Taking jobs to the people like the Chinese are doing solves employment conundrum
You’ll find that anything truly successful that endures beyond a fluke was part of a plan. It’s not always exciting, or even much fun, to adhere to a plan, but it works. Living the dream is only possible if you’ve been living the plan.
Most plans, with the benefit of hindsight, are obvious in their foresight. They were obvious at inception too, but just too difficult to embrace — too hard, too unpopular, too long term.
Instead, in the name of popular promise, we move from simple but difficult to complex but convincing. We find acceptance in the cleverness of confusion. We say, “Yes, I get it”, when we know it’s wrong, but we’re too scared to stand up and be counted for what’s right.
I believe everyone wants to work and be productive, but it’s not that simple — jobs aren’t just around the corner. People have to forsake the familiarity of their home town and head for the city to join the queue, get a job. What if, instead of expecting people to come to established business, businesses were established where people already are?
The Financial Times reported last week about how Beijing takes factories to the people: “We draw a circle on a map, and if there are enough villagers to employ here, we build a factory.” Now that’s a simple, clever plan.
Urbanisation is an obvious outcome (cause and effect) of industrialisation and the need to create economies of scale that can compete globally.
Such is the accepted conventional wisdom. Not only does this trend create “city problems”, but it leaves in its wake the unintended consequences of rural desertion. Skilled, able-bodied workers head forthe city lights to earn the big bucks, often leaving behind absent-parent, generation-gap family structures, with all of the problems that can create.
The Beijing notion of rural revitalisation is but one example of planned future equilibrium, necessary to let the powerful, natural forces of supply and demand settle, at the right price.
A steady state is a necessary foundation for planned economic prosperity; the holes have to be filled before skyscrapers can be built.
China’s policy of state capitalism (with all the reservations there should be) has worked. It has worked to create an economic superpower against the unmanaged, unbridled, capitalism in the West, which seems to be coming second.
However, China now seems to be moving away from simple supply-push initiatives towards consumer demand-pull strategies. Perhaps the sequence itself was part of the plan.
A precondition for a successful plan is common cause on the end game.
I thought we had that: a better life for all. SA now only has to agree on the mandate so the actions necessary to implement it are not continuously contested, particularly for purposes as transitory as political gain. A policy of investing in capacity will outperform spending to entrench dependency.
The notion of employment should be redefined. A mindset change is needed; a move away from centralised employer power to decentralised economic enablement, right down to the individual. Ask of every job whether it could be more efficiently (and profitably) executed by the worker becoming an enabled entrepreneur.
Owner-managed economic units, funded initially by the service user and paid on delivered output, must replace wagedependent fixed-cost structures. Everyone is off balance sheet: a vast system of satellite business units is connected by common economic purpose; the statebusiness-labour accord begins to be redefined; employees become entrepreneurs; and economic power becomes decentralised. We don’t just take the factories to the people, we take the jobs to the people.
It’ll never work! What we’ve got isn’t working. People won’t accept that responsibility! I bet they will. You have to integrate to compete! Of course you do. It’ll take ages! Yes, it will.
It starts with planning what to teach and where to build. Satellite economic clusters will emerge where natural advantage already is — of whatever resource — location, mineral deposits, people, fertile land … a lot is in place already.
New cities can literally be created by economic persuasion. Make it easier and cheaper to do business locally.
Replace corporate footprints with revenue-sharing servicelevel agreements. See state infrastructure as an enabling, shared national resource.
The plan will require extraordinary common cause and foresight, and then oversight and intervention.
SA will have to listen and think more, but if it does it could solve everything, even land.
PEOPLE HAVE TO FORSAKE THE FAMILIARITY OF THEIR HOME TOWN AND HEAD TO THE CITY TO JOIN THE QUEUE