While reading another diary about a candidate running for office in CA, I had some thoughts about the economics of supply and demand. Could it be possible that the government is consciously using health insurance policy to lower the retirement age, intentionally unemploying older workers, with the idea of employing more of the very young, to prevent civil unrest over jobs? Its a well known fact that those who demonstrate tend to be younger.
Do we use health insurers to give the young more of the scarcer jobs, and those over 30 or 40 less? Its worth considering.
We really do have to worry over the next few decades about declining working conditions and wages, because jobs are going to be scarcer and scarcer. The temptaion to strip workers of hard won rights established during the postwar era will be strong. So we need to establish strong boundaries now while we can.
There are some things we could do to give us some breathing room on jobs and employment. A national healthcare plan like many other developed nations have, that removes jobs from the healthcare equation, for example, woud immediately create millions of new jobs as already trained workers were rehired.
Another thing we could do is moving to a 4 day week and lowering the default retirement age - along with starting Social Security and medical care, to 60 or even lower.
Many European countries have 32 hour weeks, and a month long vacation is the standard in Europe, unlike the US which has no standard amount of vacation time at all. Around half of the workers in the US - hourly workers, get no paid vaction time at all! The percentage who dont get vacations, have no health insurance or never qualify for unemployment because of sporadic employment keeps increasing.
We need to consider options like the 32 hour week, and national holidays.. They would improve the situation for the workforce. It looks strange for the US to not have paid national holidays when so many other nations do.
Lowering the retirement age would also create more jobs and improve working conditions because of labor scarcity, for people under the cutoff.
The current approach of retiring people involuntarily with our broken health insurance policy is not the answer because people who get laid off at 40 or 45 and cant find new jobs don't have any way to survive.
But an economist would note that that approach does increase employment of younger people, significantly those who would be more likely to make trouble if they were unemployed.
We have to be aware that technology has the gift (or some would say curse) of constantly making workplaces more efficient with fewer and fewer people. This puts downward pressure on wages of unskilled workers. Women are in a particularly difficult position if they have children.
Right now people are the cheapest supercomputers available for rent to a business needing to get very complex tasks done.
But not for much longer.
Maybe only a decade or two more.
I should add to this diary that perhaps when writing this diary that I was incorrectly assuming that the reader understood something that many people who don't work with technology clearly dont understand. The world of wage labor that we assume is with us forever is a particular creation of the industrial era and its need for workers to man the factories and service industries that support our consumer society. But many of those jobs don't inherently depend on people to do them, people do them NOW because they are the cheapest way to do them. For many professions, the day has already arrived when nobody hires people to do that anymore, and for many others, that day is coming. For anybody who isn't learning new skills and readying themselves to wear new hats, stable employment won't exist.
So, I guess ahat I mean to say is that exponential growth in technology has far ranging social implications but its completely apolitical and it cares nothing for imperatives like amounts of money in 401ks or official retirement ages. When people discuss employment or the end of the industrial era they also need to realize that nothing is going to magically arrive and save us if we dont create that new thing. The best way we can do that is by being honest. Jobs are going away, and so we really have to do whatever we can to keep them. as long as we can and cushion the blow for those millions of people who once they are gone, one by one, can't get new ones. Thats what governments do.
A good depiction in film of a near-future world that is entirely possible, say, a century from now. Note the fact that few people in the film work, and what kinds of work those people do. The ending of the film is also noteworthy.