How the activation model broke human rights

When jobs were outsourced to Far East during the wild decades of 1970 and 1980 the statistics show undeniable rise of unemployment which previously had not been a big problem in countries of the west. The loss of complete parts of industries like manufacturing decreased the amount of jobs, leaving more unemployed people fight over what was left. The reason for outsourcing was and still is obvious, it will cut the cost of employing workers. Companies can then give that extra money for owners and shareholders. The "model" for this kind of cost saving came from USA where the political system was too weak to protect this plan the large companies had in mind. But it was also adapted by many countries in Europe where traditional socialism had to move over in the name of progress.

Since then politicians have tried to find solutions to the unemployment problem. Their approach has always had the same fallacy of the individualism which is an essential part of the capitalist lore. In that narrative each person just needs to "activate" enough to find a job and career. It doesn't matter if there are way more unemployed people than there are jobs, the whole reason for unemployment is the unemployed being somehow passive or even a bad, lazy person. Not only has this solution failed many times before, but politicians simply refuse to understand the results of these attempts to activate people as much as they are unwilling to admit the real reason for high unemployment, because then they would have to make actual changes against the will of large, rich companies who run the show.

The latest attempt to activate unemployed people in Finland was more or less copied from Denmark. The model dictates that you have to apply for at least four jobs in a month as a substition for the compensation you get from the state. However there are two problems in this model. The first one is a view that being "active" is the substitution, which is not true. The real substitution of unemployment is the high taxes we pay to get a good social safety net. The second much bigger problem is that when you are forced to apply for jobs it takes away the freedom of choice which is a human right.

Jobs are not created by activation, they are a natural result of the way our society works. If we outsource jobs to other countries it will reduce the amount and type of jobs, just as automation does. It's a matter of political debate to decide what we want to do. If we don't understand the main reasons for unemployment we simply can't create a working solution for it, not even by breaking human rights.