You want to demonise me? Go right ahead.

[avevale_intelligencer]

I've never had a job I could be really proud of, or one that made me feel rewarded in proportion to my efforts (though the staff discount at Titan was nice). I don't suppose for a moment I ever will. My job, my real job, is writing and making music, and at the moment I can barely even do that, though with encouragement from good friends I am trying. The kind of jobs that involve working for a boss, doing what the boss needs done, don't interest me. I don't perform particularly brilliantly in them. I can be more use, I can turn more of myself to advantage, doing other things.

But I've done them, and I'll do them again given the chance and the health. I get that society depends on a number of people doing things they'd rather not be doing, and I have no objection to being part of that. Where I baulk is where people tell me that number is 100%; that everyone (except the rich, naturally) has to be working for wages, enriching a boss, or society will fall apart. Because I know that is simply not true. If it were true, there would be people outside job centres grabbing passers by and saying "Have you got a job? Are you working? You're not? Thank God! We desperately need people to shore up the flood walls along the river bank! Grab a shovel and come with me!"

Well, maybe I exaggerate, but a fleeting glance at the sits vac in the papers is enough to show me that mere work, such as a bod like me can provide, has never been less in demand. Every day brings news that more jobs have been cut from here or from there. Every day brings reports of government slashing away at the overstaffing in the public sector (now, when I worked in the public sector, my office seemed to be horribly understaffed quite a lot of the time, but still they slashed then as they slash now, so obviously I must have been wrong). How a government can say out of one side of its face "everyone must work" and out of the other "we have too many people working for us" and not stand revealed to the world as a pack of canting, lying, black-souled yellow-livered duplicitous hypocrites, is a mystery I am not wise enough to unravel. But the logic is clear. If there were need for work, that need would be made obvious by employers crying out for willing workers. There is no such cry. There is no such need.

So, for the moment, I'm okay about taking handouts from the state while those handouts last. Not just because it means we can eat, but because the fact that those handouts exist shows me that my country is functioning as it should. People do more than work. It's good to have a proportion of one's people not being forced to work for a boss. Some of them will be sick, and should be being cared for. Some of them will be elderly, and should be resting after a long life of labour. And some of them will be lollygagging layabouts like me, who even if they weren't sick and elderly would still be better employed using their talents to make things that no boss can use.

I see on the net that somebody has killed some children, and the papers are saying he did it because he was on benefits. (My gods, why didn't I think of that?) One supposes it's only a matter of time before the crimes committed by every single other unemployed person are brought to light, crimes that nobody with a job would ever have perpetrated. You don't get professional people like doctors committing murder, after all. You don't get high-powered executives embezzling funds from their own companies, while still pocketing their stupidly inflated salaries. You don't get politicians engineering the deaths of thousands in unwarranted foreign wars to line their own pockets. They're working, for goodness sake. (I admit the word acquires a deliciously ironic twist when applied to politicians, but it is, after all, a job of sorts.)

So yeah. I don't particularly want to work. I like having time to do this, or write my little stories, or look after my wife, or just lie on the bed and ache. I feel no urgent need to sit in a call centre ringing people up and trying to get them to buy their car insurance through my price comparison site for minimum wage and one weekend in four off, or whatever the deal is. I think my time is worth more than that.

Am I an enemy of all that is good in society? You decide.

Comments

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing the papers that are mainly saying that stuff about the Philpotts are the ones that demonize foreigners, young people, people from poor areas, people with dark skin, people with breasts and vaginas, people who vote the "wrong way" and basically any other "minority" (including the religious of any and all faiths) ...

... I'm sure being unemployed, being told you are worthless if you don't have a job, and being given a pittance to live on *and then* being told that might be taken away if they find you "fit to work" (even if there are no jobs) or that your benefits will be cut if you have a "spare room" to below what you couldn't survive on before ... has no effect on people ... particularly not visious evil scum who think only of themselves and are willing to do unspeakable things *anyway* ... and certainly it won't have any effect on the depressed, the desperate, the marginalised, etc. ...
oh wait, I may be using sarcasm there ... who would have guessed.

So yes, I do think that the way the benefits/welfare system has been destroyed could well cause a person to do things they wouldn't otherwise ... but then the solution is not to wreck it further, but to *fix* it and give people hope and support, and help as many as can, go back into rewarding and productive jobs, or do whatever beneficial things for society as they can (babysitting children so others can work, manning government help lines, doing other social work etc.)

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

I was gobsmacked at the specious "He did it because of the benefits" argument. And appalled that John Humphrys didn't just tell that man whose name I forget just how specious his argument was.

I think the Greens have some good ideas about labour, benefits and a healthy society, so that's how I'll be voting next time, even though I may well be whistling into the wind.

[howeird]

FWIW, you have my sincere empathy. I've been near there as a poor starving student earning $8 a day, and as a victim of the dotcom bust twice. I haven't been all the way there due to the lack of another person to care for, and I have always rented not owned where I lived.

A cousin who lives in Olney shared this with me on the Book of Face:
https://www.change.org/petitions/iain-duncan-smith-iain-duncan-smith-to-live-on-53-a-week

And his sister, who has MS and lives in Brighton, has been battling with MPs to come to their senses and rescind time limits for subsidies for people whose disability prevents them from holding a steady job.

---

Please don't kill anyone. Although it would provide you with government housing, clothing and food, you would have to leave all that work on the conservatory behind.

In answer to the question in your last line:

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

No.

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

I identify with this and you'll receive no demonizing from me. *hugs*

[batyatoon]

You are correct on all counts.

I plan to quote you (or paraphrase you, at least) on what the job market would look like if society really needed everybody to be working, next time it comes up.