An Idea on How to Latch On Socialism to the Present System

Hello everyone, this is my first post.

Ok, so seeing that the mainstream political will is wanting, this is a potential way of circumventing the state and creating a sort of guaranteed employment system in the form of a non-profit (or maybe for-profit, for that matter) organization, a sort of socialist latch-on to the present system.  Im not sure if the present labor and tax structures allow a system like this (Finley, you can help with this), but here's the general idea.  Also, Im sure it has lots of holes, so please poke at will.

So, the organization is set up to provide contract employment services to corporate clients, similar to what a Manpower or Labor Ready does.  A worker joins the organization, but unlike Manpower or Labor Ready, is guaranteed a full day of productive work and thus fair compensation for that work.  The burden lies with the organization to find the person productive work for the day, week, year, however long the worker is a member of the organization.  Services are provided to corporate clients for full or part time work at various jobs and skill levels. The organization handles all human resources work and benefits, including full health care, and charges the corporate client a fee for services rendered.  Corporate clients of the organization join a sort of club where the products or services they provide are advertised and deals are provided to other member clients.

So far this is not very revolutionary.

Several things.  Entry for both corporate clients and workers is free.  No fees are associated at either end.  The organization matches client needs with worker skills for the duration required, and corporate clients pay for those services they use only.  

Now with a guaranteed employment, my guess is that the ranks of this organization on the worker side would swell pretty quickly.  It would need plenty of startup capital to provide these workers their benefits before enough corporate clients sign up to absorb the supply of labor.  However, once you start controlling a sizable portion of the labor supply, with available workers that can provide any service you need, and you provide corporate clients a quick, flexible, and no-commitment way of handling their employment needs, lots of private enterprises would sign up. 

Now, part of the key is for the organization to grow to a large enough scale where it can start providing more and more services to its members while taking advantage of sufficient economies of scale to do so at a relatively low cost.  For example, the system would provide health care to its employees.  However, in the beginning, in order to provide full health care, it would have to use one of the standard health insurance programs which we have already characterized correctly as being inefficient and costly.  However, as the number of employees swells, it will quickly begin to become affordable to provide first one, then another ambulatory doctor, hired by the organization, to provide free checkups to employees.  Pretty soon you can set up a few primary care clinics, and eventually, with enough employees and thus patients, you can set up larger proprietary health care facilities, and start weaning off the health insurance companies, saving resources as you do.  This health care system would be run the way a state health care system is run, with all its intrinsic efficiencies, and hopefully grow large enough quickly enough to be able to negotiate increasingly better terms with drug and medical good suppliers.  

Another case: housing.  Once the system employs enough construction workers, it can organize its own development arm, or enter into special contracts with developers within its corporate clients, to build housing for its employees.  Projects would be developed emphasizing density and proximity to public transit.  Allocation of housing would be flexible and preference would be given based on proximity to the general area of your employment.  Communities would be planned, with organization health care clinics and educational retraining centers (another key benefit of the organization) close by.

About the educational retraining centers, these would be a sort of night school, or half -day school (or whatever) that would provide employees with additional productive skills on demand.  So, if someone wants to learn a new craft, they just have to sign up for one of the free classes and get certified for the task.  This increases the flexibility of both the individual workers and the organization as a whole, since it will be able to mold its productive capacity to whatever the requirements of the market at the moment are.  

 

How will all of this be paid for? 

While charging of corporate clients for services rendered would be done based on the service, meaning, of course, that higher skilled or more complicated work would be better compensated, or whatever - based on the prevailing wage rate + a service premium, the compensation structure for workers (in terms of cash reimbursement) would rise at a lower rate.  That is, all workers are guaranteed the legal minimum wage, but as their skill level increases, they will be compensated to lesser degree with monetary rewards and to a greater degree with non-monetary rewards.  The organization will provide workers with a higher skill levels whose work is compensated at the private enterprise contract side at a high level with a medium level increase in pay and, say, rewards for a slightly larger organization-supplied house.  Within the organization, a person can be compensated with badges or awards the way, say, the soldiers in the military are compensated with medals and promotions of rank... in fact there could be actual ranks to which workers belong, based on their skill level, and they get compensated based on rank.  Oh, that carpenter, he's a Level 3 Master Carpenter.  He gets a big apartment and to wear that cool officer uniform.  Still, he makes only 2 bucks an hour more than me.  Whatever, you get the idea.

The purpose of this is two-fold.  First of all, it may help build worker loyalty and solidarity with the organization.  But second of all, it begins to divorce the labor force from the traditional monetary reward system that is a hallmark of capitalism.  Money, and thus what you can exchange for it in the wider capitalist economy, ceases to be as important.  The reward for work ceases to be "look at me, I have enough money to buy a PlayStation 3" and begins to be "look at me, I have a merit badge for hard work and dedication".  This begins to redirect economic resources away from frivolous spending on fabricated needs, which has characterized the last thirty years in the advanced economies, and towards more (hopefully) meaningful things... these excess resources would be controlled by the organization, and thus allocated as needed or directed, either towards the organizational health fund, education fund, building housing, factories, setting up research facilities, or whatever.

The downside is, of course, that you are keeping actual wages relatively down, and a corollary to this, you are keeping tax revenues to the state at a relatively low level.  I don't know if, because of this, this would be construed as a form of tax evasion and would thus be legally impracticable (Finley, you can help with this).  But while it deprives state of higher income tax revenues, I figure given how the present system does not provide the basics to the people (housing, health care, education) and this system would, that it makes up for it.

Acknowledging that this is not enough to pay for schools, hospitals and apartment buildings, productive arms of the organization can be set up to produce manufactures or sell services to the outside market.  Once you have the workers, and you will probably have the managers too, and the construction crews to build the factories or offices, the step towards pushing into the outside world is simple.  With enough scale, you can probably move to dominate several industries relatively quickly.  Also, in a less predatory fashion, as long as you have construction crews at your disposal you can build office buildings and factories (appropriately close to your worker residences) which you can lease to your corporate clients.  For example, Company A outsources their labor force but also their office space and their manufacturing facilities to the Organization.  At that point, the corporate client becomes your surrogate, almost a branch of your organization, a client that has an account with you and owns a name and some proprietary knowledge and maybe some, but not all, of the capital.  The organization controls the rest.

Anyway, thats a general sketch.  I have not addressed the fact that once you control a large enough portion of the labor force, you can begin acting like a union and demanding higher wages from the corporate clients, who would now be forced to use our organization to find any kind of employment.  Anticipating this, there could be a corporate member backlash or boycott once the danger of this becomes apparent but before the organization has the strength to handle it.  There could also be a government reaction.  But in any case, this is an idea I was floating around with as a sort of surreptitious way of getting socialism into the system, masquerading as flexible  employment system without anybody realizing it what it really was before it was too "late".