Parecon--Page 4

Now their is the part knon as balanced jobs. What is it?

3. Balanced Jobs

There is one more component of Participatory Economics that is also part of our proposal for how to avoid a techno-managerial ruling class from dominating in a post-capitalist system. This is the proposal of balanced jobs.

This is a program that we envision being carried out by the worker federations in industry and is a basic item to ensuring the empowerment of ordinary workers.

The idea is that jobs would be systematically re-designed throughout the economy. What we would look at would be things like the tasks that involve creativity, conceptualization, decision-making or personal empowerment in the economy, on the one hand, and tasks that involve rote work, the doing of manual labor or the not especially pleasant aspects of production.

And what we do is we re-design jobs so that they are balanced between skill and design work on the one hand, and the doing of the physical work, the less desirable or less empowered work. We also systematically change the educational system to democratize access to expertise and information and training, we integrate this with the system of production itself. The idea is to facilitate everyone having the opportunity to have their skills and talents developed, and yet everyone also must do their share of the grunt work, the sheer physical labor of production.

To take an example, right now people are hired in transit system hierarchies to do service planning typically only if they have college degrees. Meanwhile, there is a large group of people who are expected to do the stressful work of driving a bus day in and day out. Yet in fact a lot of bus drivers have an interest in transit and transit planning issues. Some fairly simple techniques are involved in service planning, including rules of thumb and use of some simple mathematical techniques. These things can be taught. So, with balanced jobs, you might have someone who would spend part of their time at work doing service planning or system design work, and part of their time cleaning or driving buses.

That’s basically the idea of balanced jobs.