As I walked
through the vineyards of the Medoc, I saw a scene that has occurred in millions
of places over the last 40 years. A huge mechanical grape picker was emptying
its grape bins into a trailer pulled by a medium sized farm tractor. Two men were picking 20 hectares of grapes.
Gone were the 40-60 Spanish, Moroccan, Polish and Bulgarian migrant vineyard
workers who for endless years have appeared at the time of the vendange. Harvest was handled by two men and machines
instead of human beings.
There are a
few old, very wealthy chateaus that still pick by hand. They have housing and
sanitary facilities and contract for several hundred workers to carefully hand
pick the grapes. The prices of their
wine reflect the labor costs that most chateaus avoid by using machines. It is
more efficient to harvest with machines. Some would insist that quality is
sacrificed.
In this
bucolic scene one can see the huge problem which faces the world. Technology is
making it possible to do work that used to require millions of human hands by
simply turning a switch and letting a machine do it. The dilemma that the
society faces is how do you provide income for people to live a decent life who
are willing to work but their job has been replaced by a machine. My 10 year-old
grandson is in a robotics club in school building robots. Is he in the process
of eliminating his future job?
The turmoil
in the United States and Western Europe about immigrants is largely caused by
the perception of the native workers in a society that their jobs are being
taken away by low cost immigrant labor. This has been compounded by free trade
which has moved many of the manufacturing jobs in the western world into areas
of low-cost labor.
The workers are
furious that having lost their job either to a machine or to an immigrant. They
rightly perceive that their job is never coming back. So, they turned to their
government for some help.
The safety
net of unemployment insurance is a very leaky net. Many workers do not qualify
for it and it is not a stable source of income on which they can plan any kind
of decent life. So who to blame? The government immediately comes forward with
a plan to retrain the workers. To do what? how long will it take? Is there any
assurance that there will be a job at the end of the training.?
This
resentment has been building in the western world since 1980. Workers have
become more efficient in what they do but have not had wage increases
commensurate with what they have done. The text structure has been changed in
such a way that all the benefits goes to the top 5% of the income pyramid. The
workers can see that and they are angry.
They are susceptible
to leaders who tell them to direct their anger at immigrants or foreign countries
or whatever. The rise of populous leaders using this technique is evident
across the face of the world. Trump is the local manifestation in the United
States but Brexit in the United Kingdom and the leadership in Poland and
Hungary and France are all struggling with the same kind of resentment and
anger in the population.
Countries
with a more complete safety net which includes health care for all and
unemployment for all and child care for all are being attacked as vigorously as
is the United States with its leaky safety net.
The time has
come for the leadership in the United States to move toward an idea which has
been bandied about or 50 years. Universal basic income (UBI)is a concept that
must be implemented if we are to have civil societies. We cannot continue with in
a society where the workers work harder, are more efficient, and get less of
the benefit while those at the top accumulate more and more with no limits.
As these
changes by technology have occurred, we have simultaneously taken away the
ability of workers to organize into unions to demand a fair share of the
profits of their endeavour. Politically we have made it harder and harder for
unions to organize workers so that they could demand what they need. We still
struggle with whether we should have universal childcare yet more than half the
workforce is made up of women who are
expected to carry the baby and then go back to work the next day. Where are
they to find someone to care for the child while they go to work. That's their
problem.
Without a
universal health care system how can they take care of their family including
their elderly parents and their children except by finding a job that has
health care benefits and staying there no matter what the situation is. On the
day that the plant closes it's their problem.
As their
parents age because we're living longer they're torn between going to work and
holding on to their job and their income and caring for their elderly parents.
If they choose to care for their parents, as one would expect a child to do,
the fact that they lost their job: it's their problem.
If their
children want to go to college and ask their parents to be cosigners on loans
to pay for the exorbitant costs of college they are saddled for the rest of
their life with the debts of their children as well as their own debts. If
their child doesn't find a job to pay off their loans and the parents would
like to move out of their big house as they downsized into retirement they
can't because they have loans for their kid’s education depending on the equity
in their house. It's their problem.
Thinkers on
both sides of the aisle have come to the conclusion at various times that a
universal basic income is the answer. it is always been dismissed as socialism.
The turmoil in the society which we are now seeing is the result of that
refusal to face the need as a society to provide a decent standard of living
for everyone.
