Nina Power.
The Guardian, Thursday 3 January 2013 21.00 GMT.
As ideas of employment become more obscure and desperate, 2013 is the perfect time to ask what it means to live without it.
A few months before the financial crash hit, the National Lottery issued a new kind of scratchcard. At £5 a go – the more expensive end of the range – it offered the chance to win £40,000 a year, every year, for the rest of your life. Howard Groves, the director of game development, described the idea in the following way: "It's about not having to put up with life's everyday irritants."
The card proved successful, despite its cost, and a new version in 2009 is still selling well. Everything that is carried in the hope of the card – life (how long might I live for?), security (how might I care for myself and others?) and leisure (what might I do with my free time?) – is really code for a life without work. The "everyday irritants" identified by the card-makers pose an important question: is work one of these "irritants"? Perhaps even the largest irritant of all?
As with all major institutional entities – law, prison, education – to question work is to tamper with reality itself. As with law, prison and education, it is almost always "never a good time" to talk about reform, or the abolition of existing structures. The ideological mishmash represented by the word itself is worth examining. Paid employment is an economic necessity for all but a tiny percentage of the population, but "work" is tied up with miasmic qualities that touch on social and even quasi-religious elements: identity, status, community, habit, duty.
The Tories, as ever,..............
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/03/world-without-work
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