An Allegory About a Family

There is a family of five. There is a father, a mother, and three children. In order to make sure that everyone is pulling their own weight, the parents decided to set up a chore system. Each child must earn each meal, a small allowance, and a place to live and sleep by doing some amount of household work. The parents decided that each meal costs an hour of work, allowance costs an hour, and living space costs two hours. So, for three meals a day, a few dollars a week allowance, and a bedroom and bed to live and sleep in, each child was required to work for six hours each day (maybe they were allowed to take weekends off without penalties). Any child could take time off, but they would have to sacrifice meals or allowance, and if they skipped enough work, they would even have to leave home and find another place to live.

When they started this plan, it was easy to come up with enough work for their three children. One did laundry by hand, for several hours a week. Another mowed the lawn with a mechanical push mower for several hours a week. The third spent a few hours a day cooking meals. They all spent a few hours a week cleaning the various rooms in the house. The entire family lived fairly well. Each child earned their three meals a day, their weekly allowance, and their living quarters.

One day, the father came home with a new invention. He had a gas powered lawn mower. The child that mowed the lawn discovered that the gas mower could mow the entire lawn in 30 minutes, instead of the 2 hours that were required for the mechanical push mower. Fortunately, there was always more work to be done and the hour and 30 minutes that were saved were instead spent doing other work.

Sometime later, the father came home with an electric washer and dryer. The child that did the laundry suddenly found that a task that used to take most of a day only took a few minutes here and there, leaving 5 hours of time to fill. With a little work, he found other jobs to take up this extra time.

Next came a microwave oven and microwave dinners, which left the third child with a few hours a day to make up. The same day, the father also brought home a vacuum cleaner, which cut several hours a week off of all the children's work. There was barely any work left to fill the extra time. The child who had been cooking meals found that he could only manage an hour of work a day with what was left. The other two children still had enough work for 3 meals a day and for living quarters, but not enough for any allowance. When the third child went to his parents begging for more work, they told him that there was not more work left to do. His two siblings told him that he was not looking hard enough for more work and told him he was lazy.

The parents discussed several solutions. First, they discussed dividing the work evenly amongst the children, but did the math and found that dividing the 11 hours of work 3 ways came out to 3 and 2/3 hours, which was only enough for each child to have living quarters and a single meal a day, with a second meal every now and then. This was discarded, since it would leave all 3 children malnourished and the current situation was bad for only 1 child. They considered just giving the third child food and shelter anyway, but found it unfair that he should be allowed to break the rules while the other two children had to work hard for their food and shelter, though they did decide to give him a little bit of food, so that he would not starve.

Eventually they found a solution that was not unfair to anyone and still provided the work that the third child needed to survive. They bought a shovel and assigned the child to dig holes on the land they owned just past the edge of the back yard. He was assigned to spend 7 hours a day digging holes, since he was already spending an hour a day making meals. No one needed the holes to be there and nobody benefited from their creation. The entire purpose of the work was to give the third child a way to fairly earn his food, shelter, and allowance.

Analysis:

Ok, if you had not yet guessed (and not read the title), this is an allegory. The parents are those in authority and power, including the government and large businesses. Of course, in real life the work that the "children" are doing directly benefits the "parents". Specifically, the parents tell the children what work to do and how to do it, and then keep a majority of the proceeds for themselves, giving the children only enough to survive and a little bit extra to prevent rebellion.

When the parents in this story obtain technology that reduces the work required for the same amount (or better) of production, instead of allowing the reduced costs of production to benefit the children, they require the children to do other work and keep all the increase for themselves, much like modern businesses.

When the work available is not enough to support all of the workers at the going rates for labor, the businesses blame those that do not have enough work and encourage other workers to believe that they are lazy, regardless of effort spent trying to find work.

When the government steps in to help those that are suffering due to lack of work, they are attacked because it is not fair that people who are not working are getting food and shelter. In short, many people believe that those who are unable to find work due to a lack of available work are the ones at fault and should starve out on the streets.

The current solution is to invent new work to employ some part of those that cannot find work. Much like the child that was given work digging holes, much of this work is pointless labor that accomplishes little or nothing. Further, much like the boy digging holes, some of this contrived work damages the environment and saps resources that we may need in the future.

