Tag Archives: work

What do you do when your economy is in the doldrums and you need to kickstart growth?Why, you put more people to work, that's what you do.This has been the Tories’ strategy since 2010. The sustained attack on welfare benefits has all been focused on “making work pay” - encouraging, and at the margin forcing, people with illnesses, disabilities and caring responsibilities into paid work. But there is another way of putting more people to work, and that is to import them. In a new report, the...

Is More Work Better? Think Again? The freedom of free time, branded as unproductive “leisure,” gets no respect. Originally published at Wealth Economics This post is prompted by a recent tweet from the excellent Joey Politano, but it’s not singling out Joey in particular. “We could be working so much more.” It’s hard to come away with any other message. This tweet’s just one example of a lurking, largely unspoken, and quite likely...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I — Introduction About a decade ago, I wrote a short piece about “labour power as a common-pool resource” that got picked up by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and led to me being invited to a conference on the commons in Berlin put on by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. I would now like to amend that to regard disposable time as the common-pool resource in question. Much of my original rationale applies...

The italian website Bollettino Culturale hosted the following interview with Stavros Mavroudeas on the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences on the economy and labour https://bollettinoculturale.blogspot.com/2021/07/intervista-stavros-mavroudeas-sulla.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR3zji71ezVNRABTmQbI4k-Uf7MYewhy26pdjmXISxlH2FdhMygmRswj_qs 1. How do you judge the management of the pandemic in the European Union? I have argued elsewhere...

We are used to thinking of workers as free agents who sell their labour in a market place. They bid a price, companies offer a lower price and the market clearing rate is somewhere between the two. Free market economics, pure and simple. But actually that's not quite right. The financial motivations of workers and companies are entirely different. To a worker, the financial benefit from getting a job is an income stream, which can be ended by either side at any time. But to a company, a...

We are used to thinking of workers as free agents who sell their labour in a market place. They bid a price, companies offer a lower price and the market clearing rate is somewhere between the two. Free market economics, pure and simple. But actually that's not quite right. The financial motivations of workers and companies are entirely different. To a worker, the financial benefit from getting a job is an income stream, which can be ended by either side at any time. But to a company, a...

I have long disagreed with Guy Standing about the solutions to unemployment. 20 years ago we crossed paths on panels and in the literature where he would argue that UBI was the way forward and I would argue that it was a neoliberal plot and that, instead, we needed to push for job creation. My view has always been that to surrender to the neoliberals on their claim that governments cannot generate sufficient jobs to satisfy the desires for work of the unemployed was a slippery slope....

It is 2.30 am, and I can't sleep. Today I must file my final piece for American Express's FXIP blog, which is being mothballed. Writing for that blog has been my main source of income for the last four years. Once it is gone, my income will once again become precarious and inadequate, as it has been all too often in the past. Hence my sleeplessness.To be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry that the blog is closing. I've done some interesting work for it, and learned a lot. And it has been a...

It is 2.30 am, and I can't sleep. Today I must file my final piece for American Express's FXIP blog, which is being mothballed. Writing for that blog has been my main source of income for the last four years. Once it is gone, my income will once again become precarious and inadequate, as it has been all too often in the past. Hence my sleeplessness.To be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry that the blog is closing. I've done some interesting work for it, and learned a lot. And it has been a...

One of the original Kodak “Shirley” cardsGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Have fun to everybody at the NEUDC conference this weekend! Fun fact: the Northeast Universities Development Consortium conference is being held at Northwestern, which is neither in the Northeast, nor the Northwest. The conference has never been held at Northeastern University. So for everybody complaining about confusing econ speak, this is what they do to themselves.An interesting idea...