The problem is not one of few jobs, poorly trained or unmotivated workers or liberal arts education vs. vocational training or who funds it. It is that there is little worthy of a person to do inside the job market but that holding a job is the only way to survive. Although both liberals and conservatives want to see "full employment," partisans of neither ideology seem concerned about the actual human experience or the consequences of working for workers. Nor do they consider it a problem that the only reason the vast majority of us who hold jobs or seek jobs do so is for the money.
Before dismissing me as terminally simple-minded, consider that most people hate their jobs, that a huge number of people (including school children) are medicated for depression, anxiety, anger, impulsiveness or despair. Liberals deal with this by calling for higher wages, better benefits, more democratic work environments, better trained workers and (minimal) help for those out of work. Conservatives deal with it by preaching sermons about character, individual responsibility, godliness, the free market and the old days when people (allegedly) did what they were supposed to, what the market economy and the ruling class morality required, and everything was peachy. In either case members of neither camp consider the distress to the soul nor the humiliation to the spirit of going in (day in, day out) to do something you wouldn't do if you didn't get paid for it.
I understand that there are things we have to do in order to live: tilling, planting, tending, excavating, gathering, refining, building, interacting with others, making songs, pictures, dances, fictions, etc. But stuffing teddy bears or molding plastics or selling chocolates or marketing appliances or groceries or sweat shop produced sneakers or entering data into a computer or forcing children to pay attention in a schoolroom or being part of an assembly line is really not among them. They only seem to be because the corporate powers have shaped the world so that people are commandeered into performing those tasks in order to earn money. Money is necessary only because the corporate entities have made it necessary by grabbing up the resources (among which we may, in terms of the market, number ourselves), the means of production and of distribution.
Glenn Foster then wants, really, the same thing as Susan Auld: workers toiling inside the money economy obeying corporate dictates. Only, he wants people to love Big Brother, to be motivated and committed to a corporate entity or to an individual who controls us by means of the economic necessities imposed by the market/money economy.
In defense of the project to transform men and women into economic machinery, not only does he romanticize the past by seeing Spartan virtue where there was desperation but he falsifies it. Contrary to what he writes, the industrial revolution was "spurred and sustained" by the blood, limbs and lives of boys and girls mangled and murdered in the Satanic mills, by workers doing sixteen hour days locked in deadly factories (remember the women who perished in the Triangle fire, burned to death or killed plunging out of windows) and by men maimed and crushed in the dark pits of the earth or the saloons of their bosses, all to make a world which by and large excluded them.
In honor of their memory we must change the world, not fashion yet another generation anywhere on earth to be newly exploited and who believe capitulating to exploitation is a moral virtue.
