JOBOCRACY PART I - Theories And Applications

“I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.”      -BILL CLINTON

Theories and Applications

The subject of Jobocracy will sound strange or alien to anyone who is an adept follower of world systems. Jobocracy will further awe many readers because the word is not entered into the English dictionary yet. It had no meaning hitherto and so could not be an adjective, synonym, antonym, verb, adjective or any figure of speech. Jobocracy could not be immediately derived from the original word job, whose origin, according to the online Etymology Dictionary, derives from the 1550s, in phrase jobbe of worke "piece of work" (contrasted with continuous labor), perhaps a variant of gobbe "mass, lump" (c.1400;). Sense of "work done for pay" first recorded as job in the 1650s. Slang meaning "specimen, thing, person" is from 1927. The verb is attested from 1660s. On the job "hard at work" is from 1882. Job lot is from obsolete sense of "cartload, lump," which might also ultimately be from gob. Jobber – "one who does odd jobs," 1706, agent noun from job. The new Webster English Dictionary of the English Origin defines job. n. as a specific piece of work, esp. done for pay; an occupation as a steady source of livelihood. You’d get other words like jobbed, jobber, jobbery, etc. in the same dictionary. But today, on this very day, all that will change. Jobocracy has come to stay with us, with meaning and definition for all of us that will embrace it. Jobocracy is not governance or any system of government. Jobocracy is a way of life.

Before I give this word the definition and meaning deserving of it, let me go down history for a better picture and understanding of this word that will soon become a culture. All through the ages, men have proposed systems that changed their societies politically and economically. All through the ages, men have practiced systems that had jobocracy as an ingredient to their successes. Utopianism, right from Plato’s discourse on the subject of Utopia around 380 BC to  the period of Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer of the 1st century who dealt with the blissful and mythic past of the humanity down to Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book, Utopia,  describing a fictional Island in the Atlantic Ocean, has always been touted as a possible political or social-economic ingredient to man’s ultimate comfort, even though in a fictitious state.  In the Chinese culture, the Utopia dream had been extensively discussed by men like Yao Yuanming, in 421 about a chance discovery of an ethereal Utopia where the people lead an ideal existence in harmony with nature, unaware of the outside world for centuries. Then came Egalitarianism  as a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among people: people should get the same, or be treated the same, or be treated as equals in some respect such as race, religion, ethnicity, sex, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and/or cultural heritage.

While most of these systems proposed since the beginning of time and at different era have never been without criticisms, it is also on record that whatever system is practiced is not without errors. For instance,  a study published in 2009 took into account data sets from major world economies and correlated them with inequality indices. The study found that the absolute wealth within a country had little effect on the citizens' well-being or social cohesion and that income inequality correlated strongly with social problems such as homicide, infant mortality, obesity, teenage pregnancies, emotional depression, prison population and unemployment. For example, countries such as Japan, Finland and Norway scored highly in social well-being and income equality, while countries such as the United States and United Kingdom scored low in both. Why is this the case that amidst the wealth of nations, citizens suffer in various forms?

Consider a possible answer from an excerpt from H.D. Henderson’s (M.A.; Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; Lecturer in Economics; Secretary to the Cotton Control Board from 1917-1919) Essay on Liberalism, titled UNEMPLOYMENT, “It would, indeed, be a miracle, if it were not for the fact that those old economic laws, whose impersonal forces of supply and demand, whose existence some people nowadays are inclined to dispute, or to regard as being in extremely bad taste, really do work in a manner after all. They are our co-ordinators, the only ones we have; and they do their work with much friction and waste, only by correcting a maladjustment after it has taken place, by slow and often cruel devices, of which one of the most cruel is, precisely, unemployment and all the misery it entails.”

Men have always dreamt of such a state where comfort can be accorded the citizenry but the travail of our time have never allowed for that. H. G. Wells said this in his book, A Modern Utopia “Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents, we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of public thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavour, and overcome.”

It is no wonder therefore that in a bid to find the solutions to economic problems, individuals have come together to form cooperative societies which currently also embraces institutions to the extent that the first cooperative principles were established by the Rochdale Pioneers in England in 1844 and observed consistently by successful societies since that time till date. At the back of the minds of members is a society that would create equality and allow members to live in a perceived Utopian-styled setting amongst themselves but with just slight variations from the perceived Utopian society as propounded by Plato.

