8. Decent Work and Economic Growth - ReadySetGooo/Sustainable-Development-Goals GitHub Wiki

How can these goals be completed in a way that ensures human rights and the end of exploitation from capitalism? 

UBI will help prevent exploitation. People who support UBI say that if there are jobs people don’t want to do, the simple solution is to raise the wage. This is a great solution, and is not a complete solution for a few different reasons:

  • Raising wages needs to be its own formal protection. As we have seen from the Great Resignation, companies and politicians responded to people leaving the workforce by stripping child labor laws and increasing forced labor from incarcerated individuals. 

  • There are not enough people who are motivated by money to support the jobs that society needs to get done. For example:

  • There are jobs that no amount of money will motivate a person to take. Our current economic system is set up for shift work (minimum 4 hours) scheduled at highly specific times. Anything else is considered a shitty part time job, no matter what the salary is. Shitty part time jobs can be solved with mutual aid, but volunteer labor reduces in educated, left-leaning areas where religion disappears.

  • To put it bluntly, white culture is entitled and lazy. Everytime migrant workers are deported or exiled because of racism and fears that “they are stealing jobs” the economy implodes because lazy white people don’t want to work. A high salary can not beat entitlement, in the same way people would rather starve than eat food that is stigmatized due to it’s association with poverty or a culture they believe is inferior. 

Important jobs need to have a well-compensated salary, and people must participate in a similar way to jury duty, except with a lot more disability accommodations, a lot less options to skip, and to fairly distribute work people would not be called randomly. Any job that can be completed by a disabled person must be given to a disabled person; the remaining jobs that require able-bodied labor go to people who are able-bodied. Jobs can be split- as an example, as a disabled person I could tie rebar from the comfort of my own home, and this would reduce the amount of rebar that must be tied at a construction site. If a person who is disabled finds a jury duty job that is a good fit for them, they would be given the priority to do that job to reduce the difficulty of transitions. 

Overall, when we think about economics and work in this document, here’s what we want to think about:

Work

  • Jury duty jobs 

  • People leading their own work and projects 

  • People bartering labor; they work on someone else’s project in exchange for others to work on their project 

Profit

  • Co-ops. Employee owned companies are highly profitable compared to other businesses.

  • Unrestricted, passion-based work. Profits are high because the quality of work is high and people are not restricted by corporate culture or controlling bosses. 

  • Inclusive services and products. Profits are high because white colonialism is not interfering with the quality of work and inclusivity is in high-demand. 

  • The above three points would initiate a Renaissance; which in of itself would be highly profitable 

Productivity 

Economy & Economic Growth

  • We are surrounded by economies. While the structure of an economy, such as money, may be an imaginary thing we made up, economies themselves are not. There are many types of economies- gift economies, barter economies, socialist economies, communist economies, the list goes on. In the same country, there can be many or very few economies. 

  • An economy does not have to run on currency. Other currencies include time, information, labor, fame, etc. 

If, despite this explanation, you find that a goal is inherently at odds with human rights or other goals, please contact or leave a comment for discussion. There are over 200 goals, and most of them were published in 2015. I'd be very surprised if at the end of this project we did not find something problematic. If there is no possible way for a goal to stay in line with human rights, then it will be specially marked and retired from this project. 

Informational Resources

Potential Organizations