue for a series of policies that
would practise such a collapse.
Most generally, the green argument is prefaced by the belief that trad-
itional solutions to the problems of unemployment (like more growth)
are doomed to failure either because of the context of a finite planet or
because the technological infrastructure that has been built up is actually
designed to reduce places of paid employment. Irvine and Ponton are
clear about the implications: In these circumstances slogans about No
Return to the 30s and Jobs for All are irrelevant if not downright
reactionary (1988, pp. 66 7). Political ecologists will go on to say that
work which is done in the informal economy must be liberated and
decriminalized, and that policies currently designed to prevent people
from working in the informal economy should be abandoned and
The sustainable society 87
replaced by policies that will encourage them to work there. In this sense,
collapsing the distinction between work and paid employment means
collapsing the distinction between the formal and the informal economy.
Greens argue that current systems of social security and the assump-
tions that inform them prevent the potential of the informal economy
from being fully realized. They point out that most social security
systems deter people from doing work on a part-time, irregular basis
(i.e. just when it shows up ) because benefits are likely to be withdrawn
in other words, it is not always financially worthwhile to work.
Second, rises in income can also lead to the withdrawal of benefits,
leading to what has been called the poverty trap . Thus work in the
informal economy, the conditions of which bear little relation to the
rigid structures of paid employment, is effectively discouraged. Fur-
thermore, most social security systems (and certainly Britain s, based
on Beveridge s 1942 proposal) have been designed around the assump-
tions of a growth economy and a system of reward based on the exist-
ence of practically universal paid employment. Once those assumptions
no longer hold (and greens believe that they do not), the social security
system based upon them must come into question too.
Beyond these points, greens are often critical of the means-testing
that is part and parcel of current social security strategies and, associ-
ated with this, they are offended by the conditionality of awards and the
repercussions this has: There are far more unclaimed benefits than
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]