Socialist Labour Competition

[Young Master Smeet]

Slightly inspired by seeing some 19th Century Labour Time vouchers in an exhibition the other day.

I've mentioned this site before, http://www.spliddit.org/apps/tasks so the algorithm applied on that app allows people to share tasks out so people can feel they are doing an equal share of the work.

The way it works is that for a group of people a range of tasks are decided on, and their frequencies needed over a period recorded.  Each participant in the group is then asked to compare their preference for each task relative to the most frequent/time intensive taske, and record how many iterations of their preferred task they would do in over the none preferred task.  Or, as the survey puts it:

Quote:

For each row, choose which task you'd prefer. Then, enter a multiplier to indicate how many times you'd be willing to complete your preferred task instead of completing the other task once. For example, if you believe that working the night shift is equal to working one and a half day shifts, select day shift and enter a multiplier of 1.5.

Now, I can't see why we couldn't replace basic repetitions of a task with time spent on the task.

Further, I could see that whilst it would be impractical to ask everyone to rank all tasks, we could aggregate thousands (or millions) of  we could find a broad social consensus on the relative preferences between tasks.  So that, if we, say, all agreed that we'd have a working week of twenty hours, some people doing non-preferred tasks could work ten hours and still count as having worked the full time.

This would lead to something like competition in the labour system which could ensure that we (as a community) tried to spare non-preferred labour, but also ensure it gets done.

Somethign like this may give us that practical 'hook' people demand when they ask how things would work, they would recognise the basics, firms looking for workers, people seeking a 'good job' and instead of a erward of a massively better standard of living, non-preferred tasks would be rewarded with a shorter working week (which would fall for everyone as we try and spare labour generally).

[Author]

Posts