Who does unpalatable jobs?

One of the most common responses I get when discussing this idea is not just whether anyone will work, but whether anyone will work in the jobs that we find unpalatable. Some commonly raised examples are sewerage workers, cleaners, miners, and so on.

The assumption is that these jobs are so unpalatable that people will not want to do them without some extrinsic motivation. That is, I have claimed that people are motivated by diffuse reciprocity, moral concern, interest, self-improvement, community and the like, but the objection is that none of these are sufficient to motivate someone into a truly unpalatable job. The motivation must therefore be something external, such as greater comfort in other parts of life, which the exchange economy provides through wages that allow market access.

I disagree. I am always surprised to find out who is motivated to do what, including things that I find unpalatable, and some people clearly tell me that they would hate to do my job because parts of it are unpalatable to them (such as public speaking, being put on the spot, dealing with students, and so on). I also think that moral concern and diffuse reciprocity would likely go further than a lot of people assume, and that many people are interested in things that others find gross or difficult.

But let's say that there are insufficient people motivated to do some of the jobs that we find unpalatable today. What are our options? Well, the main lever that businesses and society can pull to encourage people into unpalatable jobs are to change conditions to make them more palatable, to reduce the amount of time that people work them, to change people's opinions about the jobs themselves, or to find alternative ways to achieve the same goals.

Better conditions

I'll take two examples to try and think through encouraging people to work in unpalatable jobs. The first is a cleaner. This is not necessarily a job that every despises, but it is a common enough job that I think we can consider its context fairly well. Cleaners have to deal with a lot mess, sometimes biohazards, disrespect, and often long hours. The other job worth considering is a miner, who might have to spend long periods of time away from their family and whose work could be quite dangerous.

Now, one of the reasons I think cleaners often work in poor conditions is because they are not direct revenue raisers. That is, while their job is essential for an excellent customer experience, they themselves don't participate in things like sales where it is clear how much income is associated with the work. That is not to say that all businesses undervalue cleaners, but rather that as a type of industry cleaning is not always associated with high pay and good conditions. The business does want the place clean for customers, but they may spend more putting resources into those things that they directly associate with revenue (the product, the salespeople, and so on).

That's obviously not something that applies in a non-reciprocal gifting economy. There is no revenue, and there is no profit, so the benefit of cleaners is cleanliness. The job isn't to increase the number of customers buying things (that is not to say that a business would not try to make enough to suit customer demand), and so cleanliness would likely not be such a demoted component of the work. That, in and of itself, is likely to ensure that more resources are directed at cleaners.

What could be changed, then? The first things are better equipment, better timeframes to work, and perhaps times when customers clear the area which is being cleaned, rather than constantly having to work around people. The notion of customer primacy (that the cleaner needs to work around the customers sensibilities rather than this being a process of mutual respect) would also change, because the customer is not upholding the business by purchasing the product, and more power (and support) could be given to cleaners to clear customers or employees to clean areas.

One of the biggest issues with mining is safety, and although safety is not necessarily a low priority, some safety concerns are offset by the idea of paying employees for the "risk". The drive for profit and efficiency does not necessarily mean that companies do not strive to meet safety standards, but can mean that companies do not strive to raise safety standards to the highest possible level. Often, it is the government that constructs and enforces these standards and not the companies, which illustrates a tension between what the exchange economy motivates and what society believes is appropriate. In a non-reciprocal gifting economy, this tension dissolves, because there is no profit-drive to motivate the company in a direction away from safety standards. The result is that standards might not stop at the ceiling that donor-funded political parties are going to reach as a compromise that reflects this tension, but instead both groups would be motivated in the same direction to improve those standards.

More workers, less full time work

I argued earlier that an exchange economy includes all sorts of busy jobs and all sorts of jobs that are needed to sustain the exchange, and that a non-reciprocal gifting economy would not need these jobs. This means that there are a lot more workers in reserve. And while I've generally been treating workers as a binary - either a person is working or not - it would be more appropriate to treat them as a scale of effort and hours, where a more motivated worker will work for more hours and a less motivated worker will work for fewer hours, with a floor at zero.

One of the consequences of freeing people up from busy jobs and exchange-sustaining jobs is that they could then attend to other work instead. The budget exists for a certain number of teachers and nurses, but if the budget weren't a hiring constraint, then perhaps we would see more teachers and nurses and lower student/teacher ratios and nurse/patient ratios. But the other outcome is that we could see more people working in unpalatable jobs, enabling either more support within the job or, perhaps more significantly, people working fewer hours in these jobs.

Take the cleaner, for example. At the moment a lot of people who work as cleaners work a lot of hours - some are full-time, some are full-time as a second job, some work a significant number of hours part-time. If they were to scale back their hours, then they would not be paid as much and might find it more difficult to survive. The job is a full-time job not necessarily because a person wants to commit to it full time, but because people need to commit to it in order to have a sufficient quality of life.

With more people freed up from busy jobs and pay not a factor, the job of the cleaner can be distributed across more people, so that anyone who participates in cleaning is only committing to a smaller part-time role. This means that if the job is unpalatable there is no need to make someone commit to it full-time, lowering the barrier for people who find themselves motivated towards contributing effort to something they find meaningful but unpalatable.

Changed status

Unpalatable jobs are also often unpalatable because of the context and perception of the job in addition to the content of the job itself. Cleaners are sometimes seen as lower or lesser - people are happy to leave rubbish and make a mess knowing that the cleaner will clean it up. Moreover, they associate the role of the cleaner with their livelihood, their obligations and even their ambition and success in life: "If I don't leave a mess, they won't have a job to do." "It's fine to leave a mess, because it's their job to clean it up." "People get the jobs that they deserve."

But in a non-reciprocal gifting economy, the cleaning is voluntary, and so trashing a place or mistreating the cleaner is likely to make them quit - and if that happens, the location might be messy next time. If it's a place that people want to visit (presumably that is one of the likely reasons that they are there) then they may be more incentivised to leave the place clean knowing that it's not just "someone's job". In fact, if there is recognition that the job is unpalatable and that someone is doing it as volunteer labour, that might reframe it as a more noble or moral contribution.

Some jobs are likely to be replaced

If a job is sufficiently unpalatable, there will be a drive to transform or replace the job, or to find an alternative. Perhaps the job will disappear altogether. That might also imply that the product will disappear altogether as well, but if no one is really motivated to do the job, then its necessity is likely in question and the job is likely not seen as sufficiently beneficial to society.

Take strawberry picking for example. In some circumstances it is gruelling. Let's say that the conditions are awful and can't be changed, and the job is seen as too difficult. The end result might be that no one picks strawberries. This might be seen as a loss to society - lots of people love strawberries after all - but if the cost of the strawberries was unpalatable labour, then perhaps it is simply not worth the cost. This cost-benefit analysis was something invisible when other people were picking the strawberries and the product was taken for granted, but it simply isn't the case that people have a right to strawberries and someone needs to pick them. The exchange sort of covers up the cost by making a claim that the people involved are fairly remunerated, but the fact that people will do something for a particular amount of pay doesn't necessarily mean that it is fair - an idea that is constantly debated by economists and within democracies.