The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

14. The Canute Syndrome

14. The Canute Syndrome 160 This paper was never published but was the subject of an interview published in the Irish Independent on 29 September 1986 and also in the In Dublin magazine. WORK, and the methods by which wealth can be distributed, are relentlessly changing – terrifyingly, for many people. There are now in excess of twelve million people unemployed in Europe. Even as I write, that figure will have increased. A large proportion of these people will never again have a job, in the sense of being employed eight hours a day, five days a week. It is simply impossible to redress the imbalance created by technology and other factors and return, however slowly, to full employment for those who have until now been given the expectation of employment in their future. So, after all the shouting and promises, blaming and disclaiming has piled confusion and increased stress upon the problem, we are, at the end of it all, bound to find an alternative solution to unemployment other than jobs for everybody. Sooner or later we must apply ourselves to this task. It may as well be sooner. Personally I feel comforted to find myself no longer a voice crying in the wilderness, saying that employment as we knew it is slipping away. Others are saying it, even politicians are beginning to admit to it. It may lose them votes but those in power will never again be able to create enough jobs to go round. There never were enough jobs anyway. Less than one-third of the population were in jobs when employment was high: just over one million. Of these, less than half (approximately 500,000) are engaged in producing the wealth that we all share. So all the wealth which is available is produced by less than one-sixth of the population . The rest could be made redundant very quickly, their jobs in reality existing as a means of distributing wealth. Yet the job is The Canute Syndrome 161 considered as the only legitimate way of distributing wealth. The number actually engaged in the production of wealth is quite small. Let me illustrate this with some simple statistics: Total population 3,500,000 Total number at work Male 827,800 Female 322,500 1,150,300 (i.e. less than one-third of the population) Those not at work Unemployed 200,000 + Sick and Disabled 80,000 Smallholders 20,000 Total Unemployed 300,000 Students 180,000 Home Duties (almost entirely female) 640,000 Retired 180,000 1,300,000 (i.e. more than one-third of the population) Under fifteen 1,030,000 In fact, for the majority of our citizens, wealth is already distributed through other channels: the dole, old-age pensions, single-parent allowances, etc., but all of these are given grudgingly and those receiving them are defined as of low status and denied self-esteem. Our society still works by the nineteenth-century Poor Law concept – those who ‘make money’ are good; the rest are failures, or at least undeserving dependants. Ideally we must find a way for all our citizens to have a basic standard of living with the freedom to earn creatively on top of that. The effects of unemployment are so painful in our present set-up that it is small wonder it is so difficult to get enough people to listen or to explore alternative methods of distributing the nation’s wealth. Anyone who is currently unemployed or runs the risk of being unemployed is inclined to have tunnel vision, with employment at one end and disaster at the other. People are shunted into this tunnel by society’s attitude to jobs which obviously, in a transitional period, must be to save as many as possible. The Writings of Ivor Browne 162 The ill-effects of unemployment have been shown in several recent studies. There is the sequence of downward social mobility due to loss of work; strong association with illness; likelihood of mortality greatly increases; suicide and homicide increase within a year of increasing unemployment; cardiovascular mortality worsens two or three years after high unemployment. There are three stages of unemployment described: 1. Firstly, after the initial shock, there is a short-lived sense of release or a holiday period, the person being freed from stress and the constraints of work; brooding and real worry have not yet begun. 2. The second stage sees...