Now this is a beautiful banner to see being marched through the streets...

More jobs is definitely good? No, not necessarily. And especially not so if the jobs aren't actually needed or can be done away with via automation. (Or harm the planet)

Sure, I understand that people today want job security but this is precisely due to the precariousness of the economy and the recent trend of job insecurity. If your only source of income is through a job then of course you'd want more of them and want to protect it/them for yourself and immediate circle of peers and the community at large. Basic Income is a solution to this "problem" and not everyone realises or understands how so.

If more jobs are indeed good then why is that we are allowing automation to increasingly displace human work forces?

Shouldn't we be campaigning to de-automate everything. I do mean everything? Seriously, let's get rid of busses and taxis and give grants to people to build rickshaws instead of giving people a regular basic income. Let us remove ATMs and replace them with humans. Let's get rid of telephones and emails and employ "runners" to carry messages from person to person. Today people are paid to look for jobs for unemployed people, and to also check that unemployed people are looking for jobs. Why not give these jobs to the people who are unemployed? Pay them a wage and make it their job to look for a job, instead of imposing means tests and conditionality then giving them a paltry sum in return. That's roughly 1,000,000 "more jobs" right there.

But all of that actually happening would be idiotic, right? There are people out there right now though demanding "more jobs", take taxi drivers for example who then complain when someone signs up to become an Uber driver because Uber drivers are severely impacting their own income!

What do these people want? More jobs so as long as the creation of those jobs do not negatively impact their income? It's not going to happen. What happens to the displaced workers at the Department for Work and Pensions from my example above? Do we give them the job of looking for and applying for their own jobs too? Will they be accepting of that? After all traditional taxi drivers aren't happy with "common" folk becoming Uber taxi drivers.

And of course, all of these new jobs means that there'll need to be some sort of way to manage it all. So we create more jobs. Managers, hr/payroll, assistants, etc...

Your are correct in saying that these people who want more jobs shouldn't be asking for this at the expense of social security nets and the like but the fact is that many of these people already buy into the scrounger narrative of welfare claimants. They buy into the "work is virtuous" mythos and the "work for the sake of work" rhetoric. They can't seem to understand that if they don't have a job and don't have any savings then they will eventually have to rely on welfare to just about get by. They don't understand that Tesco is not going to get rid of and then scrap its automated checkouts and hire them instead to replace them. The problem, or priority, to them is that there aren't enough secure jobs and NOT that we do not yet have basic income and or full automation. They don't see that the issue of there being more people than jobs. I suppose eventually as the automate and basic income movements grow there'll be few of them but for a while to come expect to see more "more work" banners and placards at protest such as this.

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