Celebrate unemployment
Nadia,
That post got me writing and here are a ton of ideas.
Start a business that rents out rooms for US$ 100 equivalent per month where unemployed and freelancers with unreliable clients and artists and researchers can live and utilize community resources such as private studios, co-working spaces, kitchen collectives, common space and access to each other for skill sharing and collaboration.
I know of an empty building in Latvia. I’m friends with the owner and I casually pitched him on doing this concept there and he was interested. He had on his own thought about starting some kind of an artist community someplace anyway. Maybe as part of this effort I could get him on board and we could renovate the building and propagate it with a few dozen people to try out the concept. I suppose a grant from the government would be a nice facilitator of this although it would need to be a no-strings attached grant where documentation on the experiment was all they wanted. You don’t want the government tampering with your lifestyle so them designing your living and working space isn’t ideal. But funding it, why not.
The key to these spaces though is that they be low cost to the individuals and each person pays rent rather then the government paying their rent for them. This way they are free to travel, stay with friends and family, move in with a lover or do what ever they want and they still get their unemployment checks. You’ve got to give people control over their lives. Cash is the best way to support the unemployed. I know there is fear they’ll just spend it on drugs, alcohol and other frivolous things but you can’t use policy to fight self destructive behavior you have to let culture do that. The more there is to look forward to the less self destructive people will be.
So I think that the role of government is just to take from the tax pool and help people with no job keep afloat by giving them unemployment checks each month for at least $300 us dollar equivalent. The more the better but not so much it’s a big tax burden. People don’t like too much taxation.
Do you now what someone in Latvia can get when collecting unemployment? It would be good to know what each country in the region provides.
Here is another idea. Collapse borders a bit for the unemployment. So have essentially an unemployed visa in which a person is allowed to live in a country as long as they want as long as they don’t get an official job. But allow them to work for free. This way people are encouraged to travel to other countries and gain work experience.
Travel increases the value of someone in the freelance marketplace. To get more travelers leaving the country it might be smart to get some entering too. So for example you get Latvia to make a deal with india for a one to one trade on people who can stay as long as they want. So for everyone willing to go immerse in India there is someone who can come immerse from India. Someone developing IT programming skills could really benefit from a program like that.
Skills are naturally and organically passed along when people live and work together even if they aren’t working on the same projects. When you need help and can ask someone that knows there is a natural mentorship that takes place.
I’ve worked at start up companies and the missing resource is always IT. So anything that increases IT talent can increase the overall economy of that place. So if I were these countries I’d be strategizing a race to develop the most IT talent. So that’s programmers, developers, coders, iOS & android developers, UX design and all aspects of digital software design. So allowing others with any of these skills into the country on an unemployment salary would put them most likely elbow to elbow with other unemployed who would then start to gain their skills.
Tunisa is a good example where these skills are learned but then there are no jobs that can utilize these skills so people end up living with their families. If those people were invited to say Latvia there would be a culture clash for sure but it would be a really interesting opportunity for them to share their skills with other unemployed people.
I know it’s counter intuitive to spend money allowing foreigners to live in your country but the more you create international groups working together the more you improve the hire-ability of everyone involved.
I’ve personally gone up in value just be exporting myself to places where my skills were less common and then each new place I go the perceived value goes up becomes of places I’ve worked.
Another idea is crowd funding projects with government funds. It’s what Max is doing. It’s a great model. Make the people who want more then a normal amount of funding have to participate in a grant process where the application is public on the web and functions as a crowd funding campaign. As people donate money to projects that money is tripled by a governmental match. That’s a little different then Max’s model but I think it’s good because it causes people to commit to some of their own money to help make a project happen but not as much as if it was a pure crowd funding campaign.
Also a free labor directory where people learn through doing and building collaborative networks. DIYdays.com will have in a few months a directory like this that will slowly be opened up beyond event goers. If it’s not universal enough then a new one can be made. Linked in is already pretty good actually. But lacks in the department of assisting people to find free labor.
Imagine a directory where people list their skills and get discovered to be a part of projects they then choose to accept or decline based on their level of passion for the work.
