this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
552 points (97.1% liked)
Antiwork
8267 readers
3 users here now
-
We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
-
We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
Partnerships:
- Matrix/Element chatroom
- Discord (channel: #antiwork)
- IRC: #antiwork on IRCNow.org (i.e., connect to ircs://irc.ircnow.org and
/join #antiwork) - Your facebook group link here
- Your x link here
- lemmy.ca/c/antiwork
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, just wanted to say this. In almost all experiments with Universal Basic Income it turns out people don't wanna scroll Tiktok 24/7 or whatever. Most people want to do thinks that we would call "work". We just don't wanna do them in this capitalist hellscape full of meaningless bullshit jobs.
There are a lot of meaningful but awful jobs out there, like picking crops and scrubbing public toilets, that nobody in their right mind wants to do. Perhaps they can be automated, but we'd have to automate them and institute UBI at the same time in order to avoid mass starvation and/or civilization collapsing. Seems tricky…
I'd love to scrap toilets for the right pay.
I don't think that people don't like doing those jobs. I believe that it comes back to the toil aspect, since those jobs are undervalued the pay is low and the hours are long. The two solutions I see are:
People who would enjoy that kind of work, but don't want to work the grueling hours will do it.
For things like harvesting, there was already a good (If inhumane) option, Serfs. You only need o harvest a couple times a year, so if you're on UBI then a couple times a year everyone goes and harvests the fields.
I feel like we are already beginning to see an inversion in wages, where education is less valued and skilled labor is more valued.
Either UBI will include compulsory labor in low supply jobs or those jobs will earn a premium.