I've been wondering. How exactly would we organize this? I'm not comfortable with giving the power to award labor tokens to a single organization. And we'd also want the system to be discreet, other people being unaware of the purchases you're making. Preferably your workplace should be hidden as well, although I find this less important.
How do we implement enough checks-and-balances to make the system secure?
"Labor vouchers" or "labor tokens" is still a nice way to refer to that concept.
labor vouchers can be physical and digital you dumbass
It could be virtually identical to our current system. Your workplace bookkeeper sends digital "labour cheques" to the state (after the banks have been seized and nationalized) and the labour points or whatever are deposited into an account tied to a physical card you carry around. Existing bank and accounting infrastructure could be easily re-purposed to accommodate this system. I'm no expert at all on this though, so I might have overlooked something stupid.
I just don't see why we should bother with physical vouchers at all when it just makes counterfeiting and corruption (you can't reliably enforce the "non-transferable" rule on physical vouchers) easier. We have had the technology to go full-digital for decades now even with currency. Maybe for under-developed countries physical vouchers would be useful for the transitional phase to a digital system.
t. Westernoid
The same thing that happens when you pay taxes. Physical money is shredded and digital money is deleted.
They'd probably have to either make a society where you'd never have a reason to transfer them to someone else, or make it illegal, like the Soviets made it illegal to buy foreign currencies with roubles.
How would we buy drugs though
Physical during transition to digital (if necessary).
There has to be some kind of limit or anyone could start their own company and give themselves labor points for doing nothing. Labor points must be allotted based on what labor is needed. I don't see what could do that besides a state apparatus.
(me)
Here's how I imagine we could get out of this: We don't have a centralized state apparatus, instead the power is divested into the workers locally. These workers then enlist a diverse set of agencies to check whether their agreements with other enterprises are being followed. If they find that they aren't, they organize alongside other enterprises in the economy to boycott the guilty party, that is, exclude them from the plan. This means that the labor-tokens they issue are no longer considered valid by the boycotting enterprises.
Among these enlisted agencies would be something similar to a capitalist bank. This bank can discreetly keep track of people's labor-accounts. My real question is how this would work. What assurance could workers receive that these banks aren't corrupt?
There would have to be some kind of state authorization procedure before an organization could even start allotting labour points, and every workplace should have a state representative or group supervising the operation to ensure it isn't violating any rules, this is what China does.