Basic labor
Basic labor (for lack of a better term) is the bare minimum amount of labor that a society would need to sustain everyone's basic needs.
- Basic labor is not the work hours an average person might need to afford the cost of living. That's a different metric[new page needed] which tends to be higher than basic labor.
- Basic labor is the labor it physically takes to produce enough food, maintain enough housing & infrastructure, etc.
- Basic labor is a fair response to the old anti-welfare rhetoric "If no one worked, no one would produce food and we would all starve!"
It's worth quantifying how much work it actually takes to fulfill basic needs, such as food. - Basic labor is not a matter of simply labeling job professions as "essential" or "non-essential". For example, carpenters are "essential" in the sense that without carpentry, no one would have a home. But basic labor would include only the minimum amount of carpentry work it takes to build enough homes for everyone and maintain them at some basic livable standard. Basic labor wouldn't include the more cosmetic renovations typically done by richer people or businesses.
- There is no need to have one universal definition of "basic needs". There can be multiple estimates of basic labor, each specifying clearly what is counted and what is not.
The exact amount of labor can vary, depending on...
- what's considered a basic need, and
- the current level of technological development...
...but in general, in the modern world, basic labor is just a small fraction of the actual labor that people do.
Estimates
Food
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Housing
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Relation to other economics
Basic labor is not part of the lexicon of classical economics. Governments tend to be more caught up in things like GDP, economic growth, and keeping people as employed as possible - with little regard for whether the jobs are harming people's health, and little regard for affordable living. If we want a world where people are less exploited, we're going to need a new set of economic concepts, including the concept of basic labor.
Technological progress reduces basic labor but doesn't necessarily reduce total labor. Economic growth has a tendency to find new forms of consumption, which create new jobs that make up for the ones lost to technology. Even if we see extreme automation in the future, we might still end up just as overworked as ever, with ridiculous fabricated jobs that would be seen as normal and necessary to pay the bills. The cure for this is to systematically reduce the work week.[new page needed] This is already viable today (no need to wait for robots to take over), as basic labor is already much lower than total labor.