I spent a bit of time after work playing with the layout of the site. It can get frustrating with different themes because one theme will have a feature you want but not another so it is trying to find the best one that suits. Annoyingly the footer at the bottom of the page won’t take the whole page width when I have the side column up. I am not sure why but I’ve decided to live with it. I have also managed a music page in the hope it will inspire me to play more than I do but we will see.

Anyway….I came across this article in The Age newspaper which tells us workers in regional areas ‘bear the brunt’ of a decline in expenditure and as a result have high rates of underutilisation. It states what is obvious, that what matters is whether people can get enough hours and they job security.

Yesterday’s post gave us a brief overview of how we have shifted from a goal of full employment to using the unemployed as a means of discipling the rate of inflation under a NAIRU approach. It’s a pernicious thing to do it, it effects peoples livelihoods and future prospects and it assumes that inflation is a bigger problem than unemployment!

A superior option which we briefly touched on yesterday was a Job Guarantee. A so called Non-Accelerating Inflation Buffer Employment Ratio (NAIBER) that is it uses a buffer stock of employed rather than a buffer stock of unemployed. A Job Guarantee is a transition arrangement that would function with a National Skills Framework and help workers seek employment in the public or private sectors. Workers rejected by the market have a floor price of $o. A worker ‘from the bottom’ can not be inflationary because there is no other bid for them in the non-JG sector. It is what is termed ‘loose’ full employment as the aim is to have the JG pool has small as possible. It has the advantage of setting a floor for wages which by default becomes the minimum employment conditions. The private sector has to exceed the conditions of the JG if it wants to attract a worker. It practically eliminates wage theft and directs spending directly to where it is needed.

A JG doesn’t take away or replace from other public services. In many of those areas mentioned in the article, increased expenditure on worthwhile public infrastructure, investments in renewables, health and eduction, would direct spending to where it is needed and create jobs. It all requires logistical planning and targeting full employment.

In political discourse there’s always a politician or an economist mystified as to how they create more jobs and the emphasis is on subsidies for mining companies, setting up nonsense funds to spend on infrastructure at some point in the future, yet all that is required is for our Government to have a plan and directly create jobs. As a monopolist of the currency it can always purchase whatever is for sale in Australian dollars, including idle labour. If there is high underutilisation in an area you can have a plan to use that skillset and employ them in some worthwhile public investment.

Articles like the one linked to irritate me because there is a problem stated and generalisations stated by a politician of why that is bad and people needing more work but there is never an actual plan on employing those people.

Conclusion

Only a short post today because I’ve told myself I would attempt to get daily output in an attempt to train myself to write cohesively.