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[firecat]

via keryx

"The Politics of Consumption: an Interview with Juliet Schor" in Aurora Online Magazine

http://aurora.icaap.org/2004Interviews/JulietSchor.html

Excerpt:

Basically, the market sector has been cannibalizing the domestic sphere, sucking huge flows of labour out of the unpaid sector - labour that is absolutely essential to the preservation and reproduction of the social fabric.

I was thinking about this while I was visiting the OH's aunt at the hospital yesterday. There weren't enough staff there to give patients attention they could use. At the same time, there are lots of people out of work and people working in dead-end, minimum-wage-or-less jobs and kinda pointless jobs. (Technical editing, which is what I usually do for money, seems kinda pointless to me when I'm visiting a patient in a hospital.)

I know it's not a matter of snapping your fingers and reassigning people where they can be more useful, but I kind of wish it were. Or something.

Comments

[keryx.livejournal.com]

It is a really complicated issue, and part of me just wants to put something like the WPA back in place - so there was a system by which people could be redistributed into the gaps in the workforce, and be provided for in the process. It may be overly idealistic, but it just seems so simple in concept.

[firecat]

Yeah. It may be too idealistic to expect it to happen any time soon, but it is something a government is capable of doing, if the people want it to.