This has been a passion of mine for around five years, long before I met my current partner and while I was employed by the NSW Government. This is major part of the reason why I left my employment and have taken the road I have. My realisation of this inevitable outcome coincided with the birth of my first grandchild. He was born not long after I turned 50 and was going through major changes to my life. I am scared for him and his. Flotsam and Jetsam: Flotsam is wreckage and Jetsam is discarded, no longer needed. A number of years ago I ran in a federal election. It was in a rural electorate and although I was born and raised a country boy, I had been living or most of my life in the city. At a meet the candidates evening, a farmer asked me what I had been doing. "Information Architect" I told him, "Computer Programmer" I added to stop his obvious next question. He then proceeded to lecture me about how I and my kind were destroying society. You people are what's causing unemployment, you invent ATMs and now they're closing the banks. The internet and all this technology is too much. I never bristled up, I had heard it a million times. "What do you do?", I enquired. He proceeded to tell me he was a wheat farmer, been in his family for generations. "Well" I said, "your family is much more responsible for unemployment and the demise of rural towns than I am". I went on to explain that once, where hundreds of low skilled labourers were used to harvest our grains, thousands of jobs have been lost for each mechanical harvester. "That's progress" he said. We need a pool of unemployed, these however should be employable. In my opinion, they should be paid a benefit fairly close to the minimum wage. We need them as a pool of casual and part time workers, and to allow for fluctuations and market cycles. The fact that some are needed for Christmas time, and may not be needed until the next marketing season, is not the fault of the employee. Just as we get unscrupulous employers, politicians, police, judges etc, believe it or not we get welfare cheats. The system starts to deteriorate, largely due to a combination of man's laziness and greed along with the huge task of policing it. It does not mean however that the pool of unemployed, created by and needed by our economic machinery does not need to be protected and nurtured. This area of society is growing in size and now power. As knowledge is power, and mobile and internet technology allow them easy access to knowledge they are gaining power. We need to look at this part of our society now, we need to look at it with open eyes and open hearts. We need to understand that even some of the worst of them are created more by our treatment of them initially than any other reason. Sure there are those among them that are just plain bad, but so are some that sit in parliaments, behind the benches in court rooms and in company board rooms. Thread started at Forum 4 Politics on 04-09-2012 01:22 AM