Co-ops have flourished against the uneven and conflicting economic policy prescriptions from policy makers, an inconsistency that has tenaciously and dangerously eroded social and economic structures to the extent that Africa has become the experimental ground for world economic powers to profligate their future economic ideas and practices. Individuals in rural communities can achieve economic and social objectives as a group that they could not achieve as sole producers, workers or consumers (C. D. meret and N. Walzer, 2004). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, co-ops still have an enormous impact on the North American and Global economy, even though the contributions that co-ops make have changed in quantitative and qualitative ways over the past two centuries. Proponents of the cooperative enterprise approach justify its continuing importance by pointing to the significant and community development it has played over the last two centuries (Cheney 1999; Fitch 1996;Wilkinson and Quarter 1996). These roles can be readily seen by looking at how the co-op as a formal business entity emerged in the nineteenth century industrial revolution (Melnyk 1985). Today, co-ops have emerged stronger than ever providing millions of jobs for the world’s population, protecting the common interests of members while doing billions of Dollars businesses. The most interesting aspect of this concept is that people (the private sector) are coming together to form these co-ops, to cater for their needs as a people. At no time did Government at any level impose the memberships into co-ops on citizens, it is usually a voluntary gesture on the part of the individual (even the Government worker) that believes in the ideals of the co-op to meet his/her personal and economic needs.

In reality we have always practiced jobocracy through such co-ops and other like institutions that engage their members for the common good irrespective of Government economic and political policies . Today modern jobocracy is here and to be become a jobocrat, one must realize that the long touted principles and theories of Self-Help and Mutual Aid as core aspects of man’s social and economic evolution (Kropotkin 1902) must be imbibed and embraced at all levels of our development. All nations have been made what they are by the thinking and the working of many generations of men.  Patient and persevering labourers in all ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians, all have contributed towards the grand result, one generation building upon another’s labours, and carrying them forward to still higher stages.  This constant succession of noble workers—the artisans of civilisation—has served to create order out of chaos in industry, science, and art; and the living race has thus, in the course of nature, become the inheritor of the rich estate provided by the skill and industry of our forefathers, which is placed in our hands to cultivate, and to hand down, not only unimpaired but improved, to our successors. (Smiles 1859). This is been eroded in several cultures and societies by the short-cut approach to wealth in many societies, absence of skill training in schools, bad governance, loss of societal tenets and values,  over-dependence on Government for jobs, wrong economic policies and massive unemployment especially amongst the youths and so many other factors too numerous to mention.

Jobocracy is the principle of adopting self-help, mutual aid and co-operative ideologies that have been proven to work over time to create a culture and a lifestyle that can bring some sanity into the system while allowing for the progress of the nations. Jobocracy is that simple art of bringing together all the unemployed, or intending entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs and even those that are desirous of new jobs  together to create the jobs they each desire, not demeaning jobs, but jobs that each will be proud of and in accordance to their skills. A Jobocrat works with the unemployed in a semi-co-operative styled arrangement and the jobber is further encouraged to generate ideas for the start-up of his/her own business to further the cause. The beauty of been a Jobocrat is that unlike in capitalism, you are building the competition who would not actually be in competition with you per say, because you are working for the common good and are like branches from the same tree. In Jobocracy, the ownership is by both the founding  or master Jobocrat who takes majority of the stock or profit and by the other workers who take a lower percentage of the enterprise. Unlike in an ideal Utopian society, the worker in a Jobocracy is remunerated in accordance with his performance but he is assured of the percentage of ownership due him from the pioneer or master Jobocrat. So if anyone out there is practicing this style of business, he is simply a Jobocrat. We have had minor Jobocracies in the past when companies give stock options to their personnel. Can we take a look at all the organizations and co-ops that have bestowed the feeling of ownership on personnel? Record shows that average performance is better than in  Insitutions where only wage is paid out to the personnel with no sense of belonging. Jobocracy should not be mistaken for or compared with stock options, it is completely different because the Jobocrat from onset encourages the worker to start his/her own enterprise and funds are made available for such startup and workers drawn from a pool of unemployed and encouraged to do same so that more people can be employed.

Jobocracy. n. (1) is defined as creating jobs by the unemployed people, for the people and managed by the people. Everyone is a stakeholder and everyone is a potential Jobocrat. n., a person that practices Jobocracy. (2) It is the free and equal right of every person to join a work platform irrespective of educational attainment, literacy or skill level where talents are discovered, encouraged and promoted in every form. Everyone is allowed membership or participation into any Jobocracy movement. EMPLOYER as initiated by UNINET Africa, is one of her formidable carriers of change aimed at creating massive employment in the African continent by developing this concept and movement of Jobocracy and is setting up businesses for the unemployed and encouraging the unemployed drafted into these businesses to work hard enough to get enough of their equity in these businesses to either start new businesses on their own or come forth with business ideas to EMPLOYER to fund it for them under the simple principles of Jobocracy. Like everything beautiful, simplicity as seen in practices over the centuries,  is the way to go to generate massive employment opportunities and new businesses especially at the micro and micro finance level. I encourage all who wish to practice this all new system to generate more employment in their areas to contact me for us to work together through EMPLOYER to reduce poverty in the African continent and the world by generating massive employment opportunities. Become a jobocrat!