This is not
a far-out leftist idea. In Alaska the oil revenue from the oil fields is put
into a fund which is distributed every year to everyone in Alaska. Is that
socialism? Norway has a similar program collecting the oil revenue from the
North Sea and distributing it to all Norwegians. Is that socialism?
Alaska the
home of the true libertarian individualists who braved the world’s hardest
weather on an individual basis and the Norwegians who faced the same kind of
nature have come to the same conclusion. Maybe all the revenue in Alaska should
be taken away from the people and given to the oil company executives. How long
do you think it would take for that to happen.?
The
objection to the UBI proposal is that the money would go to a lot of
undeserving people. I do not notice the Alaskans making that distinction nor
the Norwegians. If one were certain that there was a basic income available for
all, some people might be willing to accept that as a decent living. There will
still be those in the society who want to make more money and have more stuff
and they are free to do that in Alaska and in Norway.
The second
objection to a UBI proposal Is that we have no money. Any serious consideration
of our tax structure shows that there is plenty of money available in the top
5% of the income pyramid. Simply raising the rate back to the levels that were
existed during the Kennedy administration would produce an enormous amount of
money. Presently we're not taxing the Internet on any serious basis. Financial
transactions are not taxed because they benefit the wealthy. There are a number
of places from which the UBI proposal could be funded. The objections to a UBI
proposal are basically the same ones that were raised when Social Security was
started in 1935. If we created a fund into which dedicated taxes was put we
could provide a UBI to all the families and childless adults in society.
If you
stopped reading several paragraphs ago because you dismiss the idea of a UBI as
the rantings of the socialist consider the fact that it was a libertarian
Alaskan governor with the blessing of Milton Friedman from the University of
Chicago that in place the Alaska fund.
Anyone who sits down and seriously thinks
about the future of the third wave of high tech and robotic world in which we
are living has to consider where the new jobs are going to come from. They're
being wiped out faster than most people can imagine. The day is just around the
corner when you will not drive your own car unless you want to. There is plenty
of evidence that all transportation will be done by technology in the form of
driverless cars.
When my
father lost his job back in the 50’s he was an insurance company employee and
while he was looking for a job he drove a cab to put food on the table for our
family. Every morning when he went down to the cab company at 5:30 in the
morning I went with him. I was the dispatcher for the Downers Grove cab
company. Those days are never coming back and the chaos which is now upon the
United States created by people who believe that you can force people to go to
work if you simply don't give them any money to buy food in any other way, do
not understand human beings. The anger and chaos that is fomenting in our
society is based on the feeling of frustration and anger that goes with having
a family and no money to buy food to put on the table or to pay the rent for
the house or apartment.
One only has
to look to history to see how this has affected our society. All through the
depression people lived on the edge and their children's nutrition suffered and
when the Second World war came and we needed recruits for the military. Thousands
of young men were rejected because of nutritional deficits created by that
period of depression and poor nutrition. The school lunch program of today was
started by Harry Truman not because he cared about kids or learning or anything
else. He wanted to be sure that the children who were growing up in the United
States would be healthy enough to go into the military. We are risking our
children again by creating a situation in which food banks and the generosity
of friends are the only source of food for families.
I’m so old
that I can remember when my grandmother who did not have Social Security and
Medicare who came to live with our family for three months of every year. She had four daughters and she rotated through
their houses every year for four or five years before she died. My parents had
discussions at night when we children were in bed over how they were going to
pay for grandmas health care bills. My father was struggling to pay for his
four children and suddenly found himself burdened with his wife's mother. Nobody
was happy when she came because she was an unhappy and demanding old lady and
she took it out on us children. My mother worked part time for the telephone
company to supplement her family income. She was only able to do that because
grandma was child care to the family.
Social Security and Medicare have made it
possible for me to live without turning to my children for basic needs. But the
problem today is complicated for young people by the fact that they have no
guaranteed income beyond the $2000 a month I got in Social Security when they
retire. They have no guaranteed pension. If they're lucky they have an IRA
which may give them some security in the future but that's based on the
vagaries of the stock market.
The answer
for a civil society to the questions of the future of all families must be a UBI
(universal basic income) guaranteed by the whole society.
Jesus said,
“Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
