We can understand people whose primary demand is to have access to lifetime employment, out of fear of precarious work and its terrible elements.
However, if we wanted to go further with this demand, we could dare to ask for much more: the right to change jobs in order to find the one that suits you best and the means to acquire training to be able to do the job.
In fact, how can we ask to spend all of our lives in the same place, in the same job, which was often chosen at random? Does anyone really feel that they were born to spend the only life that they have on this planet working in one company? Among those who make such claim today, how many believe that it is an ideal life, for them and others, to spend all his life as a traffic controller or a nurse, without having the right to try anything else?
This demand made sense in the 19th century, and in the early 20th century, when the mere fact of having a salaried job was liberation from servitude’s exploitations. But today ?
We can understand such a claim in the context of trying to avoid unemployment, disarray and precariousness. But should we not demand the opposite, that is to say the right not to be locked up for life, during one’s only life, in a single profession, a single skill?
Do not tell me that if one refused such an option, it is because that person is risk-averse: in reality, it is too often because of the enjoyment of alienation, because we do not have the audacity to want more. It is similar to the situation of someone who is offered to be freed from prison but instead asked to be locked up for life and that his jailer throws the key into a well.
Am I exaggerating? Yes, I do so voluntarily in order to make people think. Obviously, it only makes sense if, outside of the prison, we have the means to live a real life. A good life.
I am convinced that the great demand of the 21st century will not be the guarantee of employment. It will instead be the right and the means to find what one wants to do with his or her life, to have access to training for it and to try it. The right to truly become ourselves.
Work is not an end in itself if it is not wanted and chosen. It should also be a calling, as well as liberating and fulfilling. We should be able to change jobs if our calling and desires have changed, without jeopardizing the sustainability of income.
In a very real sense, the permanent employee contract and its related provisions should be replaced by a guarantee by the State to provide any person, wishing to change his occupation, a training income to help him find the work that suits him, and to accompany him in doing so. Provided, of course, that he really trains, and that it leads to a concrete solution, within a reasonable timeframe (a year at most), and to an economically viable and socially useful job.
Therefore, the unions should instead advocate for their members be entitled to get paid training rather than a job for life. They are not doing it because their legitimacy is derived from a company and it is the job in that company that they are mandated to defend.
Wouldn’t it be more stimulating to claim the right to a chosen life than to claim the guarantee of alienation for life?
If we move toward this new world, it will completely overthrow the definition of social democracy, social protection, and social struggle. It will happen someday. Not necessarily in Europe first. Perhaps in a dictatorship that will have understood the interest in doing so: it would not be the first time that social democracy begins with its totalitarian caricature.
There is still time to avoid it.
j@attali.com
