Labour Wrap: The real choice we all face

The real choice we all face

GRADUATE students shouldn’t look for jobs, they should create them. That is the latest piece of official advice on jobs, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap. It implies, he maintains, that students are to blame for their own jobless predicament.

However, such comments are merely the “latest variation” on a theme made notorious by British Conservative Party employment minister Norman Tebbit in 1981. He maintained that in the Great Depression his father “didn’t riot”; that he “got on his bike” until he found a job.

Bell says that such a statement was not surprising, coming from a praise singer of what was then called Thatcherism and is now known as neo-liberal economics. It also referred to the 1930s when, despite an economic crisis, most industries still relied on manual labour.

Today, the causes of the ongoing global economic crisis are much the same as previous crises - over-capacity and over-production - but because of technological progress, there are fewer jobs. Government and business leaders, along with mainstream economists, have not apparently taken on board the causes and consequences of the present crisis.

The trade unions, Bell notes, are often right about causes, but also seem to have no real grasp of the consequences. Nor, he adds, does the Communist Party because the official who made the “create your own jobs” statement was Buti Manamela, Deputy Minister in the Presidency and a member of the SACP central committee.

Bell also notes that there have been recent reports of the advent of driverless cars that mentioned the loss of 1 million driving jobs in the United States. What will the human cost be, he asks.

He maintains that this position was summed up in 1949 by the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who noted we could all lead a good life with the aid of machines or we could usher in “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty”. This. says Bell, is the real choice facing everyone today.

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