(no subject)
One of the most hideous new words that has come out of recent political and media discourse is "non-job". Having scapegoated supposedly wasteful public sector practices, and got the general public riled up about that, they moved on to calling it "bureaucracy" - because we can all hate the idea of forms in triplicate and so on - then final arrived at the concept of the non-job. As a buzzword it works (no pun intended) incredibly well because it doesn't have any real meaning, yet it conjures up the image of somebody in a local authority jumper being paid to inspect wheelie bins for squeaky wheels, or check the distribution of ducks across all of the council-maintained ponds. This drives the Middle-Englanders daft, even though everybody knows that they'll be among the first to complain when their wheelie bins start to squeak or they're up to their arses in ducks, but very soon they'll be demanding the immediate redundancy of every last one of these dirty bastards they're paying to count waterfowl. If the bin-inspectors and duck counters will end up on the dole, then self-righteous taxpayers will be moaning about how they're paying these lazy sods to sit at home watching Jeremy Kyle, and exactly nobody will be happy.
The reason that there's no such thing as a non-job is because each and every one of them is somebody's livelihood. They give people self-esteem, keep them out of trouble, and fulfil the vital function of allowing people to house, feed and clothe themselves. Whether or not you agree with how a capitalist society works is beside the point, because we're currently living in one and the only way to get by is to have some means of providing for yourself, which for most of us means the dreaded j-o-b.
The government doesn't want to talk about the very real and human people who are doing these "non-jobs", because that would make their own jobs so much more complicated. Instead they'll tell you about the incentives to work, and how they're going to give the unemployed incentives to get a job and make life harder for "scroungers". They're making unemployment a moral issue, but it's all back to front because they're laying responsibility with the unemployed, and it's starting to skirt the territory of Social Darwinism.
The reason that there's no such thing as a non-job is because each and every one of them is somebody's livelihood. They give people self-esteem, keep them out of trouble, and fulfil the vital function of allowing people to house, feed and clothe themselves. Whether or not you agree with how a capitalist society works is beside the point, because we're currently living in one and the only way to get by is to have some means of providing for yourself, which for most of us means the dreaded j-o-b.
The government doesn't want to talk about the very real and human people who are doing these "non-jobs", because that would make their own jobs so much more complicated. Instead they'll tell you about the incentives to work, and how they're going to give the unemployed incentives to get a job and make life harder for "scroungers". They're making unemployment a moral issue, but it's all back to front because they're laying responsibility with the unemployed, and it's starting to skirt the territory of Social Darwinism.