Historically employment, unemployment, and underemployment have fluctuated during the boom and bust cycles of our economies. During the good times when we have good economic growth, unemployment is low, and people have more money in their pockets to spend on more products and services, which increases demand which means more people are hired, and so the cycle continues. During the bad times when economic growth is slow, unemployment is high, which brings misery and suffering to working class people.
Those people who are employed often work long hours, spend hours stuck in traffic when they commute, and rarely take much vacation time. People have so little spare time during the work week that weekends are typically used to catch up on chores and errands rather than for relaxing with friends and family. Jobs can also be unrewarding and dull, and most people stick with the same profession for their entire working life.
Ironically we think that our economy is successful if we have everyone fully employed and we commend our business leaders when they have created more jobs.
When you unravel the capitalist world we live in today you find that the vast majority of traditional work is unnecessary. It is fairly obvious if you just consider the advances we have made with technology in food production, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and other basic services, where automation and computerization have replaced human labor. The percentage of human labor required to support the basic needs of the world's population is a mere fraction of the labor available if we apply our technology properly, and focus on what we need instead of participating in the capitalist system which literally requires the mindless consumption of every product and service imaginable to keep it going.
In Nutopia, the "elimination of jobs" not the "creation of jobs" is the ultimate goal. When everyone in society has their basic needs met by sharing the work that is required equally among its citizens, then there is no need to try to create more jobs. In fact much of the innovation in Nutopia is constantly trying to find new ways to eliminate mundane or unpleasant jobs and to automate tasks wherever possible.
If you compare the labor requirement to support a capitalist society today versus a Nutopia society it is likely that initially only perhaps 40% of the total labor available would be needed in Nutopia. Once the population in Nutopia has stabilized and there is no longer a need to build more and more infrastructure and housing for people because we just properly maintain what we have already built, and once the Restoration phase of Nutopia has been completed, it is likely that perhaps only 20% of the total labor available would be needed. This would be a major problem in a capitalist society because high unemployment would be the result of immense competition and more people looking for work when fewer jobs are available, but in Nutopia the work needed is simply divided up between those that are able to work.
In Nutopia the surplus hours are used for leisure time and to pursue activities such as research instead of just producing more stuff. Each citizen in a typical Nutopia community might only work an average of 4 hours a day for 3 days a week to cover the needs of everyone in the community.
Nutopia is a model designed to end unabated economic growth, so that work is done as needed instead of just to preserve the employment/consumption cycle. It is a system where work required by the community is shared fairly between its citizens, giving them more leisure time to spend with friends and family, more time to spend learning new skills, and other activities to enrich the lives of people instead of the relentless slog of unnecessary work.
Reduced work hours
It is simply not necessary for people to work as much as they do today. It is only the flawed capitalist system which dictates that people need to work so much. Capitalism only works if there is continual economic growth which requires that people work to produce more products and services. When you take away this requirement it is obvious that less work is needed. When less total work is needed to support the community then it is obvious that sharing the work required by the community between the citizens that can work is the best and fairest solution.
Elimination of redundant work
While it is again obvious, but it often goes unnoticed or ignored, computerization and the automation of tasks clearly must displace jobs and workers. As a society for some reason we refuse to embrace the technological progress we have made and we avoid making the necessary changes to allow all people to benefit from it. Instead for the last 3 decades we have created whole new sectors of financial services, information services, administration work, bureaucracies, and an army of paper pushers and people doing "busy work". Nutopia embraces the idea of making good use of technology to improve quality and efficiency, but not at the expense of workers who are displaced. If a job is eliminated because of improvements which means that a human job is no longer required, this is considered to be progress. The worker who is displaced does not have to deal with any hardship because of this, as his basic needs are taken care of while he trains and learns new skills that are useful and which the community requires.
Variety of work
Life is short, so doing what you enjoy doing is the best way to lead a happy life. While we can choose to do various enjoyable activities in our own time, many of us would not consider our time spent at work to be particularly rewarding or enjoyable. Unfortunately it is often the case that enjoyable and rewarding work doesn't pay enough for us to be able to support ourselves and our families. It is also difficult to take time off work to learn new skills for more enjoyable work because we still have to pay our bills. Nutopia encourages all people to learn new skills at any time which are required by the community. More people with more useful skills improves the collective ability of the community. People are encouraged to use their multiple skills for a variety of work, rather than doing the same type of work all the time. This variety means that work is more enjoyable and rewarding, people are more productive, and it exposes workers to different environments and different people, instead of being stuck with the same mundane work year after year.
Training and skills for what is needed
Each Nutopia community decides what services it needs which dictates what education and skills learning are needed in the coming year and beyond. This ensures that people are always learning worthwhile, valuable, and useful skills that will be put to good use by the community.
Enjoyable work
The true promise of technology is to use it so that humans do not have to work on laborious, repetitive, mundane, grueling, unpleasant, and boring tasks. No longer do we have to work long days doing back-breaking work in farm fields, or work in dangerous conditions in factories. The whole point of technology is to eliminate the need for humans to do these tasks, and let human workers focus on more rewarding and enjoyable tasks.
Competition
As more and more people come out of our colleges, and less and less jobs are available because of automation and computerization, and more and more people are working later in life because they are healthier and they are not financially prepared for retirement, and more and more manufacturing jobs go overseas, it means that competition for jobs is incredibly fierce. Our socioeconomic system does not have an effective way to deal with this situation, so it just means that more and more people are out of work or are paid less, so the end result is more people who are finding it harder and harder to survive.
In Nutopia the work that is needed is shared by the people who are available for work and there is no competing for "jobs". As progress is made and tasks no longer require a human to work on them, those people simply learn new skills that are needed by the community. The tasks needed to be completed and the skilled labor available is continually in flux so that the labor force is optimally prepared for the required work in the community. As the number of tasks needed to be completed declines over time, the less people have to work collectively to meet the needs of the community.
