What do a housewife in Chicago and a factory worker in Detroit
have in common?
No one wants to pay you for your labor.
You read that correctly—your work has no economic value. Society
needs you to work, or civilization will fall, but we're not gonna pay you on our dime. Various
politicians might give lip service to the importance of the family or the
right for workers to earn a living wage, but in the plain truth is, for most
of history, caregivers and laborers have been viewed as nothing but slaves. That
we even paid a living wage to our labor class from the early 1940’s till the
early 1990’s is a miracle, and a first in modern society.
It might seem harsh to call our caregivers and laborers slaves,
especially since the Feminist and Labor Movements of the early 20th
century did so much to change that outlook, but the truth still remains. For
even though Feminists would like to deny it, raising children takes time and
attention which means an employer’s and children’s needs are often at odds. And
even though the stock market hates it, the men and women doing the most labor-intensive
work in our society actually need to eat and sleep under a roof at night.
While Feminism made strides in opening doors for women to get
their slice of the economic pie, they have yet to solve the problem that
children need to be raised and that work of caregiving deserves a living wage.
And while Unions popped up all over the land fighting for justice for those who
work the factory line, build our roads, extract and mine our minerals, put out
of fires and protect us from harm, they’ve lost ground in the past twenty
years, no longer able to extract living wages, retirement, safe work conditions
and other benefits from employers, and instead leaving those who do the most dangerous
work in our world behind in poverty.
I think about this a lot and how a Universal Basic Income
might finally grant ALL those who work the freedom to choose their masters. I’ve
written about UBI from a feminist perspective, a technological perspective, as well as an economic perspective. I’ve even suggested that money
isn’t even real, at least not the way you think. My study of wages, money
and reward has led me to the unseemly fact that all civilizations,
including the one we now find ourselves living in, were founded on unpaid labor
both within the home as well as the most labor-intensive part of the economic
pipeline—those jobs that need the most physical effort.
Consider this, the first law on the books against slavery was
made in 1777 CE, when the state of Vermont outlawed it. The first nation to
outlaw slavery was England, in 1807 CE. Slavery
is one of the cornerstones of human society and there’s evidence that it
existed long before writing. Most experts agree that the concept of owning
another person only became affordable with the advent of towns and cities,
where surplus food from the countryside was stored, which may have started as
far back as 10,000 B.C.E. Thus for at least 12,000 years, the idea of owning a
human was completely acceptable. Slavery is even older than currency, and while we no
longer allow slavery in most of the first and second world economies, our
monetary systems were based on a significant portion of the work being free.
Owned humans provided labor in two key areas: the raising of children and
household maintenance (mostly women) and the extraction of raw materials for
the creation of goods, and the building of infrastructure (mostly males).
In the female realm, marriage contracts provided this free
labor. Women were sold by their fathers to potential husbands (the exchange of
a dowry), and then mated to produce and raise children. In addition to birthing
and raising children, wives also took care of the home, the elders, prepared food
and provided free labor for the social structures needed within the community.
In exchange, they were given food and a home.
Of course, there was sometimes romance and love in this
situation, but monetary policy cares nothing about love. The economic conditions
of the marriage arrangement at its most basic is one in which the husband
provided food and shelter for a mate who provided children and the labor of the
home. Women in most societies didn’t chose who their husband would be, their
family did. And within that economic system the labor of the home was unpaid,
and still is to this day. As wealthier classes came into existence, wives of
rich merchants or nobles for example, were able to purchase slaves, usually
women, to help them run the household. This would free the women of the upper-class
to educate themselves and eventually they would be the ones to see the economic
inequality within marriage, and begin to fight for the liberation of women,
starting with women of privilege.
Yet to this day, women of means need lower-class women to do
the work of the home so that they can “lean into” the workplace and make their
fortune, and too often, the lower-class women that make it possible for some of
our sisters to break the glass ceiling struggle to make ends meet. Since the
liberation of women into the workplace, and all of the property, fertility and
divorce rights that went with it, the work of the home is at best a minimum
wage job with no unemployment, retirement or health benefits, whether providing
care for the children, or cleaning the house. And for those women who chose to
do this work themselves, the wage is zero.
