Issue 90:2017 02 02:Politics and the Post-Work World(Neil Tidmarsh)

02 February 2017

Politics and the Post-Work World

Hamon says, but Fillon does (allegedly).

by Neil Tidmarsh

Has anyone else noticed the irony?  One politician proposes an idea and it wins him the leadership of his party.  Another politician is accused of putting that same idea into practice and it may well lose him the leadership of his party.

In France last week, Benoît Hamon proposed that the state should pay people for not working, and he was elected the leader of the Socialist party.  At the same time, Francois Fillon, who has just been elected leader of the Republican party, was accused of getting the state to pay his wife for not working, and this triggers a criminal investigation against him.

I suppose it probably isn’t an irony, given that the two parties – the Socialists and the Republicans – are opponents, so what is meat for the one is bound to be poison for the other.  Nevertheless, the more you think about it, the more amazing, the more bizarre, it seems.

(Of course, there is another irony here; a few weeks ago I said that Francois Fillon was the only one of the front runners in the race for the Republican leadership who didn’t have the suspicion of criminality casting a shadow over his political aspirations – see Made It Ma, Top Of The World! Shaw Sheet 30.11.16 – but we’ll quickly pass over that embarrassing proof of my naivety.)

Benoît Hamon, as the new leader of the governing Socialist party, goes into the race for the Presidency promising a €750 a month universal income for every adult, irrespective of whether they’re in or out of work.  The cost would be €440 billion to the French tax-payer.  Or rather, to the French robot-owner – M.Hamon says he would tax robots working in industry as if they were human workers.  That should just about cover it, he reckons, especially as he claims that automation will have destroyed ten percent of French jobs in ten years time.  It’s time to start preparing for a post-work world, he says.

His Republican rival for the presidency, Francois Fillon, has stolen a march on him, according to Le Canard Enchaîné.  This famous satirical magazine claims that M.Fillon has been preparing his family for a post-work world for some years; he has, allegedly, paid his wife €500,000 out of state funds for doing nothing over the last decade.  There is also a question about his employment of his two sons as lawyers when he was a senator between 2005 and 2007 – the media alleges that neither of them were lawyers at that time.  And further accusations emerged this week from the Journal du Dimanche about money which was supposed to pay for assistants in the senate.   M.Fillon insists that all was above board, that his wife was indeed working as his assistant, albeit behind the scenes, etc.  But the criminal investigation continues, with a dramatic and almost unprecedented police raid on the French parliament a few days ago.  If it finds that M.Fillon was indeed taking state money for nothing, and he loses his position in the Republican party, then perhaps the Socialist party will welcome him with open arms for embracing their idea so whole-heartedly.

Benoît Hamon will have been cheered by another story in the news this week.  His idea – that the state should pay you whether you work or not – appears to be well-established in at least one neighbouring country.  In Spain, the provincial council in Valencia has just discovered that it may have been paying a salary of €50,000 to a manager who has done no work for the last decade, who hasn’t even turned up for work, except to clock in first thing and clock out last thing each day.  Carlos Recio was appointed head of books in the archive department in 2006; according to the newspaper El Mundo, he never attended meetings, was never seen in the department, had no office, and the archive department has computers rather than books.

Elsewhere in Spain, Jerez de la Frontera council realised last June that two council employees – a gardener and a driver – hadn’t turned up to work for 15 years, but had been paid nevertheless.  Both were sacked.  Also last year, in Cadiz, preparations were underway to give a civil servant a long-service award when people realised they hadn’t seen him at work for some time.  For six years, in fact.  He was fined €27,000 for absenteeism.  And let’s not forget that policeman in San Remo, Italy, who hit the headlines a year ago.  Traffic cop Alberto Muriglia was the most visible victim of Matteo Renzi’s campaign against fannulloni (slackers), mainly because he was caught on CCTV clocking on for work in the morning in his underpants (he lived in a flat in the same block as his office) then disappearing back upstairs to bed.   (Could that campaign have had anything to do with Renzi’s downfall later that year?)

Another story in the news this week took things to the other extreme.  In Japan, the government announced that it’s planning to limit overtime to no more than 100 hours a month, to prevent overwork.  The victims of two recent cases of karoshi (death from overwork) had been working up to 130 hours and at least 112 hours of overtime a month.  And such is the work ethic in Japan that overtime pay isn’t always claimed, and companies have been known to take employees to court over their claims for overtime pay.

This serious news from Japan is enough to make us give serious consideration to Benoit Hamon’s ideas about a post-work world.  There has to be more to life than work, after all, so perhaps we should indeed be preparing society for a future where robots and automation will displace us from the workplace.  And with the right preparation, it could be something to be welcomed rather than dreaded, something which liberates rather than alienates the worker.  The final irony, of course, is that Japan, possibly the country which adheres most rigidly to the work ethic, is also the country taking the lead in robotics.  But perhaps the day will come when all work is sufficiently automated for Hamon’s robot tax to be able to pay even the dedicated and conscientious Japanese people overtime for all those extra hours of doing nothing which they’re bound to clock up in the post-work world.

 

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