The best solution the parents in the story had was to divide the work evenly amongst the children. Now, many people may find this to be a poor choice as it would spread resources too thin and none of the children would be able to survive. This is not true. Our economy, even when is was failing recently, is producing far more than is needed for our entire country. It is producing more than is needed for our country and all of our exports. If the analogy is accurate, the parents in the story had more than enough resources to feed, house, and pay their children, even if they were each only doing 3 and 2/3 hours of work a day (note that the children were accomplishing the same volume of work during the 11 hours total that they had previously done over the course of 18 hours; the parents were benefiting no less, even though the number of hours spent working was nearly halved). The reason that they did not split the work evenly is that they did not want to change the rules and they did not want to pay more for labor than they had originally decided on. In short, they liked living like kings at the expense of their children and were unwilling to give up any part of their own obscene salaries, even if it meant that one child was going to starve.

Over the last two centuries, we have advanced technologically by leaps and bounds. Work that used to require hundreds or thousands of people can now be done with only two or three people making sure the machines are working properly. You might argue that the machines have upkeep costs and initial costs that are fairly high, but keep in mind the businesses would not be using them if they cost as much or more than the human labor they replace. Machines that cost thousands of dollars over their lifetimes generally save millions of dollars in the wages of the people they replace. Somehow, in the last two centuries, businesses are making enormous amounts more money, while individuals are only making slightly higher wages (dollar amounts may be significantly higher, but measured by the value of the money, people now are making only barely more than people 100 years ago, and many are making less).

The point of this is that our society would not tolerate a family that was run like this. The parents would be subject to legal action for neglect and for exploitation of children. The workers in this country may be mostly adults, but we are being exploited just like the children in the story. Our government is playing the part of the good guy that makes sure everyone has enough to survive, but just like the bad parent, they are benefiting from our exploitation as well, and are not willing to make sure that we are treated fairly if it means that have to give that up.

I suggest that the best course of action would be first, to set a wage/salary cap. This would cap the hourly wage, as well as the yearly salary, of anyone working as an employee of a company. This includes board members and executive officers. If an owner of a company is taking a wage or salary, it would apply to that wage or salary equally. I further suggest that mandatory overtime pay begin at 20 hours per week (and 6 hours per day), instead of the current 40 and 8. This should not apply on a per job basis, but on a total hours worked. If a person has more than one job, the two jobs should split the overtime pay based on the percentage of time spent at each job. These requirements should be strictly enforced and heavily fined for infractions.

The intent of this plan is to discourage people from working multiple jobs (and discourage employers from hiring people already working another job), and to discourage employers from scheduling employees more than 20 hours in a week. This would double the number of full time jobs available and further increase jobs available as fewer people work multiple jobs. This is essentially forcing work to be split up more evenly. Employers would be forced to raise wages and/or lower prices, since 20 hours a week is not currently enough hours to survive on (and if they choose not to increase wages, they will loose employees or end up dealing with very large unions). The first step, capping wages and salaries, would help facilitate increasing wages and/or lower prices, since a lot of money will be saved by decreasing the wages of board members and officers of large businesses. The large companies are making enough to pay all of their employees fairly and still have plenty for upkeep and expansion. The problem is first, the extremely uneven distribution of wages and second, to rapid of expansion and development.

It is absurd to me that we are producing far more than we need and still we expect those that cannot find work to work for a living. I thought that the objective of technology and advancement was to reduce the amount of work required for people to survive. The information age would never have existed if we had not gotten to a point where we can produce enough for everyone, without needing everyone to work. The Renaissance would never have happened if the Greeks had not had slaves that were able to produce enough goods for the entire civilization, allowing everyone else time to theorize and philosophize, and now we have the ability to do this without slaves and yet somehow we are stuck expecting half of our population to find work that does not exist. We need to take advantage of this unique situation. I think the best way to do that is to reduce the work week by half, and encourage the populace to use the extra time doing things that are productive, like learning new things, experimenting and helping advance technology, and generally working to further improve our quality of life.

At the rate we are going, we are going to entirely replace the workforce with machines, produce extreme surplus, and everyone is still going to starve because we don't think it is fair that they should get any of those goods without doing their 40 hours a week.

Lord Rybec