Can anyone think of alternative arrangements that might work better? — Vera Mont
One line of American leftist theory is "industrial democracy". The idea is that workers own, control, and operate the productive business of society. Industrial democracy was the core idea of Daniel DeLeon, a 19th /20th century Marxist. The Socialist Labor Party promoted DeLeon's work, but (unfortunately) ended up deep in the weeds of bureaucratic despotism. Their core message was taken up by the New Union Party, which gave up the ghost about 15 years ago.
Industrial Democracy does away with owner-management in favor of worker management.
I was specifically interested in the necessity of "jobs". — Vera Mont
Jobs, and work, are necessary because our individual and collective needs do not grow on trees, just waiting to be plucked. Life is quite literally difficult. It's hard to extract food, fiber, and metal from the earth. Our hunter-gatherer forebears were few in number, lived in a moderately abundant environment, and had few requirements beyond food, water, some sort of shelter, a few stone/wood tools, and survival knowledge. They didn't have to spend 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, hoeing corn, picking cotton, tending cattle, and feeding the chickens. They didn't have to mine iron, smelt aluminum, haul coal, and so on, life was comparatively simple for them.
We've been on a 12,000 year project of making life better or worse, depending on your POV. During the last 150 years, the complexity of life increased a lot.
"Jobs" consist of tasks that have to be repeated continuously over a long period of time. A big share of the tasks that need to be done are complicated enough that one has to learn how to do them, practice them, and be rewarded (intrinsically and extrinsically) enough to keep showing up and doing the same thing over and over.
Got milk? If you do, it's because somebody was milking cows twice a day, every day--doing their jobs. Mail arrived? If it did, it's because thousands of people were doing their job. Drive to the store? If you can it's because many, many people were doing their jobs to make cars, build roads, and haul groceries across country, and putting them on the shelf for you to buy.