Jobs are a cost, jobs are a cost
The TUC is manfully grasping the wrong end of the stick here:
TUC calls on the UK government and companies to work together to future-proof jobs at risk of offshoring.
The union body estimates that between 368 thousand and 667 thousand jobs could be offshored from Britain if industries fail to meet climate targets and the UK falls behind other countries on climate action.
The argument is that we must spend £85 billion - one number they suggest - on going green in order to preserve these jobs. Which is to get matters very much the wrong way around.
Firstly, the number of jobs in an economy is not determined by either technology or trade. Which jobs are done is, but not the number of them. That number is determined by the fiscal and monetary policies within the economy - what’s demand? Whether we have full employment or not doesn’t, therefore, depend upon our going green or not, nor whether we go green by buying foreign windmills or make them at home.
Secondly, jobs are a cost of our doing something. Assuming that policy does give us that full employment then insisting on having half a million folk building windmills means we’ve not got half a million folks designing games, taking care of babies, fixing the NHS or selling finance packages to foreigners. We are poorer by that diversion of that labour by the amount of banking, health care, child-minding and games that we don’t have as a result of the home grown windmills.
Now maybe it’s more valuable for us to have the windmills than the other things, that’s possible, so perhaps we should have the windmills not those other things. But the argument about how many jobs are created by the windmills is still a ludicrous one. For it’s urging that choice by emphasising the cost of the plan, not the benefit.
For jobs are a cost of doing something, d’ye see?
The TUC is arguing that we must go green because it will be expensive to go green and see, here’s the proof, those half a million jobs are the expense which is the argument for the plan.
This really is firmly grasping the wrong end of the logical stick.