In the male realm, slaves were used to do the hard work of
extraction, whether in the mines or in the fields, or building infrastructure, such
as roads, monuments and aqueducts. Men were sometimes born into slavery, but more
likely taken by war into slavery. Slaves were the great prize in any battle. Their
unpaid labor is what fueled our economies for centuries upon centuries. The
Sumerians, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Mongols, Europeans, you name it, all of
those empires were founded on the unpaid labor of male slaves. Their
back-breaking work was the origin for all goods, and still is. We can’t have
computers without the mines, and someone has to extract the minerals. Google Lithium Mine Workers and enjoy
the story of the tech industry's slave labor.
We’ve made strides to use technology to advance this aspect
of labor, yet until the 1800’s, the business plans for all enterprises had at
their foundation slavery—the extraction of everything from bananas to
chocolate, to sugar to gold was done by unpaid slaves. Hence, the most grueling
aspects of business were done for free. The only obligation the slave owner had
was to house and feed their slaves, to the extent that they wanted productivity
from their purchase. Hungry men can’t crawl on their bellies all day in the
coal mine tunnels. Men without shelter won’t live very long. Thus, the labor
wasn’t exactly free, just like the women doing the work of the home, the men
doing the work of the fields needed food and shelter, and their owners provided
it.
It is within this structure of unpaid labor that currency
was born. And in many ways, we’re still operating in the same way, for even
though we’ve come to accept, in part, that humans can’t be owned, that we
should be compensated for our labor, and have a choice as to where we invest
our labor, our monetary system still trends towards free and unpaid labor as
the foundation of its success. Wages and benefits are the largest portion of
any profit and loss statement. Reducing those costs is the easiest way to
raise profits.
We have the understanding that all men and women are equal
under God, but have yet to create an economy where all labor is paid. It’s the
economic need for slaves that made the early Greek philosophy of the rights of
the individual dangerous. This is why they gave Socrates a cup of poison hemlock,
at some level they knew where “know thyself” was going. For once the individual
human is glorified, then the issue becomes which humans are to be free?
Citizens? Slaves? Women? What do you do when the rights of the individual are
in direct conflict with the economy in which you live?
When America outlawed slavery, it fell to the employer to
make sure the laborer was paid enough to provide his own food and shelter. Emancipated slaves lost the protection of their masters but gained the freedom to choose who they
would work for. The transition wasn’t pretty, and many people were taken advantage
of in the early Industrial Age. Enter the Labor Movement. And we’ve been
struggling to make the balance sheet work ever since. The end of slavery
flooded the paid labor market with freed slaves. Later the Feminist movement
would add educated women to the labor pool, and now labor is cheap. So cheap it
can no longer pay for food and shelter. In the end, supply and demand will
always have its way.
This is why the Labor Movement worked so hard to make sure
that the profits created by the work of human hands be distributed to the
workers themselves. Yet today, many working-class men and women find themselves
unemployed, with no one ensuring they have food and shelter. People who broke
their backs, some literally, to give us the world we live in, are ignored,
unseen. The economic system might have bent for a while to ensure the dignity
for those who labor, but as soon as it could ship the jobs overseas where
slavery still exists (China, Burma, Taiwan), businesses did just that, and our
government looked the other way. It’s only a matter of time before those slaves
are replaced by machines. Consider Foxconn, the maker of iPhones. In 2010,
their workers began committing suicide.
The answer? Better wages, or working conditions? No, the solution was robots to replace at least 60,000 of them in 2016. Even the
low-paid Chinese worker with no union rights is too expensive. Better to
replace them with machines.
What then to do with our unemployed laborers? What to do for
the caregivers that earn less than a living wage? How do we create a world
where their work matters? The work of extraction and building must continue,
even with machines at our sides. And the work of caring for children and our
elders is important work. Often laborers and caregivers are the heart and soul
of their communities. Do we let them go hungry, so that the coders and financiers
of the world can make millions and break glass ceilings?
I find it strange that we’d rather pay a low-income woman
money for sub-par childcare, but not pay her money to raise her children herself.
We’d rather subsidize an out of work laborer with food stamps, than pay him a
living wage to fix up houses in his neighborhood, clean up rivers and lakes
polluted by industry, or use his body to protect his people and then reward him
for it (just think of how we treat our veterans). Universal Basic Income, especially
when combined with Social Credit projects such as the one Democratic presidential
candidate Andrew Yang proposes, can
take the ideal that all of us are free one step further. This is the unfinished
business of the great worker and women’s movements of the 20th century.
Universal Basic Income is the completion of the promise to the caregivers and
the laborers of our nation. It’s the only way to create an economy that is no
longer at odds with human rights, and instead works FOR the people, rather than
against it.
