A fool and his money

SET in reverse

Bernard Hollowood

How would you like to be paid E1.50 an hour to fill bottles with water from the Thames north bank and empty them into the river on the south bank? It sounds crazy, but something similar was suggested by Louis Blanc in Paris in 1848 and if we really are threatened with the scourge of massive unemployment, I suppose equally idiotic ideas will be put forward to make work and so prevent mass idleness generating social unrest and perhaps revolution.

One way of creating jobs — and saving energy — would be to switch off a lot of our machines and revert to hand labour. There was a time, not so very long ago, when grass and standing corn were cut by scythes instead of by wonderfully efficient oil-driven reaping machines, and the temporary retirement of these machines would increase employment in agriculture by 500 or 600 per cent.

We could similarly step up the number of jobs available in textiles by reverting to spinning wheels and hand looms, and lots of work could be found for women and little boys in coalmines if we abandoned the social and technological progress of the last hundred and fifty years.

How does the idea of a return to a more primitive form of existence grab you? An oil sheikh was telling us on TV the other day that we could do without his fuel if we had the guts of our forefathers. "There was a time," he said (and I'm paraphrsing), "when oil-fired central heating was unknown and people made do with coal fires. And before the exploitation of coal you British somehow managed to exist in houses without heat of any kind." All of which is perfectly true.

Some would say that the British people were fitter during the last war than at any time in this or the nineteenth century. We were without cars or television, food was rationed and plain, and our houses often lacked heat. We were corn

pulsively busy, though many of our labours were unproductive and irrelevant. A stupendous output of ergs was consumed in such tasks as collecting savings, unravelling string and knitting-wool, digging trenches and constructing shelters, sorting through waste, converting newspaper into firelighters or salvage, cultivating barren land and drilling as guerrillas and Home Guards. Oh yes, we made plenty of work.

Another way to cut unemployment is to ration work. Though most of us grumble about the long hours of a typical working day we feel that we are entitled to work throughout a third of each day or one half of our waking hours. Yet, there is nothing sacrosanct about the eight-hour day: we could organise work in mines, factories and farms to yield twice as many shifts as it does at present, and once we had adapted ourselves to the reorganisation — and to the lower pay involved — I dare say we should, most of us, feel grateful for a four-hour or six-hour working day and for the increased leisure made available to us.

So I don't think we ought to worry too much about the threat of massive unemployment : there are so many ways of increasing work (uneconomically admittedly) and so many ways of sharing work (make a note to seek the advice of any Women's Libber on this) that unemployment should present few problems for a thinking government.

At present the Post Office is toying with plans to reduce the number of postal workers by restricting deliveries and collections and by asking householders to walk to the end of the drive or the foot of a high-rise block of flats to collect their mail. These plans would be valid in times of high employment. In fact the service industries generally ought to be used as regulators and stabilisers of employment. The country experiences a boom and needs all its hands for productive work in industry, and automatically the government increases the available productive manpower by curtailing social services and requiring the citizen to read his own meters (gas and electricity), collect his mail from the local post office, dump his own refuse, make his own bed and empty his own slops in hospital, police himself and his car, calculate his own income tax and, of course, dial his own telephone numbers.

Then the country's economY slumps and the process is reversed. Now, to create work — or, rather, to transfer work from the unpaid householder to the paid service worker — we are all waited on hand and foot by government and local government employees. Armies of them. Employment at the post office rises as the, number of collections and deliveries per day is stepped up to six or seven, as school leavers are paid to lick stamps for us, as we are encouraged to funnel all our telephone calls through batteries of helpful operators .

You see the idea? The Labour Party got near to it with its Selective Employment Tax (SET), but made it inflexible and quite unable to cope with mounting unemployment. We need a new form of SET that plunders the service industries for skill and labour during periods of high employment and economic boom, and inflates the services in times of economic gloom and mounting unemployment.

At present, faced with the prospect of two million unemployed by the end of 1976, the Government should be inflating the services like mad. I badly need help with my tax returns and so, for that matter, does ray tax accountant. I'm too old to grovel under the sink to read the meters 'and I should welcome regular visits from some nubile young meter-reader of the fair sex. STD is efficient but impersonal and I look forward to a return of the friendly telephone operator.

The retirement age for men should be reduced to fifty-five and there should be an army of government masseuses to attend to the ailments of young pensioners.

I'm sure I'm right, but is Wilson himself flexible enough to adopt the obvious answer to Britian's looming problem?