You said something to this effect. You like not getting paid because then you don’t have to do with people tell you if you don’t want to. By creating an ecosystem of projects that only happen when people have the passion to make them happen the over all catalog of projects should dramatically improve.
Then you get the media to hype up successful work and a snowball effect begins.
This should of course be a world wide network so it’s also getting people international experience.
Here is another good one:
Take them to burning man. I know this is a radical concept and unlikely to be funded by any government but it’s been reported that people often solve their monetary problems after a trip to burning man. I think that because it’s a survivalist event it ignites a dormant survival mechanism dead in our modern brains. When you have to build a yurt and survive vicious dust storms and remember to bring water every where and build a kitchen from scratch and live with no electricity or running water you get really good at taking care of yourself. This skill I think translates directly back into real life as one is lining up their life to provide all of the things they need. Plus you start to look at what you need differently. You realize how minimally you can really live. How simple a living accommodation can really be. Even the food rationing you do at burning man can translate to your default life and improve ones rationing of money and relationship to food decreasing how much they think they need to eat. Plus many camps rotate cooking shifts and I’ve camped with people who’s first experience cooking was at burning man. And they were well into their twenties. Google Burning man regional events to see events closer and cheaper to attend then Burning Man. Any survival based event would instill these skills. So governments could provide scholarships to survival skill events or workshops.
Also… more on the food topic. It might not be so much about getting jobs for these people as it is about improving the quality of life they can achieve on the small amount they get in their unemployment checks. So maybe scholarships for cooking classes? Or maybe funding for a book called, “the unemployed cookbook” teaching people to cook rich food while broke. The book could celebrate not having a job and having lots of time to cook really good food that costs almost nothing and makes the body and mind healthier providing a higher quality of life then those with jobs and no time to take care of themselves.
Finally… english. Get everyone working in english because it’s the language a lot of business is done in. Get them working on international projects where they get better at their english in professional settings. Create a culture that accepts correcting peoples bad english. I’m still working on my english as you can see in this sloppy email so definitely we need to get people who speak it as a second language to be better practiced in english to give them a competitive advantage. Also those who have english down very well should travel to places where they need english teachers. Most of asia is short on english teachers in my traveling experience. United arab Emirates apparently pays really well for english teachers.
Dating site for the unemployed. Improve their quality of life by connecting unemployed people with other unemployed people. Nothing is worse then a significant other always yelling at you to get a job. Actually the only thing worse is being unemployed and single. Find a match who won’t bitch about you not having a job and who can appreciate picnics and illegally downloaded movies and other free fun like good sex all day because neither of you have a job you have to go to.
NYsockExchange - This is an idea born out of a hack-a-thon group I was part of during occupy wall street. But we didn’t build it, just conceptualized. The idea was to help people with socks that don’t match find other socks of the correct color and shape and then link them up using an app. We were going to flood the New York Stock Exchange with socks as a publicity stunt but then all the arrests went out of style so we called it off. This tool could be used to connect a guy who has two coats but no boots with a guy that has 4 boots and no coat. This kind of a stuff finder is like craigslist designed for people with no money. Instead of the guy having to sell his boots to get the money to buy the coat you create a pay it forward gift economy. Let’s say it’s not the guy who has 4 boots that needs the coat so it’s not an easy exchange. If you create a pay it forward gift economy solution like couchsurfing.com then instead of each person giving and receiving value from individual each person gives and receives value from the network of individuals so it doesn’t matter who gave you something or when they gave it to you. It all goes in a digital bank and improves ones ranking by giving more which then encourages others to give more to them to improve their ranking and get more from others. Alternative economies are definitely part of the solution to unemployment.
I could really keep going… and going…
The point is I’m unemployed, always have been, always will be, but I make a lot of money, make my own films, have a pretty fun life and think that a jobless world is a better world and think the unemployed population shouldn’t be looked at as a problem to be corrected but as an asset to be maintained and nourished so this unique class can ultimately thrive above the rest until we all dream of being unemployed because it’s just got style.