I'm sorry if the English grammar or style is not perfect in this article, but I've written it in 2016:
Á.
F. - Advice to poor, but talented people in 7 points
1.
Working as an employee and salary earned by only meeting working time
requirements is usually not as enjoyable as work where we can get
from the fruits of success in proportion of the invested energy, so
the task means a challenge. At employees of fixed working time there
is usually no constant motivation for better performance, as the
success of the company does not always mean the personal success of
the employee, and this means more of an obligation than an
opportunity. In this form, a person cannot really use his/her brain,
and even if he/she uses it, he/she usually does not make decisions,
so his/her human dignity can be rarely perfect. The employer usually
makes the conditions of working contract himself/herself, and
in many cases, as people need money, the employer applies people with
conditions too bad for them, for which only the law could make a
limit, but even lawmakers could not think about everything. However,
it might happen that some employers go even further, and they use the
bad conditions of working contract, like confidentiality (compulsory
keeping of secrets) for their own purposes of breaking the law
easier, so they can have more money to finance their entertainment.
Thus a need appears to provide better and more enjoyable working
conditions for the poor. What can be the solution for this? Árpád
Fekete's program (or Fekete Árpád's, denoted as Á. F. in the
title):
2.
Working time as an employee is worth reducing to 30 hours per week or
below (as, for example, it was done in Sweden), and only the minimal
goals, survival and secure, calculable income should be earned by
this, and the other parts of income need not come from this. For more
certain conditions of living and to avoid the stress coming from
uncertainty about it, it is good if there are fixed basic wages,
which in our case can mean the salary coming from 30 hours of work
per week. At the same time, the time for relaxation and/or
family life should be increased, so that every people can be
well-educated, healthy, relaxed and comparatively happy, etc. E.g. in
the 19th century women often did mainly housework only.
3.
However, we cannot always relax either, so if the fixed working time
will be only 30 hours per week, then some time shall remain for
something else. In this time we can do work born from our own
decisions, and if work is born from our own decisions, then it can be
interpreted as a challenge and it can give joy, as success
usually causes joy to people. It is sad that our opportunities for
work to be born from our own decisions are usually limited. For such
a small weekly working time it is usually not economical to make an
entrepreneurship (in 2015 Hungary), but if someone will not turn to
be an entrepreneur, then generally it is not really possible to sell
products or services legally (in 2015 Hungary), so in many cases we
have to choose alternative ways of earning money.
4.
Alternative forms of making money are not coming from employment
relationship, but not even from entrepreneurship. This way someone
can turn to be an artist (e.g. writer, poet, painter, sculptor,
composer, maybe singer, musician, dancer, actor, humorist), whose
income is from the royalties (or performance fees) of his/her work
(or recordings about him/her), or a sportman or sport woman, whose
income comes from state support or sponsorship, and from prizes won
at competitions (for which it is not always necessary to have good
physique and large investment, e.g. in case of chess, bridge, darts).
People can even be inventors sometimes, whose income is coming from
selling the rights to their inventions, but this latter form is more
connected to business life, so rich people can try it with more
chance. Here, someone could also try to build some fame by
creativity, many publications and communication, which makes it
easier for him/her to get a better job or compete for an opportunity
successfully later.
5.
If only short-term money is important (and not changing careers),
then there are other opportunities for it too, like free prize games
(but beware of their conditions), and competitions for individuals
(e.g. literature, essay, photo, video, design, programming). There
may be more international competitions using the English language
than national ones using e.g. Hungarian.
6.
It cannot be expected that the whole population spends its free time
with Arts, sports, innovation, communication, competitions or prize
games, and not everyone is competent here. Thus it is reasonable to
come up with the need to make it possible for the others to be able
to work in such a way that is born from their own decisions, which
may also be worth doing economically instead of a second job. In the
old times the majority of families had own land properties, and they
sowed in it anything they wanted, or in even older times, they went
to hunt, for fishing, gathering (fruits) and fighting anywhere they
wanted, and this kind of freedom is the need of human spirit (in
contrast with the employee status). From this may come the idea that
somehow it should be made legally possible for anyone to work on any
kind of product or service in his/her free time he/she can legally do
otherwise (however small the quantity of this time), and to sell this
without the fixed high costs of entrepreneurship (that may also
require full time work or loans to function). For this, one kind of
solution is a political bill (a suggestion for lawmaking), which is
non-trivial, by the way, so it's not easy to do it. It is not easy to
make such a law because the taxation of such small works and also
checking this taxation is hard. For this, social innovation might
mean a solution, e.g. it came to Árpád Fekete's mind that in each
village (at right times), town and city (always), there should be one
or more place, at which the products or services created this
way (in free time, or by any method) can be sold, and at the same
time as the selling, the taxation could happen immediately in an easy
way, but selling at other places could be interpreted as tax evasion,
except in those cases which currently do not count as that either
(e.g. selling used things not bought with the goal of commerce, i. e.
not too often, or the employee and entrepreneur status we already
know).
7.
If there will be no political solution for the mentioned problem,
then we can also imagine this:
–
In the first step, gather people with similar needs, and make an
organization for them, which is probably a „cooperative”, but it
also depends on what the law allows and how it allows it for the
people who also work 30 hours a week at another job, achieved by
their own abilities of negotiating. In the worst case, making such
construction is impossible, so in this case there may really be a
need for a political solution, but hopefully, after consultation with
legal text on the Internet, and lawyers, some kind of solution can be
found to found an appropriate organization.
–
Whoever has only 1-2 hours a day for a project born from his/her own
decision, can enter this mentioned organization, and sell the
products or services made by himself/herself through the
organization. This is like a cooperative with the goal of selling
things, just for different
kinds of independent products and services made by different members.
-
Thus this organization would be for the sole purpose of selling
original work born from the workers' own decisions, for which
founding an entrepreneurship is not a viable way, for the high risks
or the too little number of working hours available for execution (as
an average person should also work for his/her living, so he/she has
not got all of his working hours available to found an
entrepreneurship, unless he/she gets loans, but for the same loans
the entrepreneurs of our times may be called less ethical). Through
the organization, anyone could help anyone in learning, and other
small services (often done) could be implemented legally, for which
founding an entrepreneurship is not viable for the small expected
income or the unpredictability (e.g. translation, journalism, Google
Adsense, or small agricultural services), which could be listed fully
in the documents of the organization as ideas, but members could come
up with original ideas as well, like manufacturing new kinds of
products: new Artful objects, from recycled materials or DIY
products, or which are fit for presents.
-
However, for this we might need to make a legal apparatus, and it may
be worth spending time on making such a legal apparatus more than
e.g. writing a book about Communism. This includes, for example, all
of the insider rules, documents, etc. that define the cooperative or
organization, and the people should also know all of the laws and
pitfalls in connection with this. There were similar examples, as
websites providing freelance remote work on the Internet, namely
Elance and Odesk, which also made a legal apparatus, which they
implemented in practice, and it succeeded quite well for them.
