Work, age and 'uselessness'

Richard Sennett has some interesting reflections on aging, skills, global labour markets and welfare. Painting a downbeat view of prospects for older people in the global north-west [which is particularly poignant for me as all too much of it seems to chime with my felt experience in the last two years], he suggest that the challenge for western governments is to rethink how work is organised and financed:

the task ahead of the welfare state is to finance and to organise usefulness. Many tasks that provide care and mentoring are either poorly paid or unpaid; unrecognised as work. As the private economy sheds workers, we ought to invent ways to use the skills and experience of these workers as carers - which is to say that we need to expand the welfare state, rather than shrink it or convert it into a private, profitable enterprise.
I don't offer this as a total panacea for uselessness, but rather as the kind of experiment we need to make, socially, to countervail against the economy's ever stronger tendency to do more with less. Usefulness is the political project of our times.

The point is that there will be the work, there always is, the real issue is how we value, organise and monetise it [or not]. The simple example is child care which, despite the expansion in nursery care, still is hugely valuable to the economy and yet is provided free or nearly free by the volunteer labour of parents, grandparents and other carers. If we had to pay for that labour ... externalities again. For me it raises the issue of a social wage again.
Guardian Unlimited Money | Work | Out with the old:
Filed in: work, UK, global, economy, education, age, underemployment