Being jobless means being unable to care for ones own needs because one lives in a society where one depends on others (the “market” and the “employers”) to care for ones own needs.
It seems that joblessness is an inherent phenomenon of highly civilized societies: due to the technology used, there simply is not enough work to do for everybody to work full-time. So politicians and manufacturers try to increase the amount of work by inventing new needs, but this also fells: people on average do not have that many needs, because they do not want the stress implied in fulfilling and managing even more needs. So the only real way to cure joblessness would be a better distribution of work; which will not happen, because in a market based economy, everybody will compete for the “better” jobs, with the bad jobs (joblessness) being assigned to the inferior.
In agricultural societies however, there is no joblessness: in times where there is no better option, people always can work as farmers to get what they need. Therefore, joblessness can be seen as a symptom of “overcivilization”, that is, decadence.
This can be used as a solution to joblessness even in highly civilized societies (but probably not where the state pays the jobless, as they have no motivation to work hard just for their basic needs).
The basis thesis is that every group of people, if coordinated, can provide for all or nearly all of their needs. So, jobless people would join as communities, each about 100 people from the same area, and start mastering their life together. By pooling the tools, facilities and knowledge they have, or have access to, a synergy arises that makes successfully caring for ones needs feasible, while it is very hard when totally living on ones own.
In practice: there would be smartphones, or big boards at a central place, or any other coordination device. People can request resources from each other. The principle is to value all contributed time equally, with regards to distributing the results. The community can care for their needs in these areas: housing (using tents, squattering, or being assigned empty houses officially until they are torn down); food (agriculture, gardening, Guerilla gardening, containering); furniture (own carpentery); clothing (refurbishing trashed clothes; sewing own clothes); basic health care (skilled people in the community; using the web to research information).
Also, the cooperative work style of a community allows to found ones own business easily: it is large enough right from the start to profit from synergy and therefore get a good market position; but there is no risk included, as employed people are not paid as employees, but work in a cooperative, and their basic needs are backed by the work of the rest of the community. The business will only be used to get the “foreign exchange” to buy what the community cannot create itself; applied to a whole society, this would therefore not lead to too much companies, so there would be no competition that would drive companies out of business.
Using money is always an indicator that the coupling is high (needing others to fulfill ones needs, rather than working in a collaborative autarchic community). Also, competition is always an indicator that there is oversupply in one area.
In such autarchic communities, there can also be the motivation to get more efficient. Because then, the average daily work time can be lowered, which is the time every member has to contribute to get his basic needs provided for by the community, that is, to survive. In an efficient community, this value should be as low as 3 hours average daily work time (means 4.2 hours daily work time for people who choose 5 days a week). People would be free to use the remaining time just as they want: free time (travelling, sports etc.), working to increase the efficiency in the community, working for personal “luxury needs” (like travelling), helping others free of charge.
These communities would be purely economic communities, not forcing the members to live together etc.. But of course, people who became friends and want to live together as a group may do so.
Perhaps, such a system could be set up in cooperation with the government’s job agency of a country?
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