Employers' guide to trashing a community
It doesn't take much to start trashing a community. For a start, bring in people from hundreds of kilometres away to replace permanent workers. Don't offer the incoming workers anything but piecemeal and temporary jobs for the barest minimum wage (if they are lucky). What happens to them when they aren't employed is none of your business.
Advertise these wonderful opportunities on the local radio station to make sure you have got a surplus to choose from. Don't give them housing, let them squat, wherever, but let the proper houses that were occupied by the permanent workers, before they were retrenched, fall into the hands of thieves and squatters who take away the doors and the windows and finally, show incredulity when crime happens.
Subcontracting and sub-contracting ...
big fleas and little fleas...
big fleas and little fleas...
This process is in danger of gaining momentum. Like it says in the jingle, big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em - and the little fleas and so on ad infinitum.
Most subcontractors don't have a permanent workforce but hire and fire according to the work that's passed on to them. Minimum Wages and Unemployment Insurance aren't words that are bandied about much.
In short these are phenomenon that the World Bank are proud of promoting: Sub contraction is one of the ills that globalisation brings in its wake: Insecurity. What do temporary workers do on days when they are not working and they haven't got money in their pockets?
They have little to do, they just hang about and petty theft becomes more common. The crime rate goes up.
Yes it's true that not all the blame should fall on the subcontracting companies . Some, after all, are just providing work to people who would otherwise have no jobs at all.
The government thinks it is cleaver encouraging deregulation and subcontracting as a way of generating employment. But deregulation means ditching labour laws that used to give workers some security. If conditions of work lead to insecurity and crime, what does this say about the quality of that work?
The International Labour Organisation has launched the quaint notion into our world that work has to be decent if it is to address the problems of poverty and crime. It describes decent work as work that is productive and secure, provides an adequate income and offers social protection.
Until government and employers begin to take this seriously, the effects of globalisation will increasingly trickle down into our communities and they are just as destructive as a virus.
How to make a community flourish
Taken from a talk given by the American environmentalist, Wendell berry.
- Ask what any change will do to your community.
- Include local nature as part of your community.
- Ask how local needs might be supported from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.
- Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the doctrine of labour saving if that implies poor work, unemployment or any kind of pollution or contamination.
- Develop small scale industries and businesses.
- Strive to produce as much of your own energy as possible.
- Strive to increase earnings, in whatever form within the community.
- Invest in the communities to maintain its properties, keep it clean (without dirtying some other place) look after its old people and teach its children.
- Arrange for the young and the old to take care of each other, eliminating institutionalised child care and "homes" for the aged.
- The young must learn from the